2nd hand hard drives - what to check?

[Tom_ed1987]

I'm considering buying some 2nd hand HDD in the 14+TB range for media storage.

Not the Chinese located or the OEM/datacenter 'refurbished' resellers you get on eBay/Amazon, but where a private seller has pictured the serial number/manufacture date & SMART stats.
If the serial number checks out as having say 2+ years warranty remaining on the Seagate UK checker, & it passes a full disk scan with HDTune on arrival, i'm thinking it should be a fairly low risk/low cost way to buy?

Has anyone done this, & particularly is there any SMART stats that are key to telling how good a drive might be/how it was used?
I know to watch for the reallocated/pending/uncorrected sectors as an indicator for a failing drive, but assuming all are 0, i'm not too sure about how to read/interpret all the other stats, or what the 'ideal' drive stats might look like.

 

[Armageus]

or the OEM/datacenter 'refurbished' resellers you get on eBay/Amazon

Nothing wrong with most of the IT Brokers on ebay - a lot of themn even offer warranty/replacement and drives from servers/datacentres have likely been treated arguably better than most home users.

Has anyone done this, & particularly is there any SMART stats that are key to telling how good a drive might be/how it was used?
I know to watch for the reallocated/pending/uncorrected sectors as an indicator for a failing drive, but assuming all are 0, i'm not too sure about how to read/interpret all the other stats, or what the 'ideal' drive stats might look like.

The only stats that you can really glean anything from are power on hours and power on cycles.

A drive with high power on cycles has likely been used in a home system that's regularly shut down and powered back on. Power on is one of the more stressful events for a drive.

Power on hours is also obviously a sign of how much the drive has been used - so comparing that with the manufacture date, can give you an idea of how much use it's seen - e.g. whether it's been run continuously since it was installed (e.g. in conjunction with a low power on cycles figure), or whether it's had an easier life as a cold spare, or occasionally powered up backup device.

 

[Tom_ed1987]

Nothing wrong with most of the IT Brokers on ebay - a lot of themn even offer warranty/replacement and drives from servers/datacentres have likely been treated arguably better than most home users.

Yeah maybe. My simple logic is that for the same price they charge, you can get a used retail drive that still has 2-3 years manufacture warranty, which I assume will always be better than a 3rd party eBay random seller warranty.

Also TBH I don't really like the grubby way they seem to do business.
I mean if you go on Amazon and type in '16TB hard drive' it looks like out of the top 10 results, 4-5 are refurbished drives from 3rd party sellers, and some are not even labelled refurbished/used. The Seagate one for £195 is even titled 'buy new' with 200+ sales in past month - you only see that they are refurbs/have 0 OEM warranty by reading the 1 star customer ratings.

 

[Armageus]

Yeah maybe. My simple logic is that for the same price they charge, you can get a used retail drive that still has 2-3 years manufacture warranty, which I assume will always be better than a 3rd party eBay random seller warranty.

One of the Brokers that I originally found on ebay, I buy direct with these days - and they offer a 3 year warranty. Any issues and they'll next day me a replacement drive even before I've sent the old one back.

We tend to buy a lot of used hard drives / ssds for HP Servers from them - we can normally get 2 or 3 drives for the price HP would charge for 1, whilst still having decent support.

I'd avoid Amazon, as the 3rd parties on there you have very little protection - at least with Ebay there's a bit more in place. Better to have a look on Ebay - find one of the big resellers and then see if they have a separate web site or contact details, if buying in bulk especially you can normally negotiate a better deal by buying direct and avoiding ebay/paypal's cuts. The reputable brokers should also be listed on Company House, so you can double check their details etc on there.

 

[rumple9]

I bought a second hand 8TB HGST Helium HD from CEX (they had a few of them in the shop). I saw on the label it was 4 years old so I was humming and harring about it, but it was very cheap. When I got it home and ran crystal disk, the powered on time was 30 minutes and it had only been turned on twice! I guess it had been originally bought by a company for RAID and not used. Two years later despite heavy daily use it's still running fine

 

[Dano]

I bought a second hand 8TB HGST Helium HD from CEX (they had a few of them in the shop). I saw on the label it was 4 years old so I was humming and harring about it, but it was very cheap. When I got it home and ran crystal disk, the powered on time was 30 minutes and it had only been turned on twice! I guess it had been originally bought by a company for RAID and not used. Two years later despite heavy daily use it's still running fine

Think they cover drives with a 24 month warranty too, how difficult they'll be when a claim is needed I've no idea.