There’s lots of shady things happening in the HDD resale space, so be weary. Most of what gets resold are datacenter drives that have hit a max number of hours and are pulled on that alone. Not because they aren’t still working, but because they don’t want to risk it. This number varies from place to place, and is only a preventative measure to pull them from service before they fail.
That being said… understand that this is what you’re likely buying.
For the shady bits: resellers frequently pull some tricks to obfuscate the real state of the drives including:
swapping controller boards to hide issues
resealing failed seals
wiping/resetting SMART info
All of this culminating in a real grab bag of things you probably don’t want to mess with. If you were buying, say, 10 drives to host a bunch of junk you don’t care about, it may be worth the risk. Otherwise, read what I said above and understood what you’re likely to get.
If you just want cheaper than retail drives, get factory refurbished drives directly from the manufacturer that carry a warranty. You’ll feel better about it.
Oh that definitely seem possible but I would assume going with a trusted seller with a warranty like goharddrive and serverpartdeal must be a safer choice in this regard.
If it’s coming from eBay, or doesn’t have a warranty, don’t trust it. If those that you mention have a warranty, then you’re hopefully covered in those terms.
I have the other perspective where I think that highly rated resellers have an incentive to share SMART results and ship good product. Perhaps its eBay centric, it has been my experience for used and refurbished electronics. If it’s any consolation, your perspective is likely what keeps the cost low for these sellers.
SMART status isn’t reliable because it can be altered. Plausible deniability is how most of these places operate, which is why you are disclaimers all over the place on those listings, and rarely do you find a seller who will swap out a bad drive after 30 days. That’s the point.
That wasn’t what was reported, and is largely false. What was reported is that people are buying NEW drives which have FARM values indicating years of use. Also the most likely cause being a crypto project going under, and dropping petabytes in capacity over the last 12 months.
This type of fraud hasn’t been proven in the used HDD space. There are many reasons used drives are sold other than exceeding usable life or warranty. Companies over forecast capacity or simply go bankrupt all the time (see crypto / ai), and those drives are sold. Considering drives are 30-50% more expensive now than they were 6-12 months ago the incentive and profitability of resale has increased.
No…you’re talking about news from the past few weeks. I’m talking about the reseller market in general and the way it behaves.
Source: adjacent industry experience dealing with these people.
Moreover, the article you’re referencing has nothing to do with what I posted, so not even sure why you’re talking about it here. There is zero correlation with what I said, you just assumed that was what I was referencing because… I’m not sure.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
I’ve bought some from amazon.it
Where are you located? If in the UK, BargainHardware has pretty good deals when they get a bunch of the same HDD model in stock.
Hungary, but these prices seem to be one of the best I was able to find currently.
There’s lots of shady things happening in the HDD resale space, so be weary. Most of what gets resold are datacenter drives that have hit a max number of hours and are pulled on that alone. Not because they aren’t still working, but because they don’t want to risk it. This number varies from place to place, and is only a preventative measure to pull them from service before they fail.
That being said… understand that this is what you’re likely buying.
For the shady bits: resellers frequently pull some tricks to obfuscate the real state of the drives including:
All of this culminating in a real grab bag of things you probably don’t want to mess with. If you were buying, say, 10 drives to host a bunch of junk you don’t care about, it may be worth the risk. Otherwise, read what I said above and understood what you’re likely to get.
If you just want cheaper than retail drives, get factory refurbished drives directly from the manufacturer that carry a warranty. You’ll feel better about it.
Oh that definitely seem possible but I would assume going with a trusted seller with a warranty like goharddrive and serverpartdeal must be a safer choice in this regard.
If it’s coming from eBay, or doesn’t have a warranty, don’t trust it. If those that you mention have a warranty, then you’re hopefully covered in those terms.
I have the other perspective where I think that highly rated resellers have an incentive to share SMART results and ship good product. Perhaps its eBay centric, it has been my experience for used and refurbished electronics. If it’s any consolation, your perspective is likely what keeps the cost low for these sellers.
SMART status isn’t reliable because it can be altered. Plausible deniability is how most of these places operate, which is why you are disclaimers all over the place on those listings, and rarely do you find a seller who will swap out a bad drive after 30 days. That’s the point.
That wasn’t what was reported, and is largely false. What was reported is that people are buying NEW drives which have FARM values indicating years of use. Also the most likely cause being a crypto project going under, and dropping petabytes in capacity over the last 12 months.
This type of fraud hasn’t been proven in the used HDD space. There are many reasons used drives are sold other than exceeding usable life or warranty. Companies over forecast capacity or simply go bankrupt all the time (see crypto / ai), and those drives are sold. Considering drives are 30-50% more expensive now than they were 6-12 months ago the incentive and profitability of resale has increased.
No…you’re talking about news from the past few weeks. I’m talking about the reseller market in general and the way it behaves.
Source: adjacent industry experience dealing with these people.
Moreover, the article you’re referencing has nothing to do with what I posted, so not even sure why you’re talking about it here. There is zero correlation with what I said, you just assumed that was what I was referencing because… I’m not sure.
deleted by creator
Mindfactory is selling Factory Recertified Seagate Exos and Ironwolf Pro.
They were also reportedly one of the shops (unknowingly) selling used HDDs with SMART values reset as new.
https://www.mindfactory.de/Produkte/Seagate_Factory_Recertified/
I usually find good ones in eBay.
Diskprices.com never used this but bookmarked it ages ago