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 bought used SAS drives from ebay. was running them in a raid10 until about a month ago when I retired the server.
ran for about 5 years on them no problems.
I do agree, there are risks buying any tech used, especially for servers.