this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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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 ?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe there is a way I can test the drive upon arrival, would you have some tools to recommend ? Preferably available on Linux ?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Comment save ! Thank you :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

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.