There is nothing renewed on these drives, just old used decommissioned server drives. The naming is very misleading, shame on you Amazon. Thank you for the video.
My pleasure, and yes. Even if they are ‘cleaned’, I don’t see how that justifies a refurb status really. And as these are helium sealed units, hard to see what ‘refurbishment’ or ‘renewal’ could really mean.
@@sometechguy. Nothing. If you are lucky they wiped out the data and the hard drive did not die in the process. Some of the sellers are from China and, judging by the reviews, their drives are usually the ones that are already failing out of the box.
@@sometechguy sometimes the PCB on the back of the hard drives need to be replaced, thats my only guess how a drive can be refurbished, even if they aren't filled with helium its completely uneconomical to open a drive and replace anything internally
Some of these drives are actually going back to their OEM and getting a recertification, the 14TB units I got are all recertified by WD with 5yrs warranty, I imagine that process could entail as little as erase, test, new sticker but as the OEM did it, they could do anything from PCB replacement to Helium refilling and platter swapping. Why they would do any of that? I can't say, although, I imagine, if these came back to, say, WD as bad drives, replacing the bad parts and reselling them would help minimize the cost of warranty replacements.
Yeah it's deceptive - but if they are sold cheaply enough to buy enough extras to deal with the long term failure rate, it's not a bad deal. I'm not sure they are really *cheap enough* to cover for that eventuality, though.
Been using many of the Manufacturer Recertified Seagate Exos 20TB drives from Server Part Deals for over a year. No issues. I keep buying drives and they keep arriving pristine and working great.
They are also "used"... One thing you have to be very careful with server parts deals. They have their smart info wiped. So you don't know if they had any issues, or how long they have been running.
@@nekrosoft13 just had my first one die last week, bad sectors after 300 days of use, entire disk went dead before I could migrate data off of it, thankfully SnapRAID backups worked for the most part. Manufacturer Recertified Seagate Exos 18TB disk.
4:00 - I don't know if someone already mentionned this but, FYI, according to that SMART data, disks 3 and 4 were used way beyond their rated annual workload (spec says 550TB/y, disk 3 averages at 760 and disk 4 at 1,100). The ones I bought also averaged at around double their rated annual workload.
Its a good observation, and I wonder how much this really matters and how good an indicator this may be of drive life. Not all read and write loads are equal, and there isn't a way to know if the operations that led to the IO are random or sequential. It could be a stat that is worth analysing in the backblaze data to see if it correlates with failures.
I bought 9 of these exact drives back in July and have been hammering them since (8 disk raid6 + hot spare). All drives extensively tested and similar results. No bad sectors and good smart numbers. 4.5 years on time. Bear in mind these are enterprise class drives (for sata), just old but still top of the line, above consumer grade NAS drives. Cost in the UK for a new 12tb drive is a lot more and the cheaper ones are much lower consumer models. I was lucky to get them from a reputable US refurbisher who offered a full further 5 years no quibble warranty included. Very pleased overall, hopefully I haven't cursed myself :)
@@sometechguy I recently bought 15x 14TB WD HC530 drives from the big E with a 5y seller warranty for just under 250NZD per drive. (~150US) All of them passed a full Read/Write/Read test in an average of 19.5 hours per Read or Write section with 0 DOA or DNF. All the drives tested performed within margin of error of each other and within WD's specifications when paired with an LSI 9300 controller. 0 SMART errors of concern with a similar POH to whats listed above. On their OEM/factory label they are marked as 'Recertified 2022' (varying months) after peeling the sellers sticker so these ones are in fact WD refurb'd drives. I've since bought a SAS Toshiba MG07 series refurb which, other than performing a little worse (avg 20hrs vs 19.5) is in similar condition, this one did not state 'Recertified' but had a DOM of 2019 My oldest 'non new' drives are some SAS 10TB 'Off Spec' drives that turned out to be Seagate EXOS X14 units. All of these have been going hard for a long time now and I wouldn't think twice about buying Refurb or OS drives as long as they have a decent seller warranty. Pro Tip, If you're looking on the big E for them and weren't aware, when you find those white label drives that have OS marked on them, it stands for 'Off Spec.' This means some large org has rejected a shipment for any contract reason and these drives have had their label ripped off, replaced and sold. Reasons they could have been rejected include: Damaged casing, failure rate of *batch* too high, too many DOA in the *batch* , too many drives in the *Batch* don't meet customer's spec etc. Why do I point out *Batch* so often, because these customers order in large quantities such as 260 unit batches and when they are delivered they will spot check them. This is where one or two cartons will be taken at random from the shipment and if those cartons don't meet the customers requirements for whatever reason, they'll reject all 260 units. e.g. if the DOA rate must be less than 1% and they have 3 bad drives across the 2 cartons they pull, they'll reject the whole lot of them, even if all 257 remaining drives are working. Seagate/WD/Toshiba then have to get rid of them. Most of these drives can't just be moved to retail channels so they get their stickers removed, firmware data rewritten and sold as 'Off Spec' or 'OS' drives at very low cost to recycle or refurbish companies. My drives were clearly damaged casing units as they were a little scuffed but work just fine!
@@DirectAim MrPurle is correct, I've mentioned that site a few times on TH-cam and my comments were shadow removed. That is, visible to me until I browse to the video from another PC and magically they no longer exist. Its happened on videos where I know the uploader and they confirmed they didn't remove anything and the only thing in common was mentioning 'that auction site.' Coincidence? Possibly, but ever since started calling it Big E I haven't had any similar issues.
I loaded four HGST refurbs into a RAID-5 box, and stashed a fifth one in my file cabinet. It's still there, four years later. Not the fastest storage, but it's for backups that run overnight (plus a partition for old/rarely-needed files), so speed is irrelevant. The chart @10:15 indicates that the failure rate for brand new drives is _higher_ than the rate for well-used drives. This makes the choice of "refurbished" drives a no-brainer, even though "refurbished" most likely means that they dusted it off before boxing it up. Enterprise drives are built specifically to run continuously for a stupidly long time, so you're essentially buying more-thoroughly-tested drives for less. (Imagine what you'd pay for a brand-new drive factory-tested with a 10-month spin!)
_"This makes the choice of "refurbished" drives a no-brainer"_ Not necessarily. New hard drives generally have at least a 3-year warranty, so the cost of a new-born failure is negligible. Refurbs, on the other hand, are generally only covered by a much, much shorter statutory warranty. So even though there's less chance of a disk dying, it's much more likely to result in a net loss. Add to that the resell value, which is obviously much higher for a drive with 3 years POH vs 7 years POH. IMHO, the price difference and local legislation dictate what makes the most sense financially.
@@bishnooktawak New drives do make sense for a server farm or other organization, where the financials matter most. I'm more interested in not having a failure, which is a time-consuming PITA, than in the financials. (The value of my time is doing the dictating: I don't have an "IT guy" who'll handle the warranty claim and the packing and shipping and unpacking and installing.)
I have bought $1,400 worth of these drives (four 20TB and two 16TB drives, all Seagate EXOS drives). I have bought them over a span of about a year, and are all being used daily, with flawless results so far.
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I think overall, for those looking for archival purposes these drives are a great choice. Buddy of mine purchased a few 12tb Seagate renewed drives over a year ago for his nas and have been working fine. So I took a chance and picked up 2x 16TB Seagate Iron Wolfs (renewed) and so far they've been great. I'm only 3 months in so far but they'll only be on for archiving and backup. So yeah, I think people should give them a shot. Especially for the price. Got mine for 159.00 but it looks like the price went up a bit. Regardless... I'm happy to have them. Thanks again for this video. Informative.
Yes, good call on this. And yes, if they show no signs of issues within a few weeks (SMART or bad sectors) then it would look like there is nothing specifically wrong with them. So then it’s just down to the statistical chance of failures. And of course treating them like any disk, which could fail. RAID, backups etc.
I used to work for a hosting company. Drives were DOA or would die within 90 days. Beyond that the failure rates were pretty rare. WD RE4s. Also very early SSDs. I can see companies cycling them out regularly and selling them to a third party because customers will do drive testing then complain about drive on hours on a $10 dedicated server.
Its the so called 'bathtub curve'. DoAs immediately or within a few months, then years and years of perfect behaviour then an uptick towards the end of the drive's service life by which time you've replaced them anyway.
I bought a refurbished drive, back in 2013. It finally packed up a few days ago, so I got 11 years out of it. It only contained music, and I had a backup. So that's now gone onto another drive. One day, I'll back it all up to Blu-ray discs.
Interesting video! I bought 2x EXOS 12TB refurbs from Amazon. Both came from a specific seller and arrived next day. One had a SMART error, the other made a concerning rhythmic knocking sound. Both drives had never been powered on previously/had 0 hours. I returned those and ordered another two from a different vendor on the same listing; these shipped from Germany and took a few days to get here. They had about 2.5 years usage/~25 power cycles but were noticeably quieter with no problems according to SMART. Amazon refunded me my returns because they were within 30 days, which is why I went with them rather than ebay. That said, they rejected my review for mentioning returning duff drives... I think if you do your due diligence, secondhand/refurb drives are a decent way to populate a home NAS... even if you buy 4 drives with a few years on the clock, they're unlikely to all fail at the same time so you'd still have redundancy and would be very unlikely/unlucky to lose anything - and that ignores that RAID is not a backup...
@ agree.... But when you have 4 of them you can compare them, and some were significantly louder than others. The ones I have are clicky/noisy, the ones I sent back sounded like they were on the verge of failing.
I stopped using "Amazon" when they mandated automatic additional after-sale delivery and charges when I wanted some vitamins. Went on ebay and found them in the same country and cheaper.
Same for me, 10x10Tb and a couple of 16Tb drives. Yes, they have a few hours on them but no nasty surprises, at far as Crystaldisk Info reports. And with the 5 year replacement warranties the cost saving is something that you just can't beat. All mine are in NAS units with heavy redundancy so even if a failure occurs my data is going to be safe.
I think I'm running about seven or eight drives from Server Parts Deals, and I've used several in customer systems. Most have showed up with 0 power on hours, having some run time, but basically new. All performed exactly as they should and passed a surface scan before being put into production. I think I've gotten lucky with getting some drives that were spares that were never put into production, company upgraded and had to ditch the drives... being bought by this company and sold as re-certified. They're where I get all my drives now and they come with a 2 year warranty, which is more than I can say for new OEM drives on Amazon and Newegg.
@@sheldonkupa9120 You would be surprised how many places keep spares on standby and never use them by the time a hardware refresh comes. Any place with a decent IT team will have some ready in case a production drive dies and since spinning rust is all luck, sometimes they happily chug along for 5+ years without issue.
@@amak1131 I am not surprised🤣 this is normal for datacenters, since they use hd raid pools which allow hot swap of dying drives, say zfs pools, and you need same drive specs. Would blindly buy these spare drives if guaranteed. So you are right.
@@sheldonkupa9120 While not impossible, unlikely. Server Parts Deals is an official drive recertification business through Seagate and WD/HGST. They also warranty the drives for 1 to 2 years depending. I just don't see someone that would manipulate SMART data being official and offering a warranty. I think my original explanation is far more likely, at least from this seller.
I'm pretty sure that the drives have their SMART data reset when they get recertified. I have also bought "manufacturer recertified" drives from Server Parts Deals and they also had 0 power on hours according to the SMART data. But I don't believe that they are brand new drives.
One month back I bought two of the Seagate 12TB to upgrade from two 5TB external WD Blacks. They sat right down into a couple spare bays of my external caddy and it was recognized, partitioned and formatted within a couple minutes. Did an old school block/bit/sector tests. Everything ok. So far so good.
There have been lots of comments like this, that the drives seem to be free of errors and work great. A fair few who just say ‘no’ to the whole idea. But not seen many people sharing first hand stories of problems. Thanks for sharing.
My last PC build had 4x 4TB Seagate drives which have worked flawlessly for 12 years, so I took a chance on two Amazon Refurbished 12TB Barracuda Pro disks. When I tested them with CrystalDisk they showed 2 Power On's and 0 Power On Hours. Both appear to be brand new drives, though they were packaged just as the ones in this video. I'm quite surprised that the drives the reviewer got had been used for so many hours (maybe that's Amazon UK vs. Amazon US?) At any rate, the drives were just over half the price of new ones, and I'm quite happy with them!
@@jpdemer5 Yes, the new drives I've bought in the past also showed 0 run hours, which they should since they're new. I reckon many of these "refurbished" drives are actually new ones, maybe old stock that's been sitting on a shelf somewhere but never actually used. That's just my guess, I don't know for sure, and maybe I've just been lucky!
@@deniswauchope3788yeah one commenter said sometimes an entire lot is rejected by an org for a variety of reasons. not the case in the 2 6TBs I've bought from the same seller (one HGST & the other Seagate). they both had an insane # of hours on them & still work great (knock on wood!)
@@deniswauchope3788 There could be some that were kept as on-site spare drives. What might also happen is the drives failed, had boards replaced, then sold. Refurbishing includes replacing any defective parts with new or functional parts. The drives with intact SMART data may indicate they tested fine, so not opened up, and cleared SMART data means the refurbisher opened the drive to check/replace any internal part.
I bought second hand 4 x 12TB HGST Enterprise like yours for pennies a couple of months ago. They are running on my server without any problems. Also 8 years ago I bought 15 x 3TB HGST Deskstar for 27 Pounds each: all have run without problems for at least 4 years, at the moment I still have 8 that work perfectly without errors. (one has a slightly higher temperature than the others but does not give any errors) They have shown me better reliability compared with other brand new disks that I have purchased in the meantime ..... perhaps because they had done a "running in" in their first use that had already eliminated the worst ones..... at 1/5 of the retail price: not bad.
A year ago I bought 5 of the HGST 10TB RENEWED hard drives from Amazon. If I remember correctly these were about $79 US. I did not purchase the warranty but it was offered. I needed 4 for a NAS I was building so I bought and tested a 5th Hard drive as a backup. I also run my NAS at Raid5 or RaidZ1 I think it is called now. This allows for 1 drive to fail and my data to remain. So far I am pleased with the performance.
I've bought several of the "water Panther WP Arsenal" drives. None of them had more than 10 hours of uptime on them. For general home use I think they're a great value. I've had 4 of the 14TB models in service since June of 2023 with zero issues.
I have a couple of these in a NAS and both arrived with about 40,000 hours on them. They run fine, definitely on the loud side but they are not designed to be quiet and of course new drives would be just as loud. No regrets.
I just bought several 12TB HGST from eBay for ~$7/TB. The company specializes in DC HD reclaims, test them, and self-warranty for 5 years! I'll be sure to pull SMART stats and run surface scans this month.
goHardDrive & Server Part Deals on eBay have “refurbed” 12TB for ~$95 USD, with gHH offering a 5y warranty and SPD 90days. Perhaps there was a discount going on
Check the pending sectors after the drives have been used. Also check the load cycle count in case the power management wasn't defeated. Those can be crazy high. I have had good experience with Seagate VX (SV, Surveillance, Skyhawk).
I've picked up a mixture of used Exos & HGST drives. Exos have been flawless, Had one DOA HGST, and another that started failing within the 90 day return window. Both returns were relatively painless. I run all of my drives in a Ceph cluster, so it's worth rolling the dice for the cost savings, and seeing fewer usable drives turn into e-waste.
Firstly thank you for this excellent in-depth video! I recently purchased an 8TB drive with the insurance for 4 years, it’s currently going through testing but is much older than the examples you received. My drive was manufactured 10 years ago with 6.6 years (approx) usage, that said so far so good with 10% of the long smart test remaining 🤞.
I have also seen 8 and 10Tb drives available, and I would guess they are likely to have more miles on them. But would be interesting to take a look at those. Even if drives have significantly more hours, some of these drives have proven to last well beyond those years. If they pass all the testing, they could also be good and cheaper alternative for offline storage. Glad yours are looking healthy! And thank you for the comment and feedback.
I find sellers on the four letters auction site more reliable, as they provide smart info and if the drive isn't good, the buyer protection kicks in. Drives are also cheaper there.
@@goku445 Usually, when I write the name, the comment would disappear within 20 seconds. Scammers on the other hand can write whatever they like. Go figure... 🙄
@@bufordmaddogtannen My comments disappear all the time, and yet many users say all sorts of things with total impunity! I believe I'm being shadow banned.
I have 96 12-18 TB WD discs from Amazon in three Netapp disk shelves. Never had a problem with a single one. Not doing anything too crazy (just a massive Plex server and backup storage for my video side business) but again, not a single issue. I did receive ONE DOA but Amazon replaced it with a new one and I didn't even have to send the DOA one back. I know these aren't refurbed and I'd love to know how they flash them to say they've never been used but the price is right. Wouldn't have a client use them but for the homelab they're awesome.
Thanks for doing all the hard work on this one. Absolutely every metric I have thought of when trawling for drives. PLUS+ The Amazon Guarantee, which I would never have reconsidered. Top Banana. ! I have a tip to share. I usually catch 22TB Gold drives from the WD direct around Christmas going for around £300. Unadvertised.. Perhaps just dumping stock. It's a check every day situation which goes as quick as it came.
Thank you, and this is a great tip also. The. Gold drives are the same as the Ultrastars just branded differently and i have also seen some good deals direct from WD, and they do clearance also sometimes. Also noticed the 26Tb SMR DC drives are available to ship now. They beat Seagate to that capacity, at least that you can actually buy.
Should be noted that the Bubble insurance for the drives requires you to send the failed drive to the insurer, which if used in a NAS environment may be problematic or in some cases illegal (GDPR).
Very good review video. About a year back I brough a dozen 4TB Western Digital Enterprise drives for very low cost. The power on cycle was about 20 each with about 39K hours on so most likely use on a NAS or enterprise system. Checked and no bad sectors. Good way to get large amount of disks or disk space. I did sold half of them about a month ago so I got all my money back and still got the 6 free drives to play with.
My experience, the good and the not so bad. I bought three 10TB HGST drives. Tested them on receipt. One of them had errors. The company sent me a label and I exchanged it. I installed them using a 2+1 configuration for some redundancy. I maintain backups of the important portion of the data and most of the relatively unimportant portion. After about 6 months one of the drives failed. My warranty was honored without question and I continued operation with no need to recover anything from backup. So, I rxed a bad drive (disappointing) and had a drive with a short life (also disappointing) but the company took care of me and because I took proper precautions I didn't have an issue other than a bit of stress.
This is good to hear. Shipping a bad drive isn't great, though i guess its possible it experienced something bad in transit. But any drive can fail, so for the second drive the most important thing is the honoring of the warranty and that this isn't made painful. Thanks for sharing.
@@sometechguy I figured a little inconvenience was simply the price to pay for getting an expensive hard drive. I doubt they shipped a bad drive. I figure something happened. As you touched on in your video, you can occasionally get a bad new drive.
I recently picked up a 8TB WD Ultrastar from a reputable seller on ebay for about £80. It was 3 years old, and had 13months power up time, and 11 power cycles. I use it in an external caddy to back up my laptoop. It has no errors and has been excellent.I was wary of buying a used drive due to a bad experience years ago, but now I'm very happy (fingers crossed).
The Ultrastars seem to be really solid disks. I think if you can be confident it’s not already in trouble when you receive it, then they could be good purchases. Older HGST drives have great longevity, and the newer disks are starting well, looking forward to finding out if they can last as well or better than some of those older models that seemed so solid.
I use these same drives from the same seller. Great value and only one failure in several years. They replaced the drive no questions after showing them the smart data and even paid to have me send the old drive back, with sending the new drive before they got the old. I run 6 in my NAS and 4 in my external RAID enclosure.
I bought one of these in the summer and I had similar numbers to what you've shared here. Very high quality drives and also the Backblaze stats you shared I seem to remember have these as a top performer. They've probably just swapped them out as they're reaching the end of the 5 year warranty and modern drives have 24TB+ capacities, so they can host double the amount of data in the same footprint, and often for the same power consumption. In any case Amazon offered a warranty, the seller a bit more than that - I think, although the company may have gone by then, and there was also a protectmybubble insurance option on there for 4 years warranty for like £5, so between them you should be able to get something back if it goes Pete Tong in that time. At £7/TB, I thought you can't really go too wrong with these. Thanks for sharing your info and expertise. P.S. I wrote the comment before finishing to watch the video, then you covered everything haha. Thank you again.
Thank you, and it’s interesting to hear how others experiences compare. I will be running these 24x7 also, so let’s see how they look in a few years and what happens. I think though, if they do fine in the next few months, then it’s out of the sellers hands… and as you say, warranty options also….
I used the website diskprices to find the best price for these drives. I'm currently running 4 of these including (MDD16TSAS25672E), (MD14000GSA12872), (MD14TBGSA25672X). So far no issues, I primarily uses these for automated content downloads then I process the data and archive useful content then wipe and reuse the drive. I put them in a ORICO 4 Bay Daisy Chain Hard Drive Enclosure Aluminum USB3.1 Gen2 10Gbps Type-C Hard Drive Docking Station when on sale.
I bought a MDD 6TB Nas that actually arrived today, 7200 rpm version. Bought off of Amazon and the seller is MD Tech. Going to give it a spin tomorrow.
I've had the 6TB MDD drive over a year. seller communication is great & bought a HGST 6TB to mirror it. won't hesitate to buy a pair of 14TB from MD Tech when the time comes!
@sometechguy Thanks for this video! Can you tell if there is constant background media scanning (BMS) occuring on your drives? I purchased a 12TB HGST refurb drive from Amazon, same as in your video. The first one I received was DOA, and I had it replaced. The second one works perfectly, is shows no issues in smartctl, and had around 4 years of power on time. However, the heads are moving every few seconds. This happens all the time, as long as the disk has power. Since this sort of constant head movement can be a bad sign, I did some research and found, non-conclusively, that these disks may be performing BMS, hence my question.
Yes, the drives make a small ‘tick’ sound around every 5 seconds, which is a small head movement. This is preventative wear leveling (PWL) I believe, it may be the same thing you mention. But this is to allow the drive to even out lubricant on the drive surface. I would say it’s quiet, but that is probably subjective and may depend where the drive lives. Should not be a concern, unless the noise is an issue for you. This happens when the drive is idle.
@@sometechguy Thank you for the reply! That explains it. I was just searching on the wrong thing. I like my computers ultra quiet, so the ticking is a bit annoying. But it's great to know that there's nothing wrong with the drive.
I bought 10 of the 14TB drives. Here are a few notes: (1) they came with an instruction that they required their own power adapter unless you had a "new" PSU. I figured my PCI-E 5.0 Lian Li would do it... nope, needed their adapter. (2) Used under Proxmox. 4 drives had roughly 3 years use on them, 3 drives had 5 years on them, and 2 disks had less two years on them in hours (3) Fully passed SMART and ran into no issues (4) I set them up in a ProxMox ZFSx2 so I could endure two drive fails. Since this is my most common setup, wanting to get the space at this cost made this a good buy (for me) but YMMV (5) Because of the power adapter, cable management was not as pretty as I'd want, though I'm using the Rosewill RSV-L4500U. So it could be handled, but would clutter a desktop case Overall, no issues for my homelab
I bought one at these recently Amazon UK sale and it arrives next week. I suspect, given the 3 week lead time, it is coming from the USA. I bought it to facilitate hard-drive capacity upgrades and as a backup drive so don't expect to put a lot of hours on it.
Purchased a NAS recently, i put 4x new Tosh 14tb drives in it, this obviously cost a lot of money. I would like to create a second NAS for off site storage and was considering renewed drives. This video was useful in understanding what tests to run and how to check if it's a good drive. Thanks.
I just bought a 12tb dc520 this past week. It took a day, but a full surface test showed 0 bad sectors. It’s got around 38,000 hours on it, with 18 power-ons, so a little bit less usage than yours. I got it from an auction site stores that specializes in server parts deals. I couldn’t pass up a sale at $72.99.
So where do you get the reliability data from? On a little side note, the unit on the y-axis should be %/a or generally % per time, not just %. Only the integration of the curve over some amount of time yields the % of units that failed during this amount of time.
That was all covered in the video, where I talk about the data source and show what it is and where it comes from. EDIT: To make this simpler, the data is from BackBlaze who publish a great deal of reliability data on hundreds of thousands of drives, including those of the same model line as the drives in the video. Link to the source in the video description.
Have you ever done the serial number lookup on these drives? My last set of 4 I ordered (from an established company on ebay) all showed as originally having been sold to Apple icloud. Makes me feel like they were probably in a well handled environment, but thats always luck of the draw and the original purchasing company doesnt always show up on the WD warranty lookup. Commodity "refurbished" drives like these are a valid means of getting what is usually (as your stats from the db show) a long life drive fairly cheap. Thanks for the vid!
The other SMART stat I like to look at is spin up(down) or head load(unload) cycles. Often the head incurs wear each time it is unloaded (when the disk spins down or something else causes a head park event).
Yeah I buy the hgst ultrastar (well now seagate) for my video backup and I've had a few DOA and some clicky and was able to get the data off then returned for a replacement. But I don't have em running all the time, I have a voyager Q I run them while backing up and then they go into the cabinet until I need em again. so I've had many for many years and are just fine.
Was the faster disk formatted in 4Kn and the other three in 512e? Because that would explain the performance difference, and also it might be worth pointing out that this is something worth checking on refurbished disks (the previous owner might have changed it).
It's a really nice idea, but all the disks are 512e disks. I checked them and all are running with 4096 Physical Sector Size and 512 Logical Sector size. So doesn't seem to be this.
Just arrived home to see the delivery of a renewed 16TB WD UltraStar HD. I bought this to backup and clean up my NAS. So it won't be powered on often. Mine was also packaged really well in a sealed static bag and lots of bubble wrap. I quickly turned it on to check the stats. The drive is a little over 3yrs old and powered on for only 2.5yrs (22000hrs). It's just s baby. I haven't done a deep disc check yet but I think this will suit my needs perfectly. I'd definitely consider buying more. BTW I didn't search for this video. It just popped up on my feed... I think Google is keeping an eye on my Amazon account... 🤔
I bought 2 8TB "Renewed" drives off Amazon almost 2 years ago. They are still going strong. If you buy drives like this RAID them. The more redundancy the better. I'm tempted to buy 8 of the 12TB models as an upgrade and set them up so up to 4 can die. Then just keep a few spares on hand. These are the helium filled drives too, so they are more robust.
@@sometechguy Oh, very cool! That makes a lot of sense. Is that tooling public anywhere, or do you have any alternate suggestions? Also, your analysis is great in these videos! I bought the same model of drive a few days before this video based on one of your previous blackblaze analysis videos! Thanks a lot for making this content :)
Thank you, and it’s great to hear you could make use of it. I have not published the tooling yet, but I may do in the future when I am ready to maintain it.
On the question of alternate tooling, I think CrystalDiskMark might do performance testing across the disk, but it could be on the paid version. I wanted to do specific testing which I am not sure it does, large file sequential, mixed size file sequential and non-sequential rewrite testing with configurable test sizes and capturing temperature data etc during the test.
I bought 16 of these and aside from 4 of them arriving DOA they have performed well so far. The returns process was a real pain as they were coming from the USA I couldn't have a replacement I would have to get refunded and order more. Not only that but when the new ones arrive also put them to the same scrutiny as the drives they were replacing. I can't stress enough how important it is to test them on arrival, I could easily have cost myself £300+ by presuming everything would be OK. At the end of it I had a couple of very happy 8bay Synologies which should keep me going for a while.
I buy direct from Water Panther, a bit more expensive (they also sell on Amazon and Ebay) but handling warranty issues with them has been hassle free and that's what I care about most with refurb drives.
I bought 8 and was concerned because my listing said 3 years but they had 50k hours. I called the vendor and he was more than confident that they would last more than 3 years and promised a full exchange under 3 years. Not sure if this is the same vendor, but FYI, his customer service response time was fast, despite the hours being higher. The drives have been great, no issues.
Bought three of these 10TB white label drives. They were all Western Digitals and are identified as such in the WD Dashboard software. At risk of inviting bad luck, I have not had any issues with them in a NAS with Raid 1. The RAID backs up to the third drive. All are on all the time.
I have bought many 'RENEWED" hdd. For many years now. What i learned ... GOHARDDRIVE !!!! ... However , dont think they sell on amazon or Newegg anymore , (they use too). They, do sell on Ebay and their website. I always buy drives that state 3 or 5 year warranty. I bought maybe 30 + drives from them .. think I have had 3 that I called DOA (had something wrong ) .. however I have 4 die in use .. they have always honored their warranty @ no cost to me. Also, their Warranty is S/N based .. so if you resale them and their is still warranty left it will work for next owner !
I have 2 10TB used drives from amazon and they both had around 5 years power on time and clean SMART info. Good for holding videos or backups and like any other drive new or used always keep at least 1 more copy incase of drive failure. I also keep 1 drive offline incase of a system crash, malware or ransomware.
I got a few 8tb drives from Amazon 'renewed' and all my smart stats showed 0 run time, so I assumed they modified it somehow. Wonder if there's any way to prove that or find the real data. Still have a few in the box as spares for my raid array.
Buy the drives, set up a test rig and run Spinrite on them. Back in “the day” we would have to run test on drives for Banyan Vines and Novell that would go on for 29-30 hours plus. Always caught the bad ones.
It depends on what you're using them for really..I have 8 4tb drives I bought from ebay used for like 30 bucks a piece..made a nas and use plex for it...when using for movies storage you don't really put hard usage on them..building a second one for backup.
I great video. I believe this has given me the “courage” to try two 12tb in a small 2-bay NAS for backups and video serving. And then Backblaze the backups as the offsite…. Just in case. If you don’t mind my asking, what software are you using for your charts and graphs?
Thank you, I appreciate it! For the graphs, I tried a few tools such as Tableau and Domo in previous videos. This one I used Canva, it’s a bit simpler in what it can do but I liked the results it produced.
@@sometechguy Thanks,. I liked the style, and it’s something I’ve not been able to duplicate with Excel. We’re a Microsoft 365 academic enterprise shop, so I’ve mostly used Excel and Power BI. Both have left me somewhat “wanting” with respect to getting the styles exactly as I wanted. I’ve not used Tableau nor Canva , but I’ll check them out for this next project I’’m on. Again, I really appreciate the videos on hard drives, I’ve not found anything that’s informed me so well on going the renewed route and some of the basics of what to avoid (cmr vs smr, etc.).
I bought 5 x 16TB Seagate X18 Exos drives, these were 'Recertified' drives, 1 was DOA, 1 died after a month, they were refunded without issue through Amazon, and the Amazon agent confirmed they have 2 years warranty.
When I got some refurb drives, I also looked at how much data it had dealt with. Most had around 300TB, but one has 1.7PB, so it's an easy to see how much your drive has been ragged 😁😁
I got some Maxtor recertified disks and it was weird they were big and cheap and the labels on them were new but two of them clicked and made a weird "zzzt" type noise when read/writing. What was really odd was that the SMART data said it was 0 hours / 0 power cycles, BUT there were tons of read errors. I did manage to return them to Amazon. I didn't bother next time and just bought new from WD.
I do not get the option for additional warranty on Canada's Amazon. I won't take the chance on 'renewed' drives with 4 years of 24/7 mileage on them without that.
It looks like this varies by region from the comments, I also ordered some direct from Amazon.com and was offered data recovery but not the warranty. Looks like other European sites offer the warranty also. So not sure why this is. That said, the drives I had shipped straight from .com had a warranty from the seller included, but I don’t think it was clear, so could be worth checking the terms also on the Canada site.
I got two of the $85 Seagate Exos 12TB drive one of them for "free" due to a shipping mishap (Amazon refunded me the cost, and said if I actually get it then I don't need to ship it back). Anyway I got them to replace two of my now old & worn out 8TB Seagate Barracuda consumer grade drives that have over 36,000 hours on them (well past the life span in the data sheets). These I got have the same hours as the ones you got with under 30 power cycles on both, but I am quite happy with them. Heck for $92 after tax for 24TB of storage I got nothing to complain about on my end, and will most likely last until I can afford some new models. I'll just move these to a backup storage device after installing new ones in a couple of years.
I recently bought a renewed 10tb HGST HD from Amazon. It came with the cable I saw in the box you opened and a note that said the drive had a power off feature that was not compatible with all motherboards and if there was a problem to try to use the included cable to fix the problem. Can you provide any information on what motherboards or hardware that is likely to have problems with this type of drive?
There is a PIN on some SATA drives that allows the host to signal power down to the drive and if the SATA interface on the host doesn’t support it, it can stop the driver powering on. The cable is an adapter to prevent that. The NAS I plugged it into didn’t have this problem, and neither did the USB dock I used. But if you plug the drive in and it doesn’t work, this could be the cause.
Maybe, but the issue here is that there is no data to empirically measure what vibration and power stability the drives experienced. Temperature data is recorded in the Backblaze data, and that may be interesting data to look at.
Great, now i want to dig out my old ivy bridge computer, get some high capacity hdds, and build a raid 10 nas. I must have been sleeping under a rock for a while, because the amount of storage you can get for a couple hundred bucks is insane. I rember buying a 640gb in 2008 and i was like holy crap thats alot of storage, now you can get 2tb ssd for 100 bucks
I use HDSentinel and it logs transfer rate for the whole drive - it's as picked up some drives with serious slow spots 10MB/s vs 180 for other areas on the same drive. a straight test wouldn't pick this up unless you are watching the screen
Manufacturer Recertified is the way to go. Carries new warranty usually from seller and 2-3 years vs 5 years. The WD/HGST I've purchased from Server Parts Deal were just like new but marked recertified.
So I bought 5 Water Panther (Arsenal) 18tb Drives for my Synology 5 bay NAS, I had one go bad on me and I contacted Water Panter and they tested it and sent back a new Drive. all of sudden Amazon won't let you buy an extended Warranty, Just DATA protection which I don't want so I started buying from NewEgg where If the drive does go bad I can get a new one not the Data, that's why I have a NAS the Drives have been running over 15783 hours I just can't beat the price and I run a 2 drive failure just in case.
I wrote my own automated testing tooling for this. I do a lot of performance testing on disks, and I couldn't find something that did quite what I wanted.
I almost ordered a few to try. Didn't get the same replacement option you got. I just get data recovery. Shame. I was really thinking about picking up 4 or 5 to experiment with. Still.. $500 all in isn't a bad price if the drives would last me a few years....... oooof decisions decisions
Hard to give advice based on just that, as price is going to be a big part of it as well as how you are going to use them, and if you are worried about noise, and also depends on capacity you need. But if you are assume they are all exactly the same price, I would personally go for a WD Gold as these are the same units as the Ultrastars, which have very good reliability stats. Exos are likely to be cheaper, and they are still good drives. Ironwolfs will be a bit quieter, but are often more expensive than enterprise drives, and blacks are likely the quietest, but only come in smaller capacities but I think they are over priced. I do have other videos that compare WD vs Seagate, as well as Exos vs Ironwolf and all the WD range. But for the reasons above, its hard to say you should buy a specific drive. As that varies based on your needs, prices vary over time and location also affects price.
the refurbished drive i got had its smart reset. i've heard that's the case with many drives, it's not clear what the manufacturer does besides that when they "refurbish" drives. anyway, considering seagate only replaces dead (new) drives with refurbished ones (if warranty hasn't expired) i think having 2 refurbished drives in raid 1 is still cheaper than buying a single one new. also, in my country amazon offers 2 years warranty (by default) on the refurbished drives they sell.
Resetting of SMART data seems like a red flag to me. But if this is done by the manufacturer and they retain full warranty I feel a little more comfortable. But not sure I would say ‘happy’. I don’t think I would accept that from a third party seller. I also don’t think Seagate publish any criteria for when they would reset data, but I would hope it’s only for drives that are almost new and not those with any real mileage on them.
To avoid confusion, manufacturer refurbished drives are marked as "recertified" and come with a white label that says so. These are drives that were RMAed in, fixed, wiped and sent back. Some resellers only sell those kind of drives. I have read that sometimes recertified drives are good unused drives relabelled to clear inventory, but I don't know if that's true.
@@sometechguy tbh i'm pretty sure they do have a high mileage; anyway, amazon has never denied me a refund as long as the warranty wasn't expired. imo that's a lot more than what seagate offers (they also expect you to pay for shipping). they definitely should be more clear about the drive's conditions and past use on the product page
@@bufordmaddogtannen i suppose they might need room in the warehouse at some point but i don't think that's the case with the 12tb you see online. anyway, nowhere on the product page amazon says that the drive is recertified (mine is tho) so it still seems like a gamble. what i'm wondering tho is, how do they repair them? i always thought it wasn't worth it to take a drive apart (also cause the mechanical parts are just supposed to break at some point)
@@gandalfilgrigio97 indeed. What you get is a lottery. There are companies you can buy directly from that are more reliable though. Server part deals being one. But it's in the US, so shipping and customs would wipe any saving. With helium based drives I guess they need to transplant the drive in a new case, or maybe they take apart and test components singularly then put them back on the assembly line for new drives to come out? No idea. 😁 It probably costs a manufacturer less to assemble a drive with parts from RMAed drives than building one from scratch.
I have an 8t iron wolf or whatever it's called i use for storing emulators and games and another I use for movie's and music and such. Both have been great. No bad sector's, relatively low time on both. There's lots of companies that are still switching over to ssd and if you get lucky you'll get one of their newer drives or even one of their never used backups.
I might buy one of these as my game drive for large open world games like Rdr2 and GTA (when it comes out on pc). $80 US for 12 terabytes is a steal even if they’re slow HDD’s.
i personally found seller from ebay who gives a 3 year warranty for any dead drives most of his warranty's would only recommend them if you live in usa though as shipping is horrible for shipping internationally.
It looks like the import duty depends on the seller. On the purchase in the video, I think there was some import duty but it was completely reasonable. I placed another order and a silly import duty was added. Amazon have in the past done this and then partially refunded it, but without that being stated, I would not assume that would happen. I also found that ordering individual drives did t have this problem.
This is technically possible to reset it, if you have the correct equipment. And for manufacturer refurbished drives, I am sure they do this. However, I don't believe you can modify the data. So if the drive comes with zero stats, you would want to assess if you trust those who had the drives and did this. But if they come with stats on them, like mine in the video I think I feel more comfortable, as you know more clearly what you are getting. Mine could have been reset, but that would have been at least 40k hours ago, and there are 40k hours of stats on errors to assess the drives state. The manufacturer refurbished drive would normally come with a manufacturer warranty, so less of a concern. And I suspect, but don't know, that those drives are ones that are normally returned very early and not ones that have significant mileage on them. For example, they may have been returned without use at all and many genuinely have zero or close to it hours clocked up.
Very interesting video for hobbyist home lab dude that's planning to make some smaller raid box. However there's one thing that stands out really heavily for me. IF they're "renewed" they should last possibly for very long. However I'm under heavy suspicion that there's nothing renewed on these drives, but they're infact just plainly decomissioned drives as preventive maintenance from some facility, which makes them inline for the vid. Has someone stumbled into some investigation what these drives for sure are? Meaning renewed or decommisioned? After all, there's huge difference. Even worse, note I haven't checked if this is in fact possible, but highly likely it is. I hope someone doesn't buy decommisioned drives and write falsified usage data to their memory. I wouldn't be surprised about this as many have apparently receided dead drives. Sure transit can damage drives, but getting bunch of doa drives on some shipment that's in good condition and well packaged is always bit suspicious.
Very interesting! But would i put important data to them?! Personally, i couldnt convince myself. I stille use however, a stone age old harddisk i took out of my WD Mybook live which spent like 15 years sleeping while not in use. Its still good, but i put only multimedia files on it which are well backupped.
I wrote my own automated testing tools for this, but I used python with shutil as well as smartmontools, which I mentioned in the video for command line SMART queries. I think some of this may be available in tools like HD Sentinel, but I wanted more configurability in how the tests are run, and to run a variety of tests with different file sizes and non-sequential write benchmarking, and i wanted to pull SMART stats after each test.
You cannot trust power in hours. I've received disks which had low thousands hours but were actually been running for years. They usually forget to wipe the smart test data and if they are data center disks (which they will be) they will have ran some tests which report the poh value when ran so can see some discrepancies there. Also: some drives have 16 bit counters which go back to 0 after ~7.5 years.
The warranty, at least the 1 year Amazon Renewed is real and the terms on the extended ones seem to be the same. I bought 8 X18, 16TB Exos drives last year in November and they have been working at the office NAS. We use it everyday for video editing and move a lot of data. One of them was showing bad sectors last month so I sent it back and got the money back. They tried to make me go through Seagate, but after telling them Seagate was not covering the disk they took it back no problem. All other drives have been ok and show no signs of breaking, but do make sure to get the extended warranty.
This is great experience to share, thank you. Which seller provided those if you are ok to share? GoHardDrive and Server Part Deals seem to be two of those that are selling on Amazon.
@@cuestaluis thank you, this is good to know. I am based in the UK, and the Amazon.co.uk order of mine came from the US. I have ordered a couple of batches, the one in the video looks to have actually come from Server Parts Deals, and some others I ordered came from GoHardDrive, but with similar results.
Once drives get past the initial failure phase, they can last a long time. For example, the HGST MegaScale DC4000 4Tb drives in the BackBlaze data remain below 0.5% AFR after 9 years. And historically, HGST in particular have a good track record for reliability. The problem with judging some drives isn't that there is a bad record, but that there isn't sufficient data as the drives have not been available for 10+ years. They could of course fail, but this is also true of any drive. But like with any drive, you plan for failures and because of the price of the drives, you can buy additional redundancy and spares. And of course, if you use new, used or re-certified drives, you should always backup important data. It does also depends on what you will use these for. For mission critical, you may opt for new drives. But for home media, non-production, or storage with adequate redundancy, or near-line / offline backups they can be a great deal.
Let's pretend the extended warranty is completely golden, then the cost should give you some idea how long they will really last. If you bought 100 + 4 year warranty and assuming a 2% annual failure rate they will replace 8. So 8 x $92, or $736, which paid for itself and more. I can't wait for a yearly failure update. Does it mention anything about being prorated or can only be used once. PS: I subscribed so I can get a yearly update ;)
These are good for RAID 1, 5, or 10. Even if they fail your data will still be good. Would not recommend them for single or RAID 0. Your also more likely to have a bad drive due to shock experienced during shipping than anything else.
There is nothing renewed on these drives, just old used decommissioned server drives. The naming is very misleading, shame on you Amazon.
Thank you for the video.
My pleasure, and yes. Even if they are ‘cleaned’, I don’t see how that justifies a refurb status really. And as these are helium sealed units, hard to see what ‘refurbishment’ or ‘renewal’ could really mean.
@@sometechguy. Nothing. If you are lucky they wiped out the data and the hard drive did not die in the process.
Some of the sellers are from China and, judging by the reviews, their drives are usually the ones that are already failing out of the box.
@@sometechguy sometimes the PCB on the back of the hard drives need to be replaced, thats my only guess how a drive can be refurbished, even if they aren't filled with helium its completely uneconomical to open a drive and replace anything internally
Some of these drives are actually going back to their OEM and getting a recertification, the 14TB units I got are all recertified by WD with 5yrs warranty, I imagine that process could entail as little as erase, test, new sticker but as the OEM did it, they could do anything from PCB replacement to Helium refilling and platter swapping. Why they would do any of that? I can't say, although, I imagine, if these came back to, say, WD as bad drives, replacing the bad parts and reselling them would help minimize the cost of warranty replacements.
Yeah it's deceptive - but if they are sold cheaply enough to buy enough extras to deal with the long term failure rate, it's not a bad deal. I'm not sure they are really *cheap enough* to cover for that eventuality, though.
Been using many of the Manufacturer Recertified Seagate Exos 20TB drives from Server Part Deals for over a year. No issues. I keep buying drives and they keep arriving pristine and working great.
I have bought from ServerPartDeals from Amazon and ebay. Excellent drives every time.
They are also "used"... One thing you have to be very careful with server parts deals. They have their smart info wiped. So you don't know if they had any issues, or how long they have been running.
@@nekrosoft13 just had my first one die last week, bad sectors after 300 days of use, entire disk went dead before I could migrate data off of it, thankfully SnapRAID backups worked for the most part. Manufacturer Recertified Seagate Exos 18TB disk.
Until they don't.
@@LilMissMurder3409
That true with every media. Never trust any data storage media. Always keep backups.
4:00 - I don't know if someone already mentionned this but, FYI, according to that SMART data, disks 3 and 4 were used way beyond their rated annual workload (spec says 550TB/y, disk 3 averages at 760 and disk 4 at 1,100). The ones I bought also averaged at around double their rated annual workload.
Its a good observation, and I wonder how much this really matters and how good an indicator this may be of drive life. Not all read and write loads are equal, and there isn't a way to know if the operations that led to the IO are random or sequential. It could be a stat that is worth analysing in the backblaze data to see if it correlates with failures.
@@sometechguy Very good point. It seems obvious now, but I hadn't considered it 👍
Pretty sure TB/y is there so they don't have to honor their warranty. None of my drives even keep track of reads/writes.
I bought 9 of these exact drives back in July and have been hammering them since (8 disk raid6 + hot spare). All drives extensively tested and similar results. No bad sectors and good smart numbers. 4.5 years on time. Bear in mind these are enterprise class drives (for sata), just old but still top of the line, above consumer grade NAS drives. Cost in the UK for a new 12tb drive is a lot more and the cheaper ones are much lower consumer models. I was lucky to get them from a reputable US refurbisher who offered a full further 5 years no quibble warranty included. Very pleased overall, hopefully I haven't cursed myself :)
Sounds very similar to my findings, even down to the age of the drives. thank you for sharing and glad you had a good experience with them so far. 💪
@@sometechguy I recently bought 15x 14TB WD HC530 drives from the big E with a 5y seller warranty for just under 250NZD per drive. (~150US)
All of them passed a full Read/Write/Read test in an average of 19.5 hours per Read or Write section with 0 DOA or DNF.
All the drives tested performed within margin of error of each other and within WD's specifications when paired with an LSI 9300 controller.
0 SMART errors of concern with a similar POH to whats listed above.
On their OEM/factory label they are marked as 'Recertified 2022' (varying months) after peeling the sellers sticker so these ones are in fact WD refurb'd drives.
I've since bought a SAS Toshiba MG07 series refurb which, other than performing a little worse (avg 20hrs vs 19.5) is in similar condition, this one did not state 'Recertified' but had a DOM of 2019
My oldest 'non new' drives are some SAS 10TB 'Off Spec' drives that turned out to be Seagate EXOS X14 units. All of these have been going hard for a long time now and I wouldn't think twice about buying Refurb or OS drives as long as they have a decent seller warranty.
Pro Tip, If you're looking on the big E for them and weren't aware, when you find those white label drives that have OS marked on them, it stands for 'Off Spec.' This means some large org has rejected a shipment for any contract reason and these drives have had their label ripped off, replaced and sold. Reasons they could have been rejected include: Damaged casing, failure rate of *batch* too high, too many DOA in the *batch* , too many drives in the *Batch* don't meet customer's spec etc.
Why do I point out *Batch* so often, because these customers order in large quantities such as 260 unit batches and when they are delivered they will spot check them. This is where one or two cartons will be taken at random from the shipment and if those cartons don't meet the customers requirements for whatever reason, they'll reject all 260 units. e.g. if the DOA rate must be less than 1% and they have 3 bad drives across the 2 cartons they pull, they'll reject the whole lot of them, even if all 257 remaining drives are working.
Seagate/WD/Toshiba then have to get rid of them. Most of these drives can't just be moved to retail channels so they get their stickers removed, firmware data rewritten and sold as 'Off Spec' or 'OS' drives at very low cost to recycle or refurbish companies. My drives were clearly damaged casing units as they were a little scuffed but work just fine!
@@theironangel767what do you mean by “Big E”
@@DirectAim guessing ebay
@@DirectAim MrPurle is correct, I've mentioned that site a few times on TH-cam and my comments were shadow removed. That is, visible to me until I browse to the video from another PC and magically they no longer exist. Its happened on videos where I know the uploader and they confirmed they didn't remove anything and the only thing in common was mentioning 'that auction site.' Coincidence? Possibly, but ever since started calling it Big E I haven't had any similar issues.
I loaded four HGST refurbs into a RAID-5 box, and stashed a fifth one in my file cabinet. It's still there, four years later. Not the fastest storage, but it's for backups that run overnight (plus a partition for old/rarely-needed files), so speed is irrelevant.
The chart @10:15 indicates that the failure rate for brand new drives is _higher_ than the rate for well-used drives. This makes the choice of "refurbished" drives a no-brainer, even though "refurbished" most likely means that they dusted it off before boxing it up.
Enterprise drives are built specifically to run continuously for a stupidly long time, so you're essentially buying more-thoroughly-tested drives for less. (Imagine what you'd pay for a brand-new drive factory-tested with a 10-month spin!)
_"This makes the choice of "refurbished" drives a no-brainer"_
Not necessarily. New hard drives generally have at least a 3-year warranty, so the cost of a new-born failure is negligible. Refurbs, on the other hand, are generally only covered by a much, much shorter statutory warranty. So even though there's less chance of a disk dying, it's much more likely to result in a net loss. Add to that the resell value, which is obviously much higher for a drive with 3 years POH vs 7 years POH. IMHO, the price difference and local legislation dictate what makes the most sense financially.
@@bishnooktawak New drives do make sense for a server farm or other organization, where the financials matter most.
I'm more interested in not having a failure, which is a time-consuming PITA, than in the financials. (The value of my time is doing the dictating: I don't have an "IT guy" who'll handle the warranty claim and the packing and shipping and unpacking and installing.)
@@jpdemer5 I understand. I also buy refurbs, I just wanted to point out that buying new drives can have some benefits as well ;)
I have bought $1,400 worth of these drives (four 20TB and two 16TB drives, all Seagate EXOS drives). I have bought them over a span of about a year, and are all being used daily, with flawless results so far.
Yeah sure thing troll.
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I think overall, for those looking for archival purposes these drives are a great choice. Buddy of mine purchased a few 12tb Seagate renewed drives over a year ago for his nas and have been working fine. So I took a chance and picked up 2x 16TB Seagate Iron Wolfs (renewed) and so far they've been great. I'm only 3 months in so far but they'll only be on for archiving and backup.
So yeah, I think people should give them a shot. Especially for the price. Got mine for 159.00 but it looks like the price went up a bit. Regardless... I'm happy to have them. Thanks again for this video. Informative.
Yes, good call on this. And yes, if they show no signs of issues within a few weeks (SMART or bad sectors) then it would look like there is nothing specifically wrong with them. So then it’s just down to the statistical chance of failures. And of course treating them like any disk, which could fail. RAID, backups etc.
'archival'? Really? Fool.
@@cjay2 troll
I used to work for a hosting company. Drives were DOA or would die within 90 days. Beyond that the failure rates were pretty rare. WD RE4s. Also very early SSDs. I can see companies cycling them out regularly and selling them to a third party because customers will do drive testing then complain about drive on hours on a $10 dedicated server.
Its the so called 'bathtub curve'. DoAs immediately or within a few months, then years and years of perfect behaviour then an uptick towards the end of the drive's service life by which time you've replaced them anyway.
I bought a refurbished drive, back in 2013. It finally packed up a few days ago, so I got 11 years out of it. It only contained music, and I had a backup. So that's now gone onto another drive. One day, I'll back it all up to Blu-ray discs.
Hopefully blu-ray writable discs and drives are still around by that point. Many plants that produce them are being shut down recently.
Interesting video! I bought 2x EXOS 12TB refurbs from Amazon. Both came from a specific seller and arrived next day. One had a SMART error, the other made a concerning rhythmic knocking sound. Both drives had never been powered on previously/had 0 hours. I returned those and ordered another two from a different vendor on the same listing; these shipped from Germany and took a few days to get here. They had about 2.5 years usage/~25 power cycles but were noticeably quieter with no problems according to SMART.
Amazon refunded me my returns because they were within 30 days, which is why I went with them rather than ebay. That said, they rejected my review for mentioning returning duff drives... I think if you do your due diligence, secondhand/refurb drives are a decent way to populate a home NAS... even if you buy 4 drives with a few years on the clock, they're unlikely to all fail at the same time so you'd still have redundancy and would be very unlikely/unlucky to lose anything - and that ignores that RAID is not a backup...
Oh, your drives probably had been used quite some time, they just delete the stats on the drives and set the power on time to zero.
It's pretty normal for exos drives to be loud and clicky. It's what you expect when you get exos drives.
@ agree.... But when you have 4 of them you can compare them, and some were significantly louder than others. The ones I have are clicky/noisy, the ones I sent back sounded like they were on the verge of failing.
Resetting smart values on Seagate is easy. Have done this for fun years ago via the firmware monitor.
I stopped using "Amazon" when they mandated automatic additional after-sale delivery and charges when I wanted some vitamins. Went on ebay and found them in the same country and cheaper.
I bought 3 12TB used drives on Amazon and they have worked great so far.
Same for me, 10x10Tb and a couple of 16Tb drives. Yes, they have a few hours on them but no nasty surprises, at far as Crystaldisk Info reports.
And with the 5 year replacement warranties the cost saving is something that you just can't beat. All mine are in NAS units with heavy redundancy so even if a failure occurs my data is going to be safe.
@@zybch Why you need so much pron?
I think I'm running about seven or eight drives from Server Parts Deals, and I've used several in customer systems. Most have showed up with 0 power on hours, having some run time, but basically new. All performed exactly as they should and passed a surface scan before being put into production. I think I've gotten lucky with getting some drives that were spares that were never put into production, company upgraded and had to ditch the drives... being bought by this company and sold as re-certified.
They're where I get all my drives now and they come with a 2 year warranty, which is more than I can say for new OEM drives on Amazon and Newegg.
Or the data have been manipulated...
@@sheldonkupa9120 You would be surprised how many places keep spares on standby and never use them by the time a hardware refresh comes. Any place with a decent IT team will have some ready in case a production drive dies and since spinning rust is all luck, sometimes they happily chug along for 5+ years without issue.
@@amak1131 I am not surprised🤣 this is normal for datacenters, since they use hd raid pools which allow hot swap of dying drives, say zfs pools, and you need same drive specs. Would blindly buy these spare drives if guaranteed. So you are right.
@@sheldonkupa9120 While not impossible, unlikely. Server Parts Deals is an official drive recertification business through Seagate and WD/HGST. They also warranty the drives for 1 to 2 years depending. I just don't see someone that would manipulate SMART data being official and offering a warranty. I think my original explanation is far more likely, at least from this seller.
I'm pretty sure that the drives have their SMART data reset when they get recertified. I have also bought "manufacturer recertified" drives from Server Parts Deals and they also had 0 power on hours according to the SMART data. But I don't believe that they are brand new drives.
One month back I bought two of the Seagate 12TB to upgrade from two 5TB external WD Blacks. They sat right down into a couple spare bays of my external caddy and it was recognized, partitioned and formatted within a couple minutes. Did an old school block/bit/sector tests. Everything ok. So far so good.
There have been lots of comments like this, that the drives seem to be free of errors and work great. A fair few who just say ‘no’ to the whole idea. But not seen many people sharing first hand stories of problems.
Thanks for sharing.
So what?
@@cjay2 troll
My last PC build had 4x 4TB Seagate drives which have worked flawlessly for 12 years, so I took a chance on two Amazon Refurbished 12TB Barracuda Pro disks. When I tested them with CrystalDisk they showed 2 Power On's and 0 Power On Hours. Both appear to be brand new drives, though they were packaged just as the ones in this video. I'm quite surprised that the drives the reviewer got had been used for so many hours (maybe that's Amazon UK vs. Amazon US?) At any rate, the drives were just over half the price of new ones, and I'm quite happy with them!
Would new boards show zero run hours, or is that info stored internally?
@@jpdemer5 Yes, the new drives I've bought in the past also showed 0 run hours, which they should since they're new. I reckon many of these "refurbished" drives are actually new ones, maybe old stock that's been sitting on a shelf somewhere but never actually used. That's just my guess, I don't know for sure, and maybe I've just been lucky!
@@deniswauchope3788yeah one commenter said sometimes an entire lot is rejected by an org for a variety of reasons.
not the case in the 2 6TBs I've bought from the same seller (one HGST & the other Seagate). they both had an insane # of hours on them & still work great (knock on wood!)
@@deniswauchope3788 There could be some that were kept as on-site spare drives. What might also happen is the drives failed, had boards replaced, then sold. Refurbishing includes replacing any defective parts with new or functional parts.
The drives with intact SMART data may indicate they tested fine, so not opened up, and cleared SMART data means the refurbisher opened the drive to check/replace any internal part.
There is a way to wipe the smart records just like car odometer reversing. Especially on Seagate.
I bought second hand 4 x 12TB HGST Enterprise like yours for pennies a couple of months ago. They are running on my server without any problems.
Also 8 years ago I bought 15 x 3TB HGST Deskstar for 27 Pounds each: all have run without problems for at least 4 years, at the moment I still have 8 that work perfectly without errors. (one has a slightly higher temperature than the others but does not give any errors)
They have shown me better reliability compared with other brand new disks that I have purchased in the meantime ..... perhaps because they had done a "running in" in their first use that had already eliminated the worst ones..... at 1/5 of the retail price: not bad.
A year ago I bought 5 of the HGST 10TB RENEWED hard drives from Amazon. If I remember correctly these were about $79 US. I did not purchase the warranty but it was offered. I needed 4 for a NAS I was building so I bought and tested a 5th Hard drive as a backup. I also run my NAS at Raid5 or RaidZ1 I think it is called now. This allows for 1 drive to fail and my data to remain. So far I am pleased with the performance.
I've bought several of the "water Panther WP Arsenal" drives. None of them had more than 10 hours of uptime on them. For general home use I think they're a great value. I've had 4 of the 14TB models in service since June of 2023 with zero issues.
I have a couple of these in a NAS and both arrived with about 40,000 hours on them. They run fine, definitely on the loud side but they are not designed to be quiet and of course new drives would be just as loud. No regrets.
I just bought several 12TB HGST from eBay for ~$7/TB. The company specializes in DC HD reclaims, test them, and self-warranty for 5 years!
I'll be sure to pull SMART stats and run surface scans this month.
You bought a 12 TB drive for $84 what?????????!! You typo something there?
goHardDrive & Server Part Deals on eBay have “refurbed” 12TB for ~$95 USD, with gHH offering a 5y warranty and SPD 90days. Perhaps there was a discount going on
@@TheStaniG Nope, no typo. Bought them from "goharddrive" seller on eBay plus there was a 20% off refurbs coupon.
@@KE-q7t Yeah, there was a 20% off refurbs coupon.
@@TheStaniGno typo 14TB MDD goes for $100 when the price dips (did few weeks ago, $110 today)
Check the pending sectors after the drives have been used. Also check the load cycle count in case the power management wasn't defeated. Those can be crazy high. I have had good experience with Seagate VX (SV, Surveillance, Skyhawk).
I've picked up a mixture of used Exos & HGST drives. Exos have been flawless, Had one DOA HGST, and another that started failing within the 90 day return window. Both returns were relatively painless. I run all of my drives in a Ceph cluster, so it's worth rolling the dice for the cost savings, and seeing fewer usable drives turn into e-waste.
Firstly thank you for this excellent in-depth video! I recently purchased an 8TB drive with the insurance for 4 years, it’s currently going through testing but is much older than the examples you received. My drive was manufactured 10 years ago with 6.6 years (approx) usage, that said so far so good with 10% of the long smart test remaining 🤞.
I have also seen 8 and 10Tb drives available, and I would guess they are likely to have more miles on them. But would be interesting to take a look at those. Even if drives have significantly more hours, some of these drives have proven to last well beyond those years. If they pass all the testing, they could also be good and cheaper alternative for offline storage.
Glad yours are looking healthy! And thank you for the comment and feedback.
I find sellers on the four letters auction site more reliable, as they provide smart info and if the drive isn't good, the buyer protection kicks in.
Drives are also cheaper there.
youtube is censoring the name?
@@goku445 Usually, when I write the name, the comment would disappear within 20 seconds. Scammers on the other hand can write whatever they like. Go figure... 🙄
@@bufordmaddogtannen My comments disappear all the time, and yet many users say all sorts of things with total impunity! I believe I'm being shadow banned.
I have 96 12-18 TB WD discs from Amazon in three Netapp disk shelves. Never had a problem with a single one. Not doing anything too crazy (just a massive Plex server and backup storage for my video side business) but again, not a single issue.
I did receive ONE DOA but Amazon replaced it with a new one and I didn't even have to send the DOA one back.
I know these aren't refurbed and I'd love to know how they flash them to say they've never been used but the price is right. Wouldn't have a client use them but for the homelab they're awesome.
Thanks for doing all the hard work on this one.
Absolutely every metric I have thought of when trawling for drives.
PLUS+ The Amazon Guarantee, which I would never have reconsidered. Top Banana. !
I have a tip to share. I usually catch 22TB Gold drives from the WD direct around Christmas going for around £300. Unadvertised.. Perhaps just dumping stock. It's a check every day situation which goes as quick as it came.
Thank you, and this is a great tip also. The. Gold drives are the same as the Ultrastars just branded differently and i have also seen some good deals direct from WD, and they do clearance also sometimes.
Also noticed the 26Tb SMR DC drives are available to ship now. They beat Seagate to that capacity, at least that you can actually buy.
Awesome man, subscribed! You gave me all the info I needed to ease my mind. I am looking to consolidate my nas into an array of 12tb drives
Should be noted that the Bubble insurance for the drives requires you to send the failed drive to the insurer, which if used in a NAS environment may be problematic or in some cases illegal (GDPR).
Very good review video. About a year back I brough a dozen 4TB Western Digital Enterprise drives for very low cost. The power on cycle was about 20 each with about 39K hours on so most likely use on a NAS or enterprise system.
Checked and no bad sectors. Good way to get large amount of disks or disk space. I did sold half of them about a month ago so I got all my money back and still got the 6 free drives to play with.
My experience, the good and the not so bad. I bought three 10TB HGST drives. Tested them on receipt. One of them had errors. The company sent me a label and I exchanged it. I installed them using a 2+1 configuration for some redundancy. I maintain backups of the important portion of the data and most of the relatively unimportant portion. After about 6 months one of the drives failed. My warranty was honored without question and I continued operation with no need to recover anything from backup.
So, I rxed a bad drive (disappointing) and had a drive with a short life (also disappointing) but the company took care of me and because I took proper precautions I didn't have an issue other than a bit of stress.
This is good to hear. Shipping a bad drive isn't great, though i guess its possible it experienced something bad in transit. But any drive can fail, so for the second drive the most important thing is the honoring of the warranty and that this isn't made painful.
Thanks for sharing.
@@sometechguy I figured a little inconvenience was simply the price to pay for getting an expensive hard drive. I doubt they shipped a bad drive. I figure something happened. As you touched on in your video, you can occasionally get a bad new drive.
I recently picked up a 8TB WD Ultrastar from a reputable seller on ebay for about £80. It was 3 years old, and had 13months power up time, and 11 power cycles. I use it in an external caddy to back up my laptoop. It has no errors and has been excellent.I was wary of buying a used drive due to a bad experience years ago, but now I'm very happy (fingers crossed).
The Ultrastars seem to be really solid disks. I think if you can be confident it’s not already in trouble when you receive it, then they could be good purchases. Older HGST drives have great longevity, and the newer disks are starting well, looking forward to finding out if they can last as well or better than some of those older models that seemed so solid.
I use these same drives from the same seller. Great value and only one failure in several years. They replaced the drive no questions after showing them the smart data and even paid to have me send the old drive back, with sending the new drive before they got the old. I run 6 in my NAS and 4 in my external RAID enclosure.
This is great feedback, thank you for sharing.
I'd be wary of returning a failed drive that still contained my (potentially recoverable) data.
I bought one of these in the summer and I had similar numbers to what you've shared here. Very high quality drives and also the Backblaze stats you shared I seem to remember have these as a top performer. They've probably just swapped them out as they're reaching the end of the 5 year warranty and modern drives have 24TB+ capacities, so they can host double the amount of data in the same footprint, and often for the same power consumption.
In any case Amazon offered a warranty, the seller a bit more than that - I think, although the company may have gone by then, and there was also a protectmybubble insurance option on there for 4 years warranty for like £5, so between them you should be able to get something back if it goes Pete Tong in that time. At £7/TB, I thought you can't really go too wrong with these.
Thanks for sharing your info and expertise. P.S. I wrote the comment before finishing to watch the video, then you covered everything haha. Thank you again.
Thank you, and it’s interesting to hear how others experiences compare. I will be running these 24x7 also, so let’s see how they look in a few years and what happens. I think though, if they do fine in the next few months, then it’s out of the sellers hands… and as you say, warranty options also….
I used the website diskprices to find the best price for these drives. I'm currently running 4 of these including (MDD16TSAS25672E), (MD14000GSA12872), (MD14TBGSA25672X). So far no issues, I primarily uses these for automated content downloads then I process the data and archive useful content then wipe and reuse the drive. I put them in a ORICO 4 Bay Daisy Chain Hard Drive Enclosure Aluminum USB3.1 Gen2 10Gbps Type-C Hard Drive Docking Station when on sale.
I bought a MDD 6TB Nas that actually arrived today, 7200 rpm version. Bought off of Amazon and the seller is MD Tech. Going to give it a spin tomorrow.
I've had the 6TB MDD drive over a year. seller communication is great & bought a HGST 6TB to mirror it.
won't hesitate to buy a pair of 14TB from MD Tech when the time comes!
@sometechguy Thanks for this video! Can you tell if there is constant background media scanning (BMS) occuring on your drives? I purchased a 12TB HGST refurb drive from Amazon, same as in your video. The first one I received was DOA, and I had it replaced. The second one works perfectly, is shows no issues in smartctl, and had around 4 years of power on time. However, the heads are moving every few seconds. This happens all the time, as long as the disk has power. Since this sort of constant head movement can be a bad sign, I did some research and found, non-conclusively, that these disks may be performing BMS, hence my question.
Yes, the drives make a small ‘tick’ sound around every 5 seconds, which is a small head movement. This is preventative wear leveling (PWL) I believe, it may be the same thing you mention. But this is to allow the drive to even out lubricant on the drive surface. I would say it’s quiet, but that is probably subjective and may depend where the drive lives. Should not be a concern, unless the noise is an issue for you. This happens when the drive is idle.
@@sometechguy Thank you for the reply! That explains it. I was just searching on the wrong thing. I like my computers ultra quiet, so the ticking is a bit annoying. But it's great to know that there's nothing wrong with the drive.
For the surface scan, Spinrite and even Badblock in write mode (if you don’t mind losing the drives' contents) are also pretty thorough.
I bought 10 of the 14TB drives. Here are a few notes:
(1) they came with an instruction that they required their own power adapter unless you had a "new" PSU. I figured my PCI-E 5.0 Lian Li would do it... nope, needed their adapter.
(2) Used under Proxmox. 4 drives had roughly 3 years use on them, 3 drives had 5 years on them, and 2 disks had less two years on them in hours
(3) Fully passed SMART and ran into no issues
(4) I set them up in a ProxMox ZFSx2 so I could endure two drive fails. Since this is my most common setup, wanting to get the space at this cost made this a good buy (for me) but YMMV
(5) Because of the power adapter, cable management was not as pretty as I'd want, though I'm using the Rosewill RSV-L4500U. So it could be handled, but would clutter a desktop case
Overall, no issues for my homelab
This is great. Thanks for sharing. 👍
I got a referb segate 12TB and it’s been doing great. Didn’t run smart test though but the drive is filled with video files and haven’t had any issues
I bought one at these recently Amazon UK sale and it arrives next week. I suspect, given the 3 week lead time, it is coming from the USA. I bought it to facilitate hard-drive capacity upgrades and as a backup drive so don't expect to put a lot of hours on it.
Purchased a NAS recently, i put 4x new Tosh 14tb drives in it, this obviously cost a lot of money. I would like to create a second NAS for off site storage and was considering renewed drives. This video was useful in understanding what tests to run and how to check if it's a good drive. Thanks.
Glad it was a help, and good luck with building out the second NAS. No matter how good the drives or the NAS, backups are important. 😃
I just bought a 12tb dc520 this past week. It took a day, but a full surface test showed 0 bad sectors. It’s got around 38,000 hours on it, with 18 power-ons, so a little bit less usage than yours. I got it from an auction site stores that specializes in server parts deals. I couldn’t pass up a sale at $72.99.
So where do you get the reliability data from? On a little side note, the unit on the y-axis should be %/a or generally % per time, not just %. Only the integration of the curve over some amount of time yields the % of units that failed during this amount of time.
That was all covered in the video, where I talk about the data source and show what it is and where it comes from.
EDIT: To make this simpler, the data is from BackBlaze who publish a great deal of reliability data on hundreds of thousands of drives, including those of the same model line as the drives in the video. Link to the source in the video description.
Have you ever done the serial number lookup on these drives? My last set of 4 I ordered (from an established company on ebay) all showed as originally having been sold to Apple icloud. Makes me feel like they were probably in a well handled environment, but thats always luck of the draw and the original purchasing company doesnt always show up on the WD warranty lookup. Commodity "refurbished" drives like these are a valid means of getting what is usually (as your stats from the db show) a long life drive fairly cheap. Thanks for the vid!
The other SMART stat I like to look at is spin up(down) or head load(unload) cycles. Often the head incurs wear each time it is unloaded (when the disk spins down or something else causes a head park event).
Yeah I buy the hgst ultrastar (well now seagate) for my video backup and I've had a few DOA and some clicky and was able to get the data off then returned for a replacement. But I don't have em running all the time, I have a voyager Q I run them while backing up and then they go into the cabinet until I need em again. so I've had many for many years and are just fine.
Was the faster disk formatted in 4Kn and the other three in 512e? Because that would explain the performance difference, and also it might be worth pointing out that this is something worth checking on refurbished disks (the previous owner might have changed it).
It's a really nice idea, but all the disks are 512e disks. I checked them and all are running with 4096 Physical Sector Size and 512 Logical Sector size. So doesn't seem to be this.
Thanks for the video. Lookng at expanding archive storage and this might just be what i need.
Just arrived home to see the delivery of a renewed 16TB WD UltraStar HD. I bought this to backup and clean up my NAS. So it won't be powered on often. Mine was also packaged really well in a sealed static bag and lots of bubble wrap. I quickly turned it on to check the stats. The drive is a little over 3yrs old and powered on for only 2.5yrs (22000hrs). It's just s baby. I haven't done a deep disc check yet but I think this will suit my needs perfectly. I'd definitely consider buying more.
BTW I didn't search for this video. It just popped up on my feed... I think Google is keeping an eye on my Amazon account... 🤔
It’s unnerving when you think they are watching you. Glad you found my channel. 😀
I bought 2 8TB "Renewed" drives off Amazon almost 2 years ago. They are still going strong. If you buy drives like this RAID them. The more redundancy the better. I'm tempted to buy 8 of the 12TB models as an upgrade and set them up so up to 4 can die. Then just keep a few spares on hand. These are the helium filled drives too, so they are more robust.
How did you run the performance tests to get the read and write speeds over the entire disk?
I have my own tooling I wrote for this as I couldn’t find quite what I wanted and i do a lot of disk performance testing.
@@sometechguy Oh, very cool! That makes a lot of sense. Is that tooling public anywhere, or do you have any alternate suggestions?
Also, your analysis is great in these videos! I bought the same model of drive a few days before this video based on one of your previous blackblaze analysis videos! Thanks a lot for making this content :)
Thank you, and it’s great to hear you could make use of it.
I have not published the tooling yet, but I may do in the future when I am ready to maintain it.
On the question of alternate tooling, I think CrystalDiskMark might do performance testing across the disk, but it could be on the paid version.
I wanted to do specific testing which I am not sure it does, large file sequential, mixed size file sequential and non-sequential rewrite testing with configurable test sizes and capturing temperature data etc during the test.
I bought 16 of these and aside from 4 of them arriving DOA they have performed well so far.
The returns process was a real pain as they were coming from the USA I couldn't have a replacement I would have to get refunded and order more. Not only that but when the new ones arrive also put them to the same scrutiny as the drives they were replacing.
I can't stress enough how important it is to test them on arrival, I could easily have cost myself £300+ by presuming everything would be OK.
At the end of it I had a couple of very happy 8bay Synologies which should keep me going for a while.
I buy direct from Water Panther, a bit more expensive (they also sell on Amazon and Ebay) but handling warranty issues with them has been hassle free and that's what I care about most with refurb drives.
Bought three of them from
The same seller across eBay and Amazon and they are running wonderfully in my server
I bought 8 and was concerned because my listing said 3 years but they had 50k hours. I called the vendor and he was more than confident that they would last more than 3 years and promised a full exchange under 3 years.
Not sure if this is the same vendor, but FYI, his customer service response time was fast, despite the hours being higher. The drives have been great, no issues.
Bought three of these 10TB white label drives. They were all Western Digitals and are identified as such in the WD Dashboard software. At risk of inviting bad luck, I have not had any issues with them in a NAS with Raid 1. The RAID backs up to the third drive. All are on all the time.
I have bought many 'RENEWED" hdd. For many years now. What i learned ... GOHARDDRIVE !!!! ... However , dont think they sell on amazon or Newegg anymore , (they use too). They, do sell on Ebay and their website. I always buy drives that state 3 or 5 year warranty. I bought maybe 30 + drives from them .. think I have had 3 that I called DOA (had something wrong ) .. however I have 4 die in use .. they have always honored their warranty @ no cost to me. Also, their Warranty is S/N based .. so if you resale them and their is still warranty left it will work for next owner !
I have 2 10TB used drives from amazon and they both had around 5 years power on time and clean SMART info. Good for holding videos or backups and like any other drive new or used always keep at least 1 more copy incase of drive failure. I also keep 1 drive offline incase of a system crash, malware or ransomware.
I got a few 8tb drives from Amazon 'renewed' and all my smart stats showed 0 run time, so I assumed they modified it somehow. Wonder if there's any way to prove that or find the real data. Still have a few in the box as spares for my raid array.
Buy the drives, set up a test rig and run Spinrite on them. Back in “the day” we would have to run test on drives for Banyan Vines and Novell that would go on for 29-30 hours plus. Always caught the bad ones.
It depends on what you're using them for really..I have 8 4tb drives I bought from ebay used for like 30 bucks a piece..made a nas and use plex for it...when using for movies storage you don't really put hard usage on them..building a second one for backup.
I great video. I believe this has given me the “courage” to try two 12tb in a small 2-bay NAS for backups and video serving. And then Backblaze the backups as the offsite…. Just in case.
If you don’t mind my asking, what software are you using for your charts and graphs?
Thank you, I appreciate it! For the graphs, I tried a few tools such as Tableau and Domo in previous videos. This one I used Canva, it’s a bit simpler in what it can do but I liked the results it produced.
@@sometechguy
@@sometechguy
Thanks,. I liked the style, and it’s something I’ve not been able to duplicate with Excel. We’re a Microsoft 365 academic enterprise shop, so I’ve mostly used Excel and Power BI. Both have left me somewhat “wanting” with respect to getting the styles exactly as I wanted. I’ve not used Tableau nor Canva , but I’ll check them out for this next project I’’m on.
Again, I really appreciate the videos on hard drives, I’ve not found anything that’s informed me so well on going the renewed route and some of the basics of what to avoid (cmr vs smr, etc.).
Just bought a 10tb hgst drive for 85 bucks. Hope it lasts for a while
I bought 5 x 16TB Seagate X18 Exos drives, these were 'Recertified' drives, 1 was DOA, 1 died after a month, they were refunded without issue through Amazon, and the Amazon agent confirmed they have 2 years warranty.
When I got some refurb drives, I also looked at how much data it had dealt with.
Most had around 300TB, but one has 1.7PB, so it's an easy to see how much your drive has been ragged 😁😁
I got some Maxtor recertified disks and it was weird they were big and cheap and the labels on them were new but two of them clicked and made a weird "zzzt" type noise when read/writing. What was really odd was that the SMART data said it was 0 hours / 0 power cycles, BUT there were tons of read errors. I did manage to return them to Amazon. I didn't bother next time and just bought new from WD.
😂
I do not get the option for additional warranty on Canada's Amazon. I won't take the chance on 'renewed' drives with 4 years of 24/7 mileage on them without that.
It looks like this varies by region from the comments, I also ordered some direct from Amazon.com and was offered data recovery but not the warranty. Looks like other European sites offer the warranty also. So not sure why this is. That said, the drives I had shipped straight from .com had a warranty from the seller included, but I don’t think it was clear, so could be worth checking the terms also on the Canada site.
I got two of the $85 Seagate Exos 12TB drive one of them for "free" due to a shipping mishap (Amazon refunded me the cost, and said if I actually get it then I don't need to ship it back). Anyway I got them to replace two of my now old & worn out 8TB Seagate Barracuda consumer grade drives that have over 36,000 hours on them (well past the life span in the data sheets). These I got have the same hours as the ones you got with under 30 power cycles on both, but I am quite happy with them. Heck for $92 after tax for 24TB of storage I got nothing to complain about on my end, and will most likely last until I can afford some new models. I'll just move these to a backup storage device after installing new ones in a couple of years.
This is great, I hope they serve you well. 😁
I recently bought a renewed 10tb HGST HD from Amazon. It came with the cable I saw in the box you opened and a note that said the drive had a power off feature that was not compatible with all motherboards and if there was a problem to try to use the included cable to fix the problem. Can you provide any information on what motherboards or hardware that is likely to have problems with this type of drive?
There is a PIN on some SATA drives that allows the host to signal power down to the drive and if the SATA interface on the host doesn’t support it, it can stop the driver powering on. The cable is an adapter to prevent that. The NAS I plugged it into didn’t have this problem, and neither did the USB dock I used. But if you plug the drive in and it doesn’t work, this could be the cause.
@@sometechguy Great hoped it wasn't to big of a problem. Thanks.
Does temperature, vibration in chassis and power supply quality affect drive lifespan?
Maybe, but the issue here is that there is no data to empirically measure what vibration and power stability the drives experienced. Temperature data is recorded in the Backblaze data, and that may be interesting data to look at.
Great, now i want to dig out my old ivy bridge computer, get some high capacity hdds, and build a raid 10 nas.
I must have been sleeping under a rock for a while, because the amount of storage you can get for a couple hundred bucks is insane.
I rember buying a 640gb in 2008 and i was like holy crap thats alot of storage, now you can get 2tb ssd for 100 bucks
I use HDSentinel and it logs transfer rate for the whole drive - it's as picked up some drives with serious slow spots 10MB/s vs 180 for other areas on the same drive. a straight test wouldn't pick this up unless you are watching the screen
Manufacturer Recertified is the way to go. Carries new warranty usually from seller and 2-3 years vs 5 years. The WD/HGST I've purchased from Server Parts Deal were just like new but marked recertified.
So I bought 5 Water Panther (Arsenal) 18tb Drives for my Synology 5 bay NAS, I had one go bad on me and I contacted Water Panter and they tested it and sent back a new Drive. all of sudden Amazon won't let you buy an extended Warranty, Just DATA protection which I don't want so I started buying from NewEgg where If the drive does go bad I can get a new one not the Data, that's why I have a NAS
the Drives have been running over 15783 hours I just can't beat the price and I run a 2 drive failure just in case.
.. got the Smartmontools for windows, installed it and ..., please make a video on how to use and the eMail feature. For it to run daily. TIA
i bought a 12TB Ironwolf for 119€ a year ago and it's flawless so far.
What did you use to run the performance tests @ 4 minutes 45 seconds in.
I wrote my own automated testing tooling for this. I do a lot of performance testing on disks, and I couldn't find something that did quite what I wanted.
I almost ordered a few to try. Didn't get the same replacement option you got. I just get data recovery. Shame. I was really thinking about picking up 4 or 5 to experiment with. Still.. $500 all in isn't a bad price if the drives would last me a few years....... oooof decisions decisions
May I ask question I was about to upgrade my WD Blue 500GB 64mb, should I pick SEAGate EXOS or IronWolf Pro or WD Gold or WD BLack?
Hard to give advice based on just that, as price is going to be a big part of it as well as how you are going to use them, and if you are worried about noise, and also depends on capacity you need.
But if you are assume they are all exactly the same price, I would personally go for a WD Gold as these are the same units as the Ultrastars, which have very good reliability stats. Exos are likely to be cheaper, and they are still good drives. Ironwolfs will be a bit quieter, but are often more expensive than enterprise drives, and blacks are likely the quietest, but only come in smaller capacities but I think they are over priced.
I do have other videos that compare WD vs Seagate, as well as Exos vs Ironwolf and all the WD range. But for the reasons above, its hard to say you should buy a specific drive. As that varies based on your needs, prices vary over time and location also affects price.
@@sometechguy I'll check those out
the refurbished drive i got had its smart reset. i've heard that's the case with many drives, it's not clear what the manufacturer does besides that when they "refurbish" drives.
anyway, considering seagate only replaces dead (new) drives with refurbished ones (if warranty hasn't expired) i think having 2 refurbished drives in raid 1 is still cheaper than buying a single one new.
also, in my country amazon offers 2 years warranty (by default) on the refurbished drives they sell.
Resetting of SMART data seems like a red flag to me. But if this is done by the manufacturer and they retain full warranty I feel a little more comfortable. But not sure I would say ‘happy’. I don’t think I would accept that from a third party seller. I also don’t think Seagate publish any criteria for when they would reset data, but I would hope it’s only for drives that are almost new and not those with any real mileage on them.
To avoid confusion, manufacturer refurbished drives are marked as "recertified" and come with a white label that says so.
These are drives that were RMAed in, fixed, wiped and sent back. Some resellers only sell those kind of drives. I have read that sometimes recertified drives are good unused drives relabelled to clear inventory, but I don't know if that's true.
@@sometechguy tbh i'm pretty sure they do have a high mileage; anyway, amazon has never denied me a refund as long as the warranty wasn't expired.
imo that's a lot more than what seagate offers (they also expect you to pay for shipping).
they definitely should be more clear about the drive's conditions and past use on the product page
@@bufordmaddogtannen i suppose they might need room in the warehouse at some point but i don't think that's the case with the 12tb you see online.
anyway, nowhere on the product page amazon says that the drive is recertified (mine is tho) so it still seems like a gamble.
what i'm wondering tho is, how do they repair them? i always thought it wasn't worth it to take a drive apart (also cause the mechanical parts are just supposed to break at some point)
@@gandalfilgrigio97 indeed. What you get is a lottery. There are companies you can buy directly from that are more reliable though. Server part deals being one. But it's in the US, so shipping and customs would wipe any saving.
With helium based drives I guess they need to transplant the drive in a new case, or maybe they take apart and test components singularly then put them back on the assembly line for new drives to come out? No idea. 😁
It probably costs a manufacturer less to assemble a drive with parts from RMAed drives than building one from scratch.
I have an 8t iron wolf or whatever it's called i use for storing emulators and games and another I use for movie's and music and such. Both have been great. No bad sector's, relatively low time on both. There's lots of companies that are still switching over to ssd and if you get lucky you'll get one of their newer drives or even one of their never used backups.
I might buy one of these as my game drive for large open world games like Rdr2 and GTA (when it comes out on pc). $80 US for 12 terabytes is a steal even if they’re slow HDD’s.
i personally found seller from ebay who gives a 3 year warranty for any dead drives most of his warranty's would only recommend them if you live in usa though as shipping is horrible for shipping internationally.
Did you have to pay import fees? I've just gone to purchase some of these advertised at around £100 each and the total cost is coming in at over £860
It looks like the import duty depends on the seller. On the purchase in the video, I think there was some import duty but it was completely reasonable. I placed another order and a silly import duty was added. Amazon have in the past done this and then partially refunded it, but without that being stated, I would not assume that would happen.
I also found that ordering individual drives did t have this problem.
I read somwhere they can wipe or adjust the SMART data before reselling
This is technically possible to reset it, if you have the correct equipment. And for manufacturer refurbished drives, I am sure they do this. However, I don't believe you can modify the data. So if the drive comes with zero stats, you would want to assess if you trust those who had the drives and did this. But if they come with stats on them, like mine in the video I think I feel more comfortable, as you know more clearly what you are getting. Mine could have been reset, but that would have been at least 40k hours ago, and there are 40k hours of stats on errors to assess the drives state.
The manufacturer refurbished drive would normally come with a manufacturer warranty, so less of a concern. And I suspect, but don't know, that those drives are ones that are normally returned very early and not ones that have significant mileage on them. For example, they may have been returned without use at all and many genuinely have zero or close to it hours clocked up.
Very interesting video for hobbyist home lab dude that's planning to make some smaller raid box. However there's one thing that stands out really heavily for me. IF they're "renewed" they should last possibly for very long. However I'm under heavy suspicion that there's nothing renewed on these drives, but they're infact just plainly decomissioned drives as preventive maintenance from some facility, which makes them inline for the vid. Has someone stumbled into some investigation what these drives for sure are? Meaning renewed or decommisioned? After all, there's huge difference. Even worse, note I haven't checked if this is in fact possible, but highly likely it is. I hope someone doesn't buy decommisioned drives and write falsified usage data to their memory. I wouldn't be surprised about this as many have apparently receided dead drives. Sure transit can damage drives, but getting bunch of doa drives on some shipment that's in good condition and well packaged is always bit suspicious.
Very interesting! But would i put important data to them?! Personally, i couldnt convince myself. I stille use however, a stone age old harddisk i took out of my WD Mybook live which spent like 15 years sleeping while not in use. Its still good, but i put only multimedia files on it which are well backupped.
What software did you use for the read write test
I wrote my own automated testing tools for this, but I used python with shutil as well as smartmontools, which I mentioned in the video for command line SMART queries.
I think some of this may be available in tools like HD Sentinel, but I wanted more configurability in how the tests are run, and to run a variety of tests with different file sizes and non-sequential write benchmarking, and i wanted to pull SMART stats after each test.
Have bought some of these used hgst drives and they seem to be decent.
You cannot trust power in hours. I've received disks which had low thousands hours but were actually been running for years. They usually forget to wipe the smart test data and if they are data center disks (which they will be) they will have ran some tests which report the poh value when ran so can see some discrepancies there. Also: some drives have 16 bit counters which go back to 0 after ~7.5 years.
Lovely video, great explanation and visual demonstrations
Thank you, this is appreciated. 🙏
Excellent video, many thanks for the detailed insights
I appreciate that, thank you. 🙏
Awesome video. You’ve inspired me to pick up some drives.
The warranty, at least the 1 year Amazon Renewed is real and the terms on the extended ones seem to be the same. I bought 8 X18, 16TB Exos drives last year in November and they have been working at the office NAS. We use it everyday for video editing and move a lot of data. One of them was showing bad sectors last month so I sent it back and got the money back. They tried to make me go through Seagate, but after telling them Seagate was not covering the disk they took it back no problem.
All other drives have been ok and show no signs of breaking, but do make sure to get the extended warranty.
This is great experience to share, thank you. Which seller provided those if you are ok to share? GoHardDrive and Server Part Deals seem to be two of those that are selling on Amazon.
@ Sure thing, the seller was Digital Emporium GmbH, I live in EU FYI.
@@cuestaluis thank you, this is good to know. I am based in the UK, and the Amazon.co.uk order of mine came from the US. I have ordered a couple of batches, the one in the video looks to have actually come from Server Parts Deals, and some others I ordered came from GoHardDrive, but with similar results.
Even worse I have been sold refurbished disks as new at RRP ... then they break and they are not covered by a warranty ...
Wont these drives just die real fast since they been used for years?
Once drives get past the initial failure phase, they can last a long time. For example, the HGST MegaScale DC4000 4Tb drives in the BackBlaze data remain below 0.5% AFR after 9 years. And historically, HGST in particular have a good track record for reliability. The problem with judging some drives isn't that there is a bad record, but that there isn't sufficient data as the drives have not been available for 10+ years.
They could of course fail, but this is also true of any drive. But like with any drive, you plan for failures and because of the price of the drives, you can buy additional redundancy and spares. And of course, if you use new, used or re-certified drives, you should always backup important data.
It does also depends on what you will use these for. For mission critical, you may opt for new drives. But for home media, non-production, or storage with adequate redundancy, or near-line / offline backups they can be a great deal.
people have drives that they have used since the 90s that still work.
not all drives fail.
Great info & testing, thank you! Of course I liked and subscribed! :))
Let's pretend the extended warranty is completely golden, then the cost should give you some idea how long they will really last. If you bought 100 + 4 year warranty and assuming a 2% annual failure rate they will replace 8. So 8 x $92, or $736, which paid for itself and more. I can't wait for a yearly failure update. Does it mention anything about being prorated or can only be used once.
PS: I subscribed so I can get a yearly update ;)
excellent content, very informative
Appreciated 🙏
Thanks for the information.
Thanks for the thanks 😎
These are good for RAID 1, 5, or 10. Even if they fail your data will still be good. Would not recommend them for single or RAID 0. Your also more likely to have a bad drive due to shock experienced during shipping than anything else.