There is nothing renewed on these drives, just old used decommissioned server drives. The naming is very misleading, shame on you Amazon. Thank you for the video.
My pleasure, and yes. Even if they are ‘cleaned’, I don’t see how that justifies a refurb status really. And as these are helium sealed units, hard to see what ‘refurbishment’ or ‘renewal’ could really mean.
@@sometechguy. Nothing. If you are lucky they wiped out the data and the hard drive did not die in the process. Some of the sellers are from China and, judging by the reviews, their drives are usually the ones that are already failing out of the box.
@@sometechguy sometimes the PCB on the back of the hard drives need to be replaced, thats my only guess how a drive can be refurbished, even if they aren't filled with helium its completely uneconomical to open a drive and replace anything internally
Some of these drives are actually going back to their OEM and getting a recertification, the 14TB units I got are all recertified by WD with 5yrs warranty, I imagine that process could entail as little as erase, test, new sticker but as the OEM did it, they could do anything from PCB replacement to Helium refilling and platter swapping. Why they would do any of that? I can't say, although, I imagine, if these came back to, say, WD as bad drives, replacing the bad parts and reselling them would help minimize the cost of warranty replacements.
Yeah it's deceptive - but if they are sold cheaply enough to buy enough extras to deal with the long term failure rate, it's not a bad deal. I'm not sure they are really *cheap enough* to cover for that eventuality, though.
I bought 9 of these exact drives back in July and have been hammering them since (8 disk raid6 + hot spare). All drives extensively tested and similar results. No bad sectors and good smart numbers. 4.5 years on time. Bear in mind these are enterprise class drives (for sata), just old but still top of the line, above consumer grade NAS drives. Cost in the UK for a new 12tb drive is a lot more and the cheaper ones are much lower consumer models. I was lucky to get them from a reputable US refurbisher who offered a full further 5 years no quibble warranty included. Very pleased overall, hopefully I haven't cursed myself :)
@@sometechguy I recently bought 15x 14TB WD HC530 drives from the big E with a 5y seller warranty for just under 250NZD per drive. (~150US) All of them passed a full Read/Write/Read test in an average of 19.5 hours per Read or Write section with 0 DOA or DNF. All the drives tested performed within margin of error of each other and within WD's specifications when paired with an LSI 9300 controller. 0 SMART errors of concern with a similar POH to whats listed above. On their OEM/factory label they are marked as 'Recertified 2022' (varying months) after peeling the sellers sticker so these ones are in fact WD refurb'd drives. I've since bought a SAS Toshiba MG07 series refurb which, other than performing a little worse (avg 20hrs vs 19.5) is in similar condition, this one did not state 'Recertified' but had a DOM of 2019 My oldest 'non new' drives are some SAS 10TB 'Off Spec' drives that turned out to be Seagate EXOS X14 units. All of these have been going hard for a long time now and I wouldn't think twice about buying Refurb or OS drives as long as they have a decent seller warranty. Pro Tip, If you're looking on the big E for them and weren't aware, when you find those white label drives that have OS marked on them, it stands for 'Off Spec.' This means some large org has rejected a shipment for any contract reason and these drives have had their label ripped off, replaced and sold. Reasons they could have been rejected include: Damaged casing, failure rate of *batch* too high, too many DOA in the *batch* , too many drives in the *Batch* don't meet customer's spec etc. Why do I point out *Batch* so often, because these customers order in large quantities such as 260 unit batches and when they are delivered they will spot check them. This is where one or two cartons will be taken at random from the shipment and if those cartons don't meet the customers requirements for whatever reason, they'll reject all 260 units. e.g. if the DOA rate must be less than 1% and they have 3 bad drives across the 2 cartons they pull, they'll reject the whole lot of them, even if all 257 remaining drives are working. Seagate/WD/Toshiba then have to get rid of them. Most of these drives can't just be moved to retail channels so they get their stickers removed, firmware data rewritten and sold as 'Off Spec' or 'OS' drives at very low cost to recycle or refurbish companies. My drives were clearly damaged casing units as they were a little scuffed but work just fine!
@@DirectAim MrPurle is correct, I've mentioned that site a few times on RU-vid and my comments were shadow removed. That is, visible to me until I browse to the video from another PC and magically they no longer exist. Its happened on videos where I know the uploader and they confirmed they didn't remove anything and the only thing in common was mentioning 'that auction site.' Coincidence? Possibly, but ever since started calling it Big E I haven't had any similar issues.
Interesting video! I bought 2x EXOS 12TB refurbs from Amazon. Both came from a specific seller and arrived next day. One had a SMART error, the other made a concerning rhythmic knocking sound. Both drives had never been powered on previously/had 0 hours. I returned those and ordered another two from a different vendor on the same listing; these shipped from Germany and took a few days to get here. They had about 2.5 years usage/~25 power cycles but were noticeably quieter with no problems according to SMART. Amazon refunded me my returns because they were within 30 days, which is why I went with them rather than ebay. That said, they rejected my review for mentioning returning duff drives... I think if you do your due diligence, secondhand/refurb drives are a decent way to populate a home NAS... even if you buy 4 drives with a few years on the clock, they're unlikely to all fail at the same time so you'd still have redundancy and would be very unlikely/unlucky to lose anything - and that ignores that RAID is not a backup...
I just bought several 12TB HGST from eBay for ~$7/TB. The company specializes in DC HD reclaims, test them, and self-warranty for 5 years! I'll be sure to pull SMART stats and run surface scans this month.
I have bought $1,400 worth of these drives (four 20TB and two 16TB drives, all Seagate EXOS drives). I have bought them over a span of about a year, and are all being used daily, with flawless results so far.
I have started mostly buying refurbished/second hand drives and for now Im quite happy with it since I mostly do storage archiving/data hoarding. The drives dont really do much except for some that have a 10MB read/write (combined over 6 disks or so) but looking at what they are made for, thats basically nothing for them so Im not super worried about them failing on me. And even if, where Im from a refurbished 18TB one costs 200 instead of 300 new, sometimes I can get some for 160. So there is quite a bit of cost savings and even if I have to replace one of them sooner, it should even out the cost in the end. Also as always, great video! Love your stuff!
I recently picked up a 8TB WD Ultrastar from a reputable seller on ebay for about £80. It was 3 years old, and had 13months power up time, and 11 power cycles. I use it in an external caddy to back up my laptoop. It has no errors and has been excellent.I was wary of buying a used drive due to a bad experience years ago, but now I'm very happy (fingers crossed).
The Ultrastars seem to be really solid disks. I think if you can be confident it’s not already in trouble when you receive it, then they could be good purchases. Older HGST drives have great longevity, and the newer disks are starting well, looking forward to finding out if they can last as well or better than some of those older models that seemed so solid.
I used to work for a hosting company. Drives were DOA or would die within 90 days. Beyond that the failure rates were pretty rare. WD RE4s. Also very early SSDs. I can see companies cycling them out regularly and selling them to a third party because customers will do drive testing then complain about drive on hours on a $10 dedicated server.
I think I'm running about seven or eight drives from Server Parts Deals, and I've used several in customer systems. Most have showed up with 0 power on hours, having some run time, but basically new. All performed exactly as they should and passed a surface scan before being put into production. I think I've gotten lucky with getting some drives that were spares that were never put into production, company upgraded and had to ditch the drives... being bought by this company and sold as re-certified. They're where I get all my drives now and they come with a 2 year warranty, which is more than I can say for new OEM drives on Amazon and Newegg.
@@sheldonkupa9120 You would be surprised how many places keep spares on standby and never use them by the time a hardware refresh comes. Any place with a decent IT team will have some ready in case a production drive dies and since spinning rust is all luck, sometimes they happily chug along for 5+ years without issue.
@@amak1131 I am not surprised🤣 this is normal for datacenters, since they use hd raid pools which allow hot swap of dying drives, say zfs pools, and you need same drive specs. Would blindly buy these spare drives if guaranteed. So you are right.
@@sheldonkupa9120 While not impossible, unlikely. Server Parts Deals is an official drive recertification business through Seagate and WD/HGST. They also warranty the drives for 1 to 2 years depending. I just don't see someone that would manipulate SMART data being official and offering a warranty. I think my original explanation is far more likely, at least from this seller.
I'm pretty sure that the drives have their SMART data reset when they get recertified. I have also bought "manufacturer recertified" drives from Server Parts Deals and they also had 0 power on hours according to the SMART data. But I don't believe that they are brand new drives.
I've had failures on every refurb drive from Amazon and I didn't save that much money over a new drive and I had to buy a new drive. So I would say no.
I have a couple of these in a NAS and both arrived with about 40,000 hours on them. They run fine, definitely on the loud side but they are not designed to be quiet and of course new drives would be just as loud. No regrets.
Very good review video. About a year back I brough a dozen 4TB Western Digital Enterprise drives for very low cost. The power on cycle was about 20 each with about 39K hours on so most likely use on a NAS or enterprise system. Checked and no bad sectors. Good way to get large amount of disks or disk space. I did sold half of them about a month ago so I got all my money back and still got the 6 free drives to play with.
I bought one of these in the summer and I had similar numbers to what you've shared here. Very high quality drives and also the Backblaze stats you shared I seem to remember have these as a top performer. They've probably just swapped them out as they're reaching the end of the 5 year warranty and modern drives have 24TB+ capacities, so they can host double the amount of data in the same footprint, and often for the same power consumption. In any case Amazon offered a warranty, the seller a bit more than that - I think, although the company may have gone by then, and there was also a protectmybubble insurance option on there for 4 years warranty for like £5, so between them you should be able to get something back if it goes Pete Tong in that time. At £7/TB, I thought you can't really go too wrong with these. Thanks for sharing your info and expertise. P.S. I wrote the comment before finishing to watch the video, then you covered everything haha. Thank you again.
Thank you, and it’s interesting to hear how others experiences compare. I will be running these 24x7 also, so let’s see how they look in a few years and what happens. I think though, if they do fine in the next few months, then it’s out of the sellers hands… and as you say, warranty options also….
I bought second hand 4 x 12TB HGST Enterprise like yours for pennies a couple of months ago. They are running on my server without any problems. Also 8 years ago I bought 15 x 3TB HGST Deskstar for 27 Pounds each: all have run without problems for at least 4 years, at the moment I still have 8 that work perfectly without errors. (one has a slightly higher temperature than the others but does not give any errors) They have shown me better reliability compared with other brand new disks that I have purchased in the meantime ..... perhaps because they had done a "running in" in their first use that had already eliminated the worst ones..... at 1/5 of the retail price: not bad.
Let's pretend the extended warranty is completely golden, then the cost should give you some idea how long they will really last. If you bought 100 + 4 year warranty and assuming a 2% annual failure rate they will replace 8. So 8 x $92, or $736, which paid for itself and more. I can't wait for a yearly failure update. Does it mention anything about being prorated or can only be used once. PS: I subscribed so I can get a yearly update ;)
I bought a MDD 6TB Nas that actually arrived today, 7200 rpm version. Bought off of Amazon and the seller is MD Tech. Going to give it a spin tomorrow.
I used the website diskprices to find the best price for these drives. I'm currently running 4 of these including (MDD16TSAS25672E), (MD14000GSA12872), (MD14TBGSA25672X). So far no issues, I primarily uses these for automated content downloads then I process the data and archive useful content then wipe and reuse the drive. I put them in a ORICO 4 Bay Daisy Chain Hard Drive Enclosure Aluminum USB3.1 Gen2 10Gbps Type-C Hard Drive Docking Station when on sale.
Purchased a NAS recently, i put 4x new Tosh 14tb drives in it, this obviously cost a lot of money. I would like to create a second NAS for off site storage and was considering renewed drives. This video was useful in understanding what tests to run and how to check if it's a good drive. Thanks.
I have 2 10TB used drives from amazon and they both had around 5 years power on time and clean SMART info. Good for holding videos or backups and like any other drive new or used always keep at least 1 more copy incase of drive failure. I also keep 1 drive offline incase of a system crash, malware or ransomware.
I know one thing, I don't trust reviews on Amazon anymore. Recently I bought an endoscope camera to look inside my truck piston. It was supposed to have a side camera as well but it did not work. I gave them a 3 star review on the faulty camera. A few days later I went back to see if the seller had any feedback. Amazon prevented me from even looking at the reviews on that product. Said that I wasn't allowed to leave comments on this product anymore. Now I don't trust any of the reviews on Amazon anymore.
Have you ever done the serial number lookup on these drives? My last set of 4 I ordered (from an established company on ebay) all showed as originally having been sold to Apple icloud. Makes me feel like they were probably in a well handled environment, but thats always luck of the draw and the original purchasing company doesnt always show up on the WD warranty lookup. Commodity "refurbished" drives like these are a valid means of getting what is usually (as your stats from the db show) a long life drive fairly cheap. Thanks for the vid!
So I bought 5 Water Panther (Arsenal) 18tb Drives for my Synology 5 bay NAS, I had one go bad on me and I contacted Water Panter and they tested it and sent back a new Drive. all of sudden Amazon won't let you buy an extended Warranty, Just DATA protection which I don't want so I started buying from NewEgg where If the drive does go bad I can get a new one not the Data, that's why I have a NAS the Drives have been running over 15783 hours I just can't beat the price and I run a 2 drive failure just in case.
I just bought a 12tb dc520 this past week. It took a day, but a full surface test showed 0 bad sectors. It’s got around 38,000 hours on it, with 18 power-ons, so a little bit less usage than yours. I got it from an auction site stores that specializes in server parts deals. I couldn’t pass up a sale at $72.99.
It depends on what you're using them for really..I have 8 4tb drives I bought from ebay used for like 30 bucks a piece..made a nas and use plex for it...when using for movies storage you don't really put hard usage on them..building a second one for backup.
I buy direct from Water Panther, a bit more expensive (they also sell on Amazon and Ebay) but handling warranty issues with them has been hassle free and that's what I care about most with refurb drives.
I bought one at these recently Amazon UK sale and it arrives next week. I suspect, given the 3 week lead time, it is coming from the USA. I bought it to facilitate hard-drive capacity upgrades and as a backup drive so don't expect to put a lot of hours on it.
I find sellers on the four letters auction site more reliable, as they provide smart info and if the drive isn't good, the buyer protection kicks in. Drives are also cheaper there.
@@goku445 Usually, when I write the name, the comment would disappear within 20 seconds. Scammers on the other hand can write whatever they like. Go figure... 🙄
I almost ordered a few to try. Didn't get the same replacement option you got. I just get data recovery. Shame. I was really thinking about picking up 4 or 5 to experiment with. Still.. $500 all in isn't a bad price if the drives would last me a few years....... oooof decisions decisions
These are good for RAID 1, 5, or 10. Even if they fail your data will still be good. Would not recommend them for single or RAID 0. Your also more likely to have a bad drive due to shock experienced during shipping than anything else.
i personally found seller from ebay who gives a 3 year warranty for any dead drives most of his warranty's would only recommend them if you live in usa though as shipping is horrible for shipping internationally.
Was the faster disk formatted in 4Kn and the other three in 512e? Because that would explain the performance difference, and also it might be worth pointing out that this is something worth checking on refurbished disks (the previous owner might have changed it).
It's a really nice idea, but all the disks are 512e disks. I checked them and all are running with 4096 Physical Sector Size and 512 Logical Sector size. So doesn't seem to be this.
From my humble 30+ years of experience with computers, 2 things for PC you don't buy used, EVER: 1 ) Storage 2 ) Power supply. YMMV, but it is the same as gambling.
I bought several WD Gold drives renewed. They've worked fine for years. I bought a new WD Gold drive and it had errors and became unreliable within 8 months. It seems like just a matter of luck.
I bought a 2TB refurbished hard drive last July. It died in August. Sent the contents to a data recovery company. £700 later I got my data back. Didn’t have a chance to even back it up, that’s how bad my experience was.
Did you get the chance to check the drive first for bad sectors or smart errors? And did it have hours on it, or were they reset? But that’s a bad experience, I would always have a backup of anything important, but I know that doesn’t help in retrospect. So, sorry you had that experience. 😞
2tb refurbished consumer hdd in 2024 when u can buy an new 2tb ssd for few bucks? to put on it sensible data without backup and parity? only a complete idiot could do that
Very interesting! But would i put important data to them?! Personally, i couldnt convince myself. I stille use however, a stone age old harddisk i took out of my WD Mybook live which spent like 15 years sleeping while not in use. Its still good, but i put only multimedia files on it which are well backupped.
In my understanding, the accidental policy will protect you from, as the name implies, accidents. Like a fire in the server room. I doubt they will reimburse you for a drive that just fails.
the refurbished drive i got had its smart reset. i've heard that's the case with many drives, it's not clear what the manufacturer does besides that when they "refurbish" drives. anyway, considering seagate only replaces dead (new) drives with refurbished ones (if warranty hasn't expired) i think having 2 refurbished drives in raid 1 is still cheaper than buying a single one new. also, in my country amazon offers 2 years warranty (by default) on the refurbished drives they sell.
Resetting of SMART data seems like a red flag to me. But if this is done by the manufacturer and they retain full warranty I feel a little more comfortable. But not sure I would say ‘happy’. I don’t think I would accept that from a third party seller. I also don’t think Seagate publish any criteria for when they would reset data, but I would hope it’s only for drives that are almost new and not those with any real mileage on them.
To avoid confusion, manufacturer refurbished drives are marked as "recertified" and come with a white label that says so. These are drives that were RMAed in, fixed, wiped and sent back. Some resellers only sell those kind of drives. I have read that sometimes recertified drives are good unused drives relabelled to clear inventory, but I don't know if that's true.
@@sometechguy tbh i'm pretty sure they do have a high mileage; anyway, amazon has never denied me a refund as long as the warranty wasn't expired. imo that's a lot more than what seagate offers (they also expect you to pay for shipping). they definitely should be more clear about the drive's conditions and past use on the product page
@@bufordmaddogtannen i suppose they might need room in the warehouse at some point but i don't think that's the case with the 12tb you see online. anyway, nowhere on the product page amazon says that the drive is recertified (mine is tho) so it still seems like a gamble. what i'm wondering tho is, how do they repair them? i always thought it wasn't worth it to take a drive apart (also cause the mechanical parts are just supposed to break at some point)
@@gandalfilgrigio97 indeed. What you get is a lottery. There are companies you can buy directly from that are more reliable though. Server part deals being one. But it's in the US, so shipping and customs would wipe any saving. With helium based drives I guess they need to transplant the drive in a new case, or maybe they take apart and test components singularly then put them back on the assembly line for new drives to come out? No idea. 😁 It probably costs a manufacturer less to assemble a drive with parts from RMAed drives than building one from scratch.
The drives that you show in the thumbnail are garbage. I had three of them. One self-destructed after like two months. I bought another one and it was DOA. Then I bought another one from the same vendor and it was DOA too. Amazon thought i was one of those problem returners but I proved that the drives were trash. I put the representative on speakerphone and let her hear the drive clicking. However, there is a brand called water panther that I have used for about two years that are very good. I do a lot of heavy duty transfers and they have stood the test of time. I’m talking about I have those drives running 20 TB transfers sometimes for three days straight and they have not failed.
Otters have mentioned Water Panther, but have not used them myself. It sounds like they deal with refurbished drives, but have heard good things. I might check them out. Thanks for sharing. I believe the HGST Ultrastars are really good drives. But of course buying used drives will be affected by how they are sourced, validated and handled.
I don’t know what the originally source is. They seem to come from multiple sellers, but they could be acting as agents for AWS. But I would guess that these sellers probably handle drives from multiple data centre or cloud scale companies. I believe some of these sellers at least also sell direct and from places like eBay.
@@goku445 Various sellers in the Amazon marketplace will have various sources, but the drives SomeTechGuy has been looking at are being sold by Amazon themselves. Specifically Amazon US.
@2:43 12 TB? nope this is for computers, so the capacity is 10.9 TiB and formatted probably -10%=9.8 TiB; this is BS, Seagate is underselling by 1 TiB and 88GiB les; HDD/SSD should be sold at Formatted Capacity/Size, ' coz that's what we use. I'm tired of their BS. I had mostly Toshibas, and the rare Hitachi, old 0.5, 1 & 1.5 TB, 8 years each until they started to click. I don't buy Seagate or WD, not as good.
Technically HDD manufacturers are correct. They sell HDD's by the TB (terabytes aka 10^12 bytes) not in TiB (tebibytes aka 2^40=1024^4 bytes) OS'es shouldn't have used MB, GB and TB names when showing MiB, GiB and TiB numbers.
Amazon in the early days: Trusted sellers, carefully vetted by Amazon. Amazon about a decade ago: lets allow the chinese to sell crap and flood amazon with rubbish Amazon now: great now fill it with second hand junk and call it refurbished (basically became an overpriced and worse version of eBay)
Thks, this is just what I need! I just bought 4 of them, will get them on 30th Oct. I have had with a few issues with 2nd hand hard drives from ebay, I believe the main reason is bad packaging so happy to see amazon package properly. Anyways will try to follow your steps to test them on arrival, as I would assume like new drives the highest percentage of failure is caused by them being transported.
I think it will depend on how many you get as well as which seller you buy from on the big E - I've bought 1, 5 and 15, each came in different packing. The single was just a plain small box with plastic holders like what HPE sends their SSDs in. The 5-pack were in a nice box with custom cut foam inserts which had padding on all sides. and the 15-pack came on a 20-drive clam-shell tray like you'd get from an OEM such as Seagate or WD Funnily enough, my refurb drives are between 4yo (5x10TB) 8 months, (15x14TB) and 6 months old (1x14TB) in December this year, 0 failures. in that same time I've bought brand new 4x8TB Sky Hawks with a 50% failure rate, all outside warranty and 5x10TB Iron Wolf drives with a 20% failure rate, this one was inside warranty and has been replaced.
I have bought many 'RENEWED" hdd. For many years now. What i learned ... GOHARDDRIVE !!!! ... However , dont think they sell on amazon or Newegg anymore , (they use too). They, do sell on Ebay and their website. I always buy drives that state 3 or 5 year warranty. I bought maybe 30 + drives from them .. think I have had 3 that I called DOA (had something wrong ) .. however I have 4 die in use .. they have always honored their warranty @ no cost to me. Also, their Warranty is S/N based .. so if you resale them and their is still warranty left it will work for next owner !
I can get where you're coming from but will respectfully disagree, especially if they are going to be used in a redundant array. Consider that some places have insane prices for drives. I live in New Zealand and here a 14TB drive will STILL set you back $1000NZ or more if you want enterprise drives. I bought 15x 14TB drives from a US refurbisher that sells on the big E. They came with a 5 year seller warranty and, the average cost, including shipping AND Import tax was just below $250NZ per drive... Even if they came with no warranty and failed 3 times quicker than a brand new drive I'd still have saved money buying the Refurbs. I've had plenty of first hand experience buying a brand new disk for it to fail at 3.5-4yo on a 3y warranty. Especially Seagate Skyhawks of varying sizes, screw that range in particular.
