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Comment on Are there cheap refurbished HDD resellers in Europe, like ServerPartDeals?

just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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 likely 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 inna 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.

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PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - macattack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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    just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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