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 ?
It’s a gamble.
When you lose, you can simply return it.
When you win, you get a hard drive that works for really cheap.
I purchased one in 2020 that I still haven’t replaced, although I’m buying the replacement now as it has begun it’s slow certain death.
Maybe there is a way I can test the drive upon arrival, would you have some tools to recommend ? Preferably available on Linux ?
SMART tools
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX where sdX is your drive in question (sdA, sdB, etc).
| grep Power_On_Hours
| grep Power_Cycle_Count
This just tells you how much that drive was used in the past, It’s not a perfect to test but it’s what I do 🤷♂️
Comment save ! Thank you :)
Also run a health test on it. It’s less important for SSDs IMO, but it’s great for HDDs to check if there’s any obvious issues.