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 ?

  • @foggyEnglish
    21•3 months ago

    SMART tools

    sudo apt-get install smartmontools

    sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX where sdX is your drive in question (sdA, sdB, etc).

    | grep Power_On_Hours

    | grep Power_Cycle_Count

    This just tells you how much that drive was used in the past, It’s not a perfect to test but it’s what I do 🤷‍♂️

    • SynapseOPEnglish
      6•3 months ago

      Comment save ! Thank you :)

    • @[email protected]English
      5•3 months ago

      Also run a health test on it. It’s less important for SSDs IMO, but it’s great for HDDs to check if there’s any obvious issues.