[ale] Refurbished HDDs

[Alex Carver]

I am looking for TB-sized disks and I'm not in Georgia any longer so 
I'll have to decline your offer.


I understand that in most cases manufacturers don't refurbish drives but 
sometimes they do or at least put their names on the service:
https://www.westerndigital.com/products/recertified
https://www.seagate.com/products/seagate-recertified/


I don't actually care all that much if it's the manufacturer or a 
third-party vendor that cleans them up, swaps a bearing or two and moves 
on. I can live with refurbished drives for this purpose. I can slowly 
swap the refurbished drives with new ones over time as budget permits 
but I can't populate the whole NAS in one shot with new.


On 2026-02-03 04:58, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
> Manufacturers don't refurbish hard drives. It doesn't happen. Third 
> parties "refurbish" by wiping and resetting drive firmware. Manufacture 
> warranties are void.
> 
> I was not clear in my offer. I'm not asking for money. I just want this 
> hardware hauled away by someone who wants it. I lack time and interest 
> to be involved. So, Alex, if you want this stuff, let me know. Once Alex 
> decides, I'll toss the rest on the group for another rehoming event. I 
> want to unload the entire space formerly used as my test gear server 
> closet. I have several thousand systems at work to wrestle with and I no 
> longer experiment at home with new technologies. At the end of the day, 
> I make tiny, wearable sculptures from silver and occasionally gold or 
> platinum, semi and precious stones, and fused glass. I'm done making 
> invisible things that 99.9% of humans don't understand.
> 
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III
> ////
> ////Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What 
> you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on 
> his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
> - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
> ////
> http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/ <http:// 
> heretothereideas.blogspot.com/>
> ////
> 
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2026, 11:54 PM Alex Carver via Ale <ale at ale.org 
> <mailto:ale at ale.org>> wrote:
> 
>     I'm no stranger to drive failures but I'm also not exactly flush with
>     cash enough to buy a dozen drives at over $300 each. Recall I wasn't
>     asking about used drives, I asked about manufacturer refurbished which
>     is a bit different.
> 
>     This is going in a NAS already, redundancy is part of the process but
>     there's other backups, too.
> 
>     On 2026-02-02 10:20, Bob Toxen wrote:
>      > It's been my experience that high quality disks, such as the Western
>      > Digital Caviar series, will last 5 years and should be replaced at
>      > that time!!!  I find most other brands to be suboptimal, e.g., expect
>      > a head crash and catastrophic loss of all data.  The Caviar Black
>     disks
>      > spin at 7200 RPM and carry a 5 year warranty!
>      >
>      > I've had poor luck with Seagate.  YMMV.
>      >
>      > I realize that a RAID array is redundant but is it worth being
>     cheap to
>      > hopefully replace every failed disk before another one also fails?
>      >
>      > Understand that the MTBF is less than that for one disk increased by
>      > being able to continue until two disks fail.  This is because,
>     assuming
>      > all disks of the same type and time in service are more likely to
>     fail
>      > around the same time, same as incandescent light bulbs.
>      >
>      > I suggest, if you use refurbished disks, pick a RAID mode, such
>     as RAID6,
>      > with double redundancy due to two different parities that can
>     withstand
>      > two disk failures in the array.
>      >
>      > Wikipedia's "RAID" entry is excellent.
>      >
>      > If the cost isn't out of your pocket buy new WD Black!
>      >
>      > Bob
>      >
>      > [Bob's political comment suppressed by Bob]
>      >
>      > On Sat, Jan 31, 2026 at 06:25:39PM -0800, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>      >> Anyone have recommendations for an online place to buy
>     refurbished HDDs (not
>      >> SSDs)? I want to add a few more drives to the NAS.
> 
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