Are Cheap Used HGST Hard Drives Any Good? 

For people who find this video, one thing to consider is that HGST is pretty specifically an Enterprise brand (or was), not a Consumer brand. This usually implies higher quality. MORE IMPORTANTLY, what I have found is that every single HDD that has a sleep mode has died. Every. Single. One. Now I use a small utility called "NoSleepHD" that I configure to write to an empty TXT file every nine minutes, since Sleep Mode usually occurs at ten minutes. I also leave my computer running 24/7. Since using this tiny utility, I've never, ever had a hard drive failure. That's from a 100% failure rate across multiple drives to a 0% failure rate. Because these used drives likely had a 100% up-time, I would trust them, but that's just my opinion...

Thanks for the review and analysis! Was seeing these pop up online and wondering how good they are as the value is just unbeatable. You helped clear a lot of doubts!

In my experience, HDD to get : hgst, Hitachi HDD to avoid : Seagate, WD

I have 8 and they've been powered on for 3 years. No problems at all. Planning on getting another 8 bay and 8 more. Thanks for the video

I've been buying used hgst drives for years now. Just bought 7 x 10tb for $50 each!

Really nice deal duuud, congrats!!!

Very useful video, thank you!

I have literally HUNDREDS of "used" HGST enterprise model hard drives - teh older ones, 2 and 3 TB models, have had *1* die in the 6-8 years I've had the 15 or so. The more recent drives, mostly 14TB with a few 8 10 or 12 TB models, have had *2 drive out of well over 200 - but I've only had those for an average of about a year. The WD "Ultrastar" line are the SAME drives - WD bought out HGST about a decade ago, but were forced to operate them as a "separate" company for most of that time - they finally were allowed to fully merge them in a couple years ago or so. I also have a few "used" Toshiba enterprise model drives, that have also been reliable so far - a couple of those are pushing 15 years old.

I have one and they are excellent. Mine was from a Taiwanese server and still going strong after 4 years I purchased it. HGST is the best HDD brand

I've bought these cheap HGST/Deskstar "(Renewed)" drives from Amazon in the past (smaller 2 and 3TB drives) and they work very well. I've only had one SMART alert popup about overheating. When I check the drives I can't even see which one had the SMART error... I didn't even think SMART error would go away or correct it self. Regardless they are running inside my homemade NAS 24/7 operating just fine.

Thank you for the video! looking for some drives for my Unraid NAS.

My 120 tb zraid6 zfs file, streaming and game server uses 24x 12gb/s sas 6tb ultrastars, that have around 8k hours on them. They've treated me great other than the single 80k hour drive in the array giving me occasional hiccups. It's always recovered itself- but I've got a few cold spares when it fails for good. I've also got another array with 24x HGST 2tb Sata drives that have 130k hours in only 40 power cycles- and I haven't had any problems with them yet. I switched to the HGSTs after buying nothing but WD Blacks for 15 years prior. The blacks have gotten really unreliable over my last 12-15 new drive purchases. I still got nothing but love for the original black 1tbs I've got with 120k hours on them and no problems. I'd take one of those over a new WD any day of the week!

Very cool review. Looking at comparing the used 6TB Drive route versus LTO-7 Tape Storage. The Price to Value get's dicey when you think about a hard drive being 5+ years old.

Thanks for the info. Have they held up?

Very good video. the power on hours would be the age of the drive? Mine doesn't have date of manufacture.

Great Video Ordered 8tb for $50

I am I wrong that the pick bubble aint no static bag? ie It might produce little static but it offer no protection from static.

I have one of these. I wouldn't use it for a system drive for the long run because it's very noisy and gets hot and is very slow to boot/load games but for archival storage works good.

I have a 10GB IBM drive from 1999 that spins up and holds data fine. I still have files from when I was 9 years old on there. I got a samsung 640gb from 2010 running surveillance and same for an old 09 barracuda 1tb. Found a few old WD blues one laptop 500gb and desktop 1tb with less than 100 power on hours so yay free storage!

Thank you

It's just hit or miss. I had a couple WD drives fail on me, as well as one or two Seagate drives over the course of 20 years. But there's one 160 GB Seagate hard drive that I'm still using to this day as a "temporary trash data network share" and it still runs fine. Why am I using it? Just because I find it funny it's still running with 0 reallocated sectors. I think, I got that one somewhen around 2005-2008. I bought new hard drives, used hard drives. I've used them in high utilization NAS systems (with ZFS, etc.) and they work. The whole "dOn't bUy uSeD HaRd dRiVeS." crowd can go suck a dong. You can even buy refurbished / used hard drives with warranty on them, so I don't see a problem here, especially if you run them in a redundant RAID configuration and also have your backup routine sorted.

In 2019 I bough 2 on amazon supposed NEW they looked a bit used seller gave a separate waranty not in original package and they were both 2013 escalate to amazon with pictures. Both refunded They were marked from Dell but HGST.

On ebay, I got a 6 tb for $36 and a 8 TB for $43. I have no complaints :)

I only at least 4 of these hgst drives and they still going great

I will give you interesting points: Disk platter surface also goes old. If you test by writing file, reading back, it will look fine, as charge on each sector is fresh. But after few years, reading that sector can give error. Use HDD-Scan utility to do read scan and check if many sectors have higher read times, like 100ms or more. In that case, means hdd has trouble reading and may even be doing data recovery internally to retrieve the data. Indicates surface quality degrading. Such corruption in filesystem is hard to detect. A trick would be to store the files in zip archives, you can use 'Store' option to avoid compression. Zip archives have CRC checksums and if it gets corrupted, it will indicate it when you extract. Do not make extremely large archives, if it gets corrupted, you can lose all files. Advantage of zips is that small files are added into one file and writes to hdd are continuous, with less seeks and tear. Filesystem can also show sizes and file count faster when you have less files. Or use tool like ExactFile to write in each directory a checksum file, with MD5 signatures. You can later verify files are still correct.

Hey I watched your video all the way true, really interesting! I bought one if these drives before I looked into it, may I ask what do I need to run one of these drives? I've just got a regular pc and I've never seen the connection of the drive before. Sorry for the noob question 🙈

I bought two 2TB HGST drives from goharddrive in 2014 and they are still going strong. I had to retire them because I need more space. It sucks I have to dump them because they are great drives but not enough capacity

Concerning the reliability of the drives, I looked at a site that claimed the early generation drives should be good for a million hours and the second generation for two million hours, (I don't have any 2nd gen drives). The earliest my Hgst drive was manufactured around 2011. If they ran 24/7 for nearly 11 to 12 years, that would be somewhere around 90 to 100,000 hours. Based on the overall time, that tells me about 90% of the drive life expectancy still remains. Well... I hope at least. That tells me to go for it and save a ton of money.

is western digital still making hgst quality drives but just renamed as western digital? or have they started cheapening the drives?

I bought two of them a week or so ago for a NAS I just set up. They worked perfectly so far. I've bought two more that should arrive tomorrow, I will use these for my back-up drives. Price is great, the ones I bought last week have a 3 year warranty, and the ones that are arriving tomorrow have a 5 year warranty. I've been told, the longer the warranty, the newer the drive is. I don't know if that is true.

Yes I love them I got one that has over 60000 hrs from 2015

YES!

I just ordered a HGST 12tb drive today. Heard they were most reliable. Recertified with 2 year waranty...will see if they are gud...

Any update on these? How are they holding up?

You can be happy with a reallocated sector or two. So long as they don’t keep increasing in number

I’ve bought used Deskstars and Ultrastars, and they are really loud. They also run warm too. Edit: $20 down the drain, the Deskstar is throwing spin up errors. Do not buy from EMSA.

i never had a HDD fail on me yet, i still have one 1tb hdd running after well over 10 years now

Seems like these would be fantastic for a home media/nas/plex server in unraid

I just bought two brand new, still sealed HGST enterprise drives at very very cheap prices. Other buyers confirmed that seller's items to be new and have zero hours in s.m.a.r.t. Hopefully they last long for me. 😍😍

Im wondering if peeps are dumping these drives after mining CHIA.

2014, 78.000 hours 4 TB still running. Ventilated & standby mode when not used. My last HGST is a 10 TB HUH721010ALE600 from 2018. These are like 10$ / TB (but half the noise of 2 x 4 TB) U can also find some WD Purple 10 TB for this kind of price... Some say : opened, never used... OK at ur own risk bc storage conditions are critical : not as sealed & no Helium inside these.

I don't trust used storage mediums. The previous owner could have gotten viruses. Sometimes they reside / persist in the firmware.

I think is a good option for the common poorly people (joke) who cant affort the big new one hdds BUT if you are going to use in a minimal way of RAID in a NAS device RAID 1 ,RAID 10 or RAID 5 it depends of the case/hardware that you have or to plan to use these thisk to get this kind of solutions using these disk for saving/storage files with a minimun of safety without loose your kidney to affort the price of one single big "in storage" disk

If you’re doing this you need to have functional raid 5.

9:34

Bought 6 6TB drives, 1 died. Bought 6 10TB drives 2 died.

Where do you order cheap refurbished discs?

Try to avoid using same model drives in raid/nas as they may have same problems and fail both at same time. A firmware or integrity check issue can corrupt on both drives at the same time. If you have a different model, there is a chance it will not be affected. Maybe even avoid using same tech, like helium.

my Hitachi xbox hdd outlived all of my ssds

I wonder if he ever checked how many miles were on the 6 TB drives? If an eBay seller will not tell me I don't purchase

Seagate drives always die!