Buying second-hand hard drives

[steve30]

I was just wondering what people's experiences are with buying second hand hard drives.

What with HDD and SSD prices going up, you can sometimes get decent prices on second hand server HDDs (e.g. UltraStars, Exos, etc).

If they were used in servers, they probably had decent lives (probably powered up 24/7 in a temperature controlled environment), but with old second hand stuff, nothing is ever guaranteed.

So, I'm just curious as to people's experiences and if they have any suggestions for suppliers or HDD models to keep an eye out for.

[Gyro]

I've bought a few mSATA SSDs on ebay over the last few weeks - 250/256GB for my Linux laptop system disks. All were main brand, a couple of Samsungs and a Kingston (main'ish I suppose). All were relatively low hours and cycle count with nothing to be suspicious of in the SMART data and believable benchmark results. I'd rather buy those than new no-name (to me) Chinese brands - there have been a couple of reports of dead year old Phison ones on the forum recently. I got my used ones for around 10-20% of the price of new no-name ones anyway.

I picked a few 500G 2.5" WD black drives a couple of years ago that had single digit hours on them that were pulls by companies swapping them for SSDs I guess those will have dried up as the laptops will now be supplied with SSDs in the first place. All are still going strong. Oh I picked up a pair of decent Samsung 8GB SODIMMs for one of my Thinkpads recently too, for little money too.

For me, it's a viable route to upgrading as my needs are modest - I'm behind the curve in terms of maximum demand. mSATA isn't being used in new laptops now, they're all going M2 single drive SSD. My clunky old Thinkpads can accommodate 2 x 2.5" and an mSATA so I'm not pushed for drive capacity and have redundancy.

Short answer, it works very economically for me, your needs may well be different.


Edit: I should probably add that the cheaply ebay purchased smaller capacity 128GB Sandisk mSATA SSDs, that were the predecessors of the newly acquired ones, have lived for 3+ years, trouble free and still showing minimal wear.

[Geoff-AU]

I bought 5 x second hand SAS drives off a computer trader's listing on ebay.  One of them repeatedly failed SMART Long test at the same LBA.  I started making preparations to return it but then thought I'd try a full disk wipe using 'dd' and after that succeeded, the Smart Long tests consistently passed.  So then I learned Smart Long is a media read test - and I had a corrupt sector (caused by someone pulling power during a write, probably).  Overwriting the data sorted that out, and all 5 disks have been working beautifully for the last couple of years.

I also recently bought a used mini PC which came with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD for much less than the price it would have cost me to buy a SBC.

Second hand market is worthwhile..  try and buy from traders not from individuals, traders know what to look for and care about their reputation.