this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
76 points (91.3% liked)

Selfhosted

40173 readers
650 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.

I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.

In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Depends.

If it's "buy from Amazon" then you can return it with no issue if shits bad.

If Amazon is just the middleman, than the seller could be scamming and will either fight returns or just close up shop. I wouldn't buy any used electronic over $200 from a middle man because of that, so this is kind of on the line.

But modern HDDs hold up a lot better than they used to. I tend to "ship of Theseus" PC builds and I've got some HDDs probably 15 years old that are still going strong.

I can't remember the last time I've heard anyone say a HDD failed. Just people remembering what it was like 25 years ago. We don't think of innovation with old tech like HDDs, but there's been a lot of improvements to the parts that used to fail regularly.

Exos x18 are enterprise drives that came out last than 5 years ago, I can't imagine they were replaced because they're all bad, just companies upgrading to newer tech. So should be fine and last you well over a decade.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I've had one of my 6TB drives fail this year. And I occasionally hear from my friends or extended family that they have harddisks fail. Sometimes I help scrape off the data on it, if it's someone who doesn't do backups. So it definitely happens. Just not super often. And SMART also didn't warn me this time. All these drives were purchased new. I'm not sure about OP's question. Maybe I'll try a refurbished drive myself.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Out of curiosity, how old was that drive?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think about 8 years. I'm not sure. I bought it when 6TB drives were the best value for money. I've managed a few other storage systems in my life and usually they fail soon, ideally while still under warranty, or they last quite some time. But there are exceptions. And I'm not entirely up to date anymore. I wouldn't recommend skimping on backups. At some point in time they will fail. But in my experience it's completely random. You can't expect a drive to last like 2 or 5 years. They'll do whatever they want. And on average last way longer than 2 years or whatever refurbished drives have lasted when they get re-sold.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I see offers from both "Amazon Renewed store" and "Seagate store".

The HDDs I currently have in my NAS are a mix match of 6TB drive from different brands they all are 4+yo and they all have worked without issues so far, even though some are SMR. It's running 24/7 but it's not a very intense workload. I will need some capacity upgrade soon but I don't feel like investing 1000+€ 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Direct from Seagate wouldn't be bad, check their store first to see if you can cut out Amazon.

I was talking about random reseller stores. "Manufacturer refurbished" for things you can't see is almost always a good idea. The manufacturer has their brand name on the line and usually go over common fail points and replace if it looks worn.

Stores/Amazon doing "renewed" means they tried to cover up superficial damage and is completely different. It might look ok on the outside and be complete junk on the inside.

Think of "renewed" as "open box returns" except it might have taken the last user 5 years to return. It's a much worse gamble.