Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Should You Buy a Refurbished Hard Drive?”.
Hello and welcome to Tech deals new versus refurbished hard drives, which should you buy now this advice might or might not apply to solid state drives, but today we are strictly looking at hard drives. I have a box with some refurbished hard drives in it. I’Ll talk to you about where I got them in just a minute, and then I have some new hard drives as well. You can save substantial amounts of money by buying refurbished drives instead of new. In fact, you can typically buy three refurbished drives for the same price as two brand new ones.
I will have some links down in the video description below and show you some details and prices later in the video. But what we’re going to do is open. This box of refurbished drives up we’re going to take a look at the actual stats on them: power on hours, usage, smart numbers, Etc. Compare them to new drives, take a look at their warranty status.
The warranty status is very important and then we’ll come to the conclusion: should you buy these or should you skip them as a content creator, we use a lot of hard drives for a lot of storage. After all, we record in 4k at 60 frames per second. In this box, our refurbished hard drives that I bought off of eBay scary. I know, however, the seller I bought these from.
I have bought from numerous times in the past, both new and refurbished, and these drives over here, which I bought on Amazon. I have bought from several times in the past. There are several very large sellers of hard drives on both Amazon and eBay that you will find their names repeatedly across a variety of sizes of drives.
Now these are 18 terabyte drives refurbished they’re, just over two hundred dollars, each new they’re 300, each. That is fifty percent more money. Just so you can buy something labeled new versus refurbished, but techies, say well.
New is obviously going to be new and not used right. It’S going to come with a full length. Warranty, it’s uh, never been touched by human hands before and those refurbished drives are probably some junk out of some old server. How long do you think they’ve made 18 terabyte drives? They haven’t been around long enough to be some old junk, as I said in the intro, we’re going to put these into a drive cage and we’re going to take a look at the Smart stats and see how much use they have on them. And then we will look up their warranty numbers, but because you can buy three of these for the price of two new 18 terabyte drives. If you’re buying multiple drives the cost savings add up quickly and if you are backing up your drives you’re running them in raid on, for example, a network detached storage, you can buy a lot more storage and have plenty of backups for way less money.
One question many of you may have is wait a minute if the drives are basically like new, why are they being sold for such a discounted price? Next to the new drives? Many companies have minimum advertised pricing. These are authorized Distributors, the seller that I bought. These particular drives from no relation, not sponsored, is server part deals, and the seller that I bought off of Amazon from is called Tech on Tech. Again, not sponsored no relation. These companies are authorized Distributors. They get these drives directly from Seagate they, so they have to abide by their agreement with Seagate in order to sell those drives seagate’s a very large company. Very large companies often have rules that state. You can’t sell our drives below X price because they want to protect all their various sellers so by marking them refurbished. Well, they’re no longer selling new drives, so they can sell those at a discount right. Are they the exact same drives? Let’S open this up and find out now, as I film this, you will find out along with me if these are truly used or new drives, because I just opened this well, it does say re-certified drives. Can we just say for a minute how good of a packing job this is? This is an excellent packing job.
Inside this box we have Bubble, Wrap wrapped around the Box, more bubble, wrap wrapped around inside boxes and then the drives are inside those. This is one of the reasons why I buy from the same sellers over and over. They know how to pack drives properly goodness gracious. It doesn’t even look like it’s ever been opened. [ Applause ] model number st18, triple zero, NM triple zero J.
I don’t know about you, but that’s a heck of a packing job box, bubble, wrap box protective material, and so you can all see what it looks like inside. That is packed very nicely. Take out that protective packing those drives yeah. That’S how you want to ship hard drives.
It’S like a brand new drive to me holy smokes. Is it hard to tell now this is interesting! I’Ve now unpacked three of them, I’m gon na, stick them over on the tester in just a second. They actually do have a recertified label down here on the bottom of the drive. If you’re ever curious, if you have a recertified drive, there will actually be very small print right here. That says: recertified: are they or do they just have to put that there? I don’t know these are helium sealed drives with a lot of platters in them. I don’t know that they’re even repairable, if there’s a problem with them, it’s one of those things that, like it works and if it doesn’t, they give you another one. Let’S take it. The computer and find out well, this has been interesting.
I have now put three of these drives on my machine in this lovely external drive holder right here, and I’ve checked their various stats, their power on hours, their power Cycles, as well as their warranty status for Seagate. Now I’ve been buying these drives for a number of years. We have dozens of drives here for storage for both personal and business use. I have had to warranty these drives in the past, because, if you own enough hard drives, you will eventually have hard drives fail.
Backup Backup backup link to backblaze down in the video description below seven dollars a month or seventy dollars a year for unlimited backup, and they are serious about unlimited. This is not sponsored by the way I have been a paying customer for 11 years of backblaze. They will back up tens of terabytes of data for just seven dollars a month. It has saved my bacon more than once, in any case, back up your data.
Now I’ve had to warranty Seagate drives that I have purchased through both eBay and Amazon in the past, and I’ve never had a problem. These drives do not actually have a warranty through Seagate, which surprised me, because that is kind of an odd duck. I’Ve had them be warranty covered in the past. These say: contact the seller now, how many hours do they have on them? This is the crystal diskmark screenshot, showing one of these drives that has five power-ons and less than 25 power on hours. That’S a trivial amount of use. That’S testing use. Now the seller actually claims that these will have fewer than 500 hours. None of these drives had over 100 hours on them, they’re all very, very low time now, whether that’s their original time or whether Seagate actually recertified.
These and erased those hours and set them back to zero. I have no way of knowing 18 terabyte drives, have not been out very long. You’D think that if they had a ton of hours on them and they failed, they would have just recycled them. But again, I have no way of knowing now. This is what the Seagate warranty page looks like for an 18 terabyte drive. That does have a valid warranty, and this is what a Seagate warranty page looks like for one that does not. One of these is a previous drive I bought, and one of these is one of these that came out of this box right here now you saw the packing material that came in this very professionally packaged. Clearly, this is the seller that sells thousands upon thousands of drives. I’M not really worried about not having a Seagate warranty. However, if it bothers you that’s what new drives are for some quick math and numbers.
These are 200 a piece. New ones are 300 a piece for eighteen hundred dollars. You can buy Six brand new 18 terabyte drives or for eighteen hundred dollars. You can buy nine of these recertified and have three spares or for twelve hundred dollars. You can buy Six to three furbished like I didn’t save six hundred dollars and, of course, if we ever have a failed drive, that’s what Replacements are for back up your data back up back up back up. If you don’t have a backup of your data, you don’t care about your data. In any case, let me know what you think about this video. It’S sort of a quick look at hard drives refurbished versus new, at least as much testing as I can do. Obviously, I’m not going to take one of these part and if I did it wouldn’t tell me anything by looking inside. Let me know your experiences. Have you bought a refurbished Drive? Have you had hard drives fail on you in the past post your comment down below and let me know what you think all I can tell you is that for the past five years we’ve been using a variety of Seagate drives a few Western digitals, but mostly Seagates uh, ranging from eight terabytes all the way up to 18 terabytes without too much of a problem. We’Ve had three or four fail, but again you deal with enough.
It happens if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this very exciting video. Like comment subscribe and do all of the YouTube things, thank you so much for watching, as I mentioned before, links in the video description below will be affiliate links to both Amazon, Newegg and eBay. Those support the channel at no extra cost to you and again, I want to know what you guys think this is a this was an unscripted video in a very different style than what we’ve been doing lately, and it will be interesting to see what you guys Think of it, do you want follow-up testing? Do you want to know more about hard drives? Do you not care about hard drives? Do you want to see well? Okay, I know all of you want to see an SSD review. I’Ve seen the request we will get to a proper SSD review, but that requires benchmarking and scripting, whereas this is something I can film in a day. Thank you all so much for watching. I will see all of you next time.
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