I’m in the marked for a used 4TB for my offsite backup. As I’ve recently acquired four 12TB drives (about 10000 hours and one to two years old) for 130€ each, I was optimistic. 30 to 40€ I thought. Easy.
WRONG! Used drive, failing SMART stats, 40€. Here is a new drive, no hours on it. Oh wait, it was cold storage and it’s almost 8 years old. Price? 90€ (mind you, a new drive costs about 110€). Another drive has already failed, but someone wants 25€ for e-waste. No Sir, it worked fine when I used Check-Disk, please buy. Most of the decent ones are 70 to 80€, way too close to the new price. I PAID 130 FOR 12TB. These drive were almost new and under warranty. WHY DO THIS NUMBNUT WANT 80 EURO FOR A USED 4TB Drive? And what sane person doesn’t put SMART data in their offerings??? I have to ask at least 50 percent of the time. Don’t even get me started on those external hard drives, they were trash to begin with. I’m SO CLOSE to buying a high capacity drive, because in that segment, people actually know what they are doing and understand what they have.
Rant over.
What gives? Did these people buy them, when they were much more expensive? Does anyone now a good site that ships refurbished drives to Germany? Most of those I found are also rippoffs…
I have no idea why, but I made the same experience. Used drives are in most cases much overprized. Often far beyond the price/TB of new, larger disks.
Could it perhaps be specific models that are no longer manufactured? I was checking out the price I could expect for one of my old PSUs and found that it was apparently a particularly well liked unit for some reason, and so it’s used price was a fair bit higher than expected.
My guess is that it is often hard for people to grasp that HDDs loose value much faster than other items they own. New HDDs are larger and offer better price per TB, and older HDDs have a higher risk to fail.
I can buy new HDDs at 16€/TB, why should I spend 12€/TB on a used disk?
With the right timing/deals you get them even cheaper. Mindfactory had 20 TB Seagate exo drives on a deal for 219€ (~11€/TB) The 18 TB Seagate exos were often on 239€. (13.2€/TB)
Where did you got these new 16€/TB HDDs?
Mindfactory is a good store for middle Europe. But not sure where they ship to.
One of the best offers I could find is 300€ for 20 TB, which makes exactly 15€/TB.
Good to know I’m not the only one!