However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it.

It’s honestly not even worth trying to use the right terminology these days…

Every seller/manufacturer uses slightly different definitions.

So to clarify, what’s good is:

A product that was sent back to manufacturer and “manufacturer refurbished” meaning that common fail points were inspected and repaired even if a failure would be emmenient but it’s still working

Pretty much anything else, would be bad.

An example of what is bad is:

“Amazon/ebay refurbished” where someone may have wiped the dust off and possibly checked to see if it turned on.

Especially for hard drives, the refurbishing is built into the purchase contract of the new drives. And since the purchaser and manufacturer both understand the refresh is proactive and the old drives still have life in them, it knocks off a percentage on the new drives and that’s where we can find deals.

I think I’ve got a 1TB that’s ~20 years old I got that way. It’s still technically in my main PC, but at this point it’s an important archive drive that just doesn’t get read or wrote very often.

I’ve just literally never had a HDD or SD die tho. I don’t know why people act like they’re disposable parts of a PC still.