I’ve been buying refurb/recert enterprise CMR drives from MD Data off of Amazon/eBay for a while now. They mostly work, but I have had to RMA three of them in the past few months. These drives are still mildly expensive $200-220 for a 14TB, but still enough savings to warrant used purchase over new, especially with MD Data’s 5-year warranty and good RMA policy.
I’m curious where everyone else sources their drives? Do you think that buying new would be a better choice, despite the price, for getting good solid drives that aren’t going to fail in the first 6 months?
I reach out to people on Market Place and have them show me drive information before I decide to purchase it. The smart data gives me an idea of the health of the drive but it isn’t perfect.
My first batches of 10-12 TB drives were bought new, some genuine NAS drives (WD Red, WD Gold, HGST Ultrastar), some shucked from USB enclosures (WD White?).
When I began replacing some of these due to failures, I decided to give used drives a try. I first went to known sellers on a local small ads site, then found an offer on the forum at ServeTheHome for Ironwolf Pro and Exos X20 in sufficient numbers to upgrade the whole pool, with some cold spares. So far, so good…
For anything you buy as a consumer in the EU the vendor is required to provide two years of warranty by law. They cannot wave that away and refer to the manufacturer. But that is only the first two years.
After that and if there is an e.g. five year extended warranty, it’s the manufacturer.
Most of my drives were either DOA or outlasted even five years. Cannot remember the last time I did a manufacturer RMA.
At work, when an SSD fails, we replace it and have the broken one properly destroyed. Not worth the effort to return e.g. Samsung 1 or 2 TB drives. Plus we really tend to use all that TBW for good, anyway.
I either shuck or purchase manufacture recertified. The money saved is used to purchase cold spares that I would not have had if I spent more on new drives.
Most recently, which is almost 3 years ago now, I rolled the dice on a whole bunch of 10TiB HGST drives from a guy off eBay that had reportedly bought a bunch of Cisco UCS Storage Servers he got on audtion from AT&T. He was selling thousands for $100 a pop and all have treated me well.
Now that Truenas forums doompilled me into getting a quality HBA, I buy used SAS drives off ebay for super cheap. The price difference between used enterprise SAS and SATA drives is quite pronounced.
Never had a problem once with any of them, but I only have (12) in operation so my sample set is small.
Before ebay stopped this, I would use my Amex Platinum to buy them. Ridiculously good warranty that adds 1 year to the ebay warranty from the supplier. Invoked this once from AMEX on a laptop with a bunch of dead pixels that Amazon refused to return with zero problems.
I don’t buy used.