Hi, I seek your help once again. I’m in the need of upgrading my storage now and I found what I consider to be a good deal via Amazon on an older gen enterprise WD drive that supposedly hasn’t been used, but I’ll let the power on hours tell me the truth. The price is about 16usd/TB and I’m wondering if this is a bad idea due to the age of the drive? I’m guessing the drive would be about 10 years old maybe. The plan would be to buy 2: 1 for my cold media backups and the other would be a backup for the cold media backup.
If it’s not been used, there should be no major difference. That’s a big IF though. There’s lots of resellers on NewEgg and Amazon that sell “refurbished” drives with a BS warranty of 30-90 days, after which the drives will more than likely fail. Most of these resellers reset the SMART data to report a drive as passing, or go so far as to swap controller boards to make it seem new. Do your research before buying.
Might be stupid to ask but how would you go about weeding out the bad sellers from the good ones when it comes to hard drives? Especially on secondhand markets like eBay and amazon
Reviews, mostly. Don’t buy from new accounts without older AND recent reviews. If this is supposed to be a new product, check the warranty on the drive with the manufacturer before hooking it up, and if something seems fishy, send it right back for a refund. That’s about all I got.
Don’t use Amazon or Ebay, use something like serverpartdeals.com so you know you’re not buying from some fly-by-night company that’ll disappear when you try to do a warranty claim.
Mechanics doesn’t like just sitting around. 10 years is not nothing, I’d definitely take that into account.