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I buy manufacturer refurbished drives from serverpartdeals.com. They come with a 2 year warranty but I've never had a problem with any of them.

Purely anecdotal but I tend to avoid any sensitive hardware purchases off of Amazon because they suck at packaging things a lot of times and I've had more than a few DOA components because they just tossed the box into an even larger box then apparently yeeted it down a flight of stairs

Edit: I should add that I live 10 minutes from a Microcenter which plays a large part in my overall pickiness, but that said, when I'm looking for something sensitive to handling and needs to be purchased online I stick to computer hardware retailers solely because they love packing peanuts and bubble wrap as much as the components love them

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.

Don't buy them off of Amazon. Find some place a little more reputable. You want some sort of legally valid warranty plus seller protection

I buy mine used from eBay. When I receive them, I inspect them, check SMART data, and run a test. I've gotten one that had a cracked connector, one with a bunch of bad blocks, stuff like that. I reached out to the sellers and they replaced them at no cost to me.

a lot of amazon sellers simply mark working pulls as "refubrished" when all they did was reformat or if you are lucky did a zero fill and check that the sectors weren't bad.

I don't trust reburbs that aren't manufacturer refurbished on any site because its a huge difference in the testing and checking being done.

I do sometimes buy used drives, but I know what I am getting there vs "refurbished" - and there is usually a pricing difference which is why so many are dishonestly calling used drives refurbs.

you want to look at the sellers warranty policies. if if they actually have one besides amazons, the seller is confident in their own items longevity

Depends.

If it's "buy from Amazon" then you can return it with no issue if shits bad.

If Amazon is just the middleman, than the seller could be scamming and will either fight returns or just close up shop. I wouldn't buy any used electronic over $200 from a middle man because of that, so this is kind of on the line.

But modern HDDs hold up a lot better than they used to. I tend to "ship of Theseus" PC builds and I've got some HDDs probably 15 years old that are still going strong.

I can't remember the last time I've heard anyone say a HDD failed. Just people remembering what it was like 25 years ago. We don't think of innovation with old tech like HDDs, but there's been a lot of improvements to the parts that used to fail regularly.

Exos x18 are enterprise drives that came out last than 5 years ago, I can't imagine they were replaced because they're all bad, just companies upgrading to newer tech. So should be fine and last you well over a decade.

I don't know if SPD ships to where you are but a manufacturer recertified 16TB from them goes for ~$160. I have 7 drives from them so far, 5 in continuous use since spring, no issues so far.

I know I'm in a different situation here but i buy all my server drives off ebay. Just got ~60TB worth of SAS drives for a little over $200 USD. Ive never had an issue. Most of these places are where business sell their drives to be wiped. Then they just put them up on ebay

Edit: bad autocorrect

With raid 10 - i would not risk it . With RAID6 ( obviously not on BTRFS) it is fair game if you have solid return policy for drives which are DOA. Go for SAS drives, they are cheaper (but generally hotter and nosier). And look for old-new-stock on specialized sites, no one in enterprise needs say 8tb drives, so they selling them cheap at times.

Get drive, connect , run long smart self-test ( for 18tb it is probably take a day). If it passed you are reasonably sure that it will not die soon. And keep running these test regularly, as soon as they start failing, replace.

Did it once and was disappointed. One was Sata2 instead of 3 and the other was straight up broken

I wouldn't buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I've ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I've owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drives as to be useless.

Anecdotal, yes, but it's happened enough to me that I've been soured on them for life.

Just bear in mind that nothing involved in "refurbishing" a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn't tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.

If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won't be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.

Like others, I’ve had good experiences with eBay- just look for reputable sellers (good reviews, not a brand new seller, etc). Most of what I bought was fine, but the ones that were dead on arrival I was able to get replaced within their warranty window. Just be sure to test what you get as soon as it arrives.

I've had good luck with goharddrive.com. They sell through amazon as well, but I believe they ship direct. I usually get the hgst, or now wd, ultrastar hard drives. I've had zero issues.

I've had good luck getting refurb drives from serverpartdeals. I did get one or two wd red used from Amazon, one was fine and the other I had to return for a replacement

I'd rather just shuck external HDD than buy refurbs