Experiences with second-hand HDD

[Overloke]

I'm from Australia, the land of expensive technology. I'm thinking about getting some new drives for my NAS and server. I'm currently running a mish-mash of drives in a JBOD in my NAS, and a single 8TB Seagate Iron Wolf in my server.

 

New 8TB Iron Wolf drives from my supplier of choice are $339 AUD (about $222 USD). I'm poking around on eBay, and I see a number of 'Like new' or 'Refurbished' Seagate Exos drives, for absolutely insane prices - 12TB Exos drives for $245 AUD (~$160 USD). Now obviously I know I'm rolling the dice if I go ahead with these, but we all know that 99% of gamblers quit right before they win big.

 

Have any of you guys bought second-hand storage before, and if so, what was your experience with it?

[Skiiwee29]

@da na this sounds up your alley 

[danalog]

Thanks for the @.

 

Used drives fall into two categories - server used and consumer used.

Consumer used drives will have a lower number of hours, a good deal of start/stop cycles, and will likely have been bonked around a little - particularly if it's a laptop drive. They are being sold either by a PC repair shop who pulled out the used drive, or by a user who simply doesn't need it anymore.

Server used drives will have years of hours, very few start/stop cycles, and will likely have been retired from a datacenter because of either old age - or, they have some sort of failure - reallocated sectors, bad sectors, CRC interface errors (if ATA-based), etc. 

 

If looking on eBay, you can determine if you're buying a consumer or server-used drive by how much feedback the seller has and how many items they have sold. Drive refurbishers will have sold hundreds to hundreds of thousands of drives.

 

If the drive you are looking at buying is, let's say, a 2015 WD Blue, that drive is obviously consumer used. But it seems like you're looking only for server drives so that seems irrelevant here; I wouldn't recommend buying a consumer-used server drive.

If the drive you are looking at buying is, let's say, a 2009 WD VelociRaptor 10K, that's a server drive that was retired and replaced with something higher-capacity. Will have a ton of hours, twenty start/stop cycles, and absolutely nothing wrong with it.

If the drive you are looking at buying is, let's say, a 24TB Seagate Exos, that drive is basically brand new and has been retired from a datacenter because there is something wrong with it.

 

I have bought a lot of used drives - from late-80s SCSI drives (server-used) through late-2000s WD VelociRaptors (fastest 2.5" SATA drives, server used) to 16 terabyte HGST UltraStar helium drives (server used). One of the two 16TB HGST drives I bought recently, mfg date of 2022, racked up 45 'pending' sectors in under 48 hours of usage - so it is safe to say that was a drive retired due to failing SMART, and the reseller had wiped the SMART data hoping the warranty would expire before the buyer noticed. That is what you have to watch out for. The drives that have worked without issue, the drives I have put years worth of hours on, have been the older drives previously used in servers.

 

TL:DR The only used drives I would recommend buying are old ones - those 80s SCSI drives and 15-year-old 10K SAS drives, because those were all retired due to age rather than being deemed unsuitable for a datacenter environment due to the risk of knocking a RAID array offline. Don't buy a drive that came out, say, two years ago because that is way too new and high-capacity for a datacenter to replace it due to age or size - that drive has a mechanical problem. SMART is easy to tamper with, and resellers will resort to it; I've seen it several times. 

 

 

Edit: In general, I recommend Hitachi/HGST (or WD-branded Ultrastar) drives over anything else. No drive is built better than the Ultrastar 7k- series - the chassis was introduced on the Deskstar series around 2005 and is so damn good that WD still uses the exact same design nearly 20 years later. No other server drive has magnets quite so big, heads quite so sturdy, or casing quite so thick. The only near second is the WD Gold - shares more in common with the classic WD RE2-series server drives, also fantastically reliable. 

The difference Hitachi and WD drives have from Seagates is that they are built from the ground up as server drives. Since the early 2000s, Seagate server drives have been nothing more than a Barracuda with a different label and different firmware - the chassis and head assembly is the exact same as the consumer-grade drives. 

[Overloke]

Thanks for your incredible write-up @da na.

 

I think the biggest red flag I'm seeing from eBay is that there is one particular seller who has made about 8 accounts, with about a thousand sales each - they're all [username]1, [username]2, [username]3, etc. Makes me wonder why they feel the need to do that.

 

Based on the ratio of good to bad reviews, there is probably nothing to worry about, but I feel like the 12TB Exos drives are probably new enough to fall into that category of "Removed due to failure, not to age". Some of the negative reviews do state that the drives are being marketed as 'Opened but new', but their serial numbers are reporting as drives from like 2020 or so, and the warranty has expired.

 

I think it's looking more and more like I'll need to just bite the bullet and pay the higher price for new drives. Which, you know, is fine, I prefer buying new to used tech in almost all cases anyway. It's more just that these prices on eBay seemed almost too good. They're like more than half the price of new drives that have less capacity.

[danalog]

7 minutes ago, Overloke said:

I think the biggest red flag I'm seeing from eBay is that there is one particular seller who has made about 8 accounts, with about a thousand sales each - they're all [username]1, [username]2, [username]3, etc. Makes me wonder why they feel the need to do that.

That is often done to artifically boost the number of listings of your product users see. Ebay promotes sellers equally, so creating a ton of accounts with the same drives means if you search "used hard drive", you're now eight times as likely to see that same drive from that same company under different seller names.

7 minutes ago, Overloke said:

Based on the ratio of good to bad reviews, there is probably nothing to worry about, but I feel like the 12TB Exos drives are probably new enough to fall into that category of "Removed due to failure, not to age". Some of the negative reviews do state that the drives are being marketed as 'Opened but new', but their serial numbers are reporting as drives from like 2020 or so, and the warranty has expired.

Good resellers offer a reseller warranty on their drives, 2 years is pretty typical. If you're worried about warranty, definitely seek that out. I can vouch for a company called MDD here, they sell on eBay and Amazon. They offer reseller warranties and do not participate in any SMART-wiping monkey business. 

[Overloke]

4 minutes ago, da na said:

That is often done to artifically boost the number of listings of your product users see. Ebay promotes sellers equally, so creating a ton of accounts with the same drives means if you search "used hard drive", you're now eight times as likely to see that same drive from that same company under different seller names.

I did not know that was a thing. Thanks for the heads up.

 

5 minutes ago, da na said:

I can vouch for a company called MDD here, they sell on eBay and Amazon. They offer reseller warranties and do not participate in any SMART-wiping monkey business. 

I did a quick check on AU Amazon, and there looks like there's a few that look like this:

 

Is this what you mean, or does Max Digital Data actually sell their drives as a first party, and these guys are all just resellers as well?

[leclod]

I believe Seagate has flooded the market with recertified drives.

I could buy, today, a 20TB rece Seagate drive ST20000NT001 for 268USD, among others (don't know if that's a steal for you)

Those drives have a 1 year warranty from Samsung.

Those drives are said to be better than new, better tested (by Samsung).

I didn't bite because the price advantage over the drive I'd really want isn't big enough.

Edited July 25, 2024 by leclod

[Manuarmata]

i'm running some second hand 3TB  WD greens from 2013 in my NAS that served me for many years and they are still working flawless. If you use two drives in a redundant raid config and don't store things of great importance, like things you depend on for your income. then i guess you could take the risk. Good for the wallet and good for the planet. You could also demand or check the S.M.A.R.T. data before you buy to reduce your risk even more.