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 ?

  • Synapse@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 months ago

    Maybe there is a way I can test the drive upon arrival, would you have some tools to recommend ? Preferably available on Linux ?

    • foggy@lemmy.world
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      2 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 🤷‍♂️

      • sugar_in_your_tea
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        2 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.