[secabeen]

These are useful data points, but I've found that at my risk tolerance level, I get a lot more TB/$ buying refurbished drives. Amazon has a couple of sellers that specialize in server pulls from datacenters, even after 3 years of minimal use, the vendors provide 5 years of additional warranty to you.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> even after 3 years of minimal use, the vendors provide 5 years of additional warranty to you.

The Amazon refurb drives (in this class) typically come with 40k-43k hours of data center use. Generally they're well used for 4½-5yrs. Price is ~30% of new.

I think refurb DC drives have their place (replaceable data). I've bought them - but I followed other buyers' steps to maximize my odds.

I chose my model (of HGST) carefully, put it thru an intensive 24h test and check smart stats afterward.

As far as the 5yr warranty goes, it's from the seller and they don't all stick around for 5 years. But they are around for a while -> heavy test that drive after purchase.

[pronoiac]

Buying refurbished also makes it much easier to avoid having the same brand/model/batch/uptime, for firmware and hardware issues. I do carefully test for bad sectors and verify capacity, just in case.

[dehrmann]

I think you're better off buying used and using the savings for either mirroring or off-site backup. I'd take two mirrored used drives from different vendors over one new drive any day.

[ethbr1]

There was a Backblaze report a while ago that said, essentially, that most individual drives are either immediate lemons or run to warranty.

If you buy used, you're avoiding the first form of failure.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Indeed- RAID used to stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The point was to throw a bunch of disks together and with redundancy it didn't matter how unreliable they were. Using blingy drives w/ RAID feels counter-intuitive- at least as a hobbyist.

[malfist]

A lot of those resellers do not disclose that the drive isn't new, even labeling the item as new.

GoHardDrive is notorious for selling "new" drives with years of power on time. Neither Newegg nor Amazon seem to do anything about those sellers

[spiffytech]

Any specific sellers you'd recommend?

[hwbunny]

Refurbed drives have a MUCH HIGHER failure rate. I used to send back lots of drives to Seagate, they come back with the service sticker and that means trouble. YMMV

[secabeen]

These generally aren't refurbed drives, they are used drives that sat in a datacenter for 3-5 years.