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.

 

[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.