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 ?
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.
Out of curiosity, how old was that drive?
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.