Did decide to go the used drive route just saving up and waiting for the right deal from a good seller. I did notice on eBay specifically that some sellers have tested drives for a great price per tb with a shit seller’s warranty (30 days to 1 year) but offer insurance for a significantly longer length of time for a few more bucks. I’m wondering if that’s a good alternative to having a long seller’s warranty? Just assume I will back everything up properly so drive failure won’t be a massive concern I just want the option of returning it or getting a replacement if need be.
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I’ve bought plenty of used drives, like 25-30 from eBay alone, only had around 5 SSDs fail after pretty heavy abuse. I’ve also bought refurbished drives, they are really good value from buying brand new ones.
Were they all from the same seller?
SSDs were from Garland computers (great company and visited locally)
All the refurb drives are water panther from Amazon, but they have a website you can buy from directly. They are RMA drives from Western Digital and Seagate with 0 hours.
I believe there is nothing what last forever so take some risks and you can win the big pot.
If you “RAID and backup enough” any chepo used hard drive is a good and valid. :)
Generally speaking datacenter drives with manufacturer warranty will be a good option because they’re easy to get replaced by the manufacturer without much fuzz. For any second hard drive I look at bad blocks > count of starts > time they’ve been running and if it isn’t an absurd number they should be fine.
There’s a lot of good suggestions here, but I just wanted to add that I absolutely wouldn’t rely on a random eBay seller’s warranty in any way. I made that mistake early on in my journey. I came back to find my seller had deleted their account (probably to start another and skip out on warranties).
