I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.

I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.

In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?

  • SynapseOPEnglish
    2•3 months ago

    Seems fair compare to the discount. What tool can you recommend for testing the drives ? Do you have some programs that are available on Linux ?

    • @static09English
      4•3 months ago

      SeaTools is a long-standing, trusted tool for HDD testing. I always have a bootable drive with the SeaTools bootable image on me for diagnosing hard drives.

      https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/seatools-legacy-support/

      Keep in mind that testing a failing drive will likely make a failing drive worse. For your use-case this is fine, but for anyone else looking to test drives, please create a backup image of the drive prior to testing.