What is if any of your experiences with renewed hdds found on amazon? I see a enterprise drive 16tb for 200 bucks. I would love to know what you think the reliability is like. I have bought 2 new for 600 usd. If renewed is decently reliable I would be willing to risk it.
My retailers here have Toshiba MG08 16TB for 250€. I personally wouldn’t take a risk for 20% discount. Does the seller provide some data on active running hours on those drives or full SMART readouts? full 5-year warranty? I’m personally comfortable with buying old/refurbished electronics, but for things with a mechanical wear component, I’m always cautious.
Next question seagate exos x18 16tb vs seagate exos x16 16tb are they the same drive? The x18 is cheaper than a x16.
Besides model number what would be the difference?
If the x18 is technically the same specs as x16 then I’ll get the x18 16tb @ 250bucks new.
I do buy used drives for 20-30% of retail, and expect higher failure rates.
But, I have only got up to 4TB used, so When some of them inevitably die, they will be quick enough to replace.
Also, I have several backups of my data (on mix of used and new drives) so again, when drives fail, I can replace.
I personally, would not have 16TB drives in an array of less than R2, because the uptime needed to resilver. But that is me.
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16-wide R1 with 16TB drives is the way to go for the true admin resilver experience
Can’t comment on Seagate really. x18 seems newer and slightly faster according to official specs. But “new” doesn’t mean much if the batch is prone to fail 
But they’re all helium-sealed and if the serial no. has warranty on it…probably not worse than any other HDD out there. Just make sure the seller gets the packaging done properly.
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I have bought renewed Intel Enterprise SSDs. Basically 960GiB units for like 50 USD a piece. All of them had about 5 years of power on but only 1% of life wear. With the feature of failing to read only if a problem occurs, I am find to have a 50USD archived disk.
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I think I’ve talked about this before, but I really despise the term “renewed hard drive”. And this comes from someone in the ewaste / refurbishing business. It’s a used drive thats been wiped… I have high doubts any of those drives have been opened to have the spindle or actuator replaced.
The worse part is companies resetting the SMART data, like there’s no need to hide the power on hours, or r/w’s.
So if the data isn’t critical and you have backups elsewhere go for it. But I wish companies just called them what they are… used drives.
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My first 3-4 8TB HDD’s were “refurbished” HGST Ultrastar drives from Amazon at least 4 years ago now. They are really just used drives that are wiped. Mine still still work, though that’s more of a testament of the quality of HGST drives than of this method of buying them.
I would say, as long as the drives you get are mirrored with a drive with a different lifecycle (to prevent simultaneous failure) and a backup, there’s no horror stories I know of to put you off from it.
That said, I quickly moved on to getting Easystores and WD elements during sales and shucking them as they were generally cheaper this way, and showed up more consistently.
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