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I recently bought a new 14TB disk drive to put in my new 4-disk enclosure (no raid or anything special, just a simple enclosure to save power strips) connected to my file server via 6gb eSATA.
I liked the way it performed so went back to buy another one only to find it was out of stock but they offered a "renewed" version of the same disk for $10 less. I decided against this as disk life seemed important and I don't care how much they polished the case, the disk itself had obviously done some amount of spinning before it was "renewed".
Anyone got any definite knowledge or even vague opinions about this?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Use the renewed one as a backup / for backups of the new one (or vise versa).
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: Use the renewed one as a backup / for backups of the new one
Backups are for for cowards. Live dangerously!
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
To err is human, to arr is pirate.
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$10 off on a $300 dollar HDD to get a used drive? I'll give it a miss. 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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But think of all the pron "important work documents" you could recover if they haven't wiped it properly!
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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HDDs are assembled in a clean room (How it's made - Western Digital Hard Disk Drives - YouTube), because even dust particles can cause damage to the platters or R/W heads. There is no guarantee that the "renewal" work was performed to the same standard.
Note that some HDD manufacturers will sell refurbished drives. These are typically repaired drives that have been tested by the manufacturer to meet the same standards as new drives, and are typically sold at a significant discount. Going to Western Digital's website, a MyCloud Home 8TB lists for US $299, while a refurbished device lists for US $199.
Personally, given the relatively low price/TB of new HDDs, I would not risk my data on a drive that has already failed once.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: a drive that has already failed once
^ This.
Why else does anyone return a drive?
It's a ticking timebomb. I would not use a drive for anything important. That includes using it as a backup drive, as someone above suggested. Why would you back up anything on a drive you'd have less trust in than a drive for your "live" data??
Unless it's purely as an additional backup set.
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dandy72 wrote: Why else does anyone return a drive?
I had to search on "renewed", as I had no idea what the term means:
4. Renewed
In general, refurbished and renewed refer to the same thing. But Amazon's renewed means more things. It not only includes refurbished products, but also pre-owned and open-box products.
Pre-owned: Products that are likely used, but were in better condition when returned than a refurbished product may have been.
Open-box: Products whose packaging was opened but the actual product was not used.
A large percentage of refurbished products are open box, e.g., the box was opened but the product never used. It's possible that the item was non-functional and has been repaired, but in the case of HD, that is highly unlikely due to the conditions necessary for repair.
All refurbished items have been inspected, in contrast to production items where it's typically 1 in 10,000, so refurbs can be a good choice.
However, for $10 off a $300 item? I'd buy new. If it was 1/3 off, I'd think about it.
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OP said it was "the only one available". Everybody ignores that point.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I still wouldn't buy the refurbished disk. It's not as if new disks are not being made, so in the worst case he can buy new from another seller.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: OP said it was "the only one available". Everybody ignores that point.
You don't build a system you want to be able to rely on using questionable parts. No reliable parts? Wait until they become available, or go elsewhere.
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There's a reason it was the only one available - no one else wanted to trust their data to a used disk.
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HDDs are assembled in a clean room
No way anyone is going to open a factory-sealed drive. Whatever 'renewed' means, it doesn't mean that.
What matters here is how many hours of operation the drive has experienced - they don't last forever. I think SMART might tell you that, but only after you've bought it, of course. As for why it was returned, well people return stuff for all sorts of reasons. If it's Amazon, they have a very liberal returns policy.
But also, what Griff said.
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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The big risks with "renewed"/"refurbished" drives are that you don't know how long they were operating, under what conditions, or what kind of refurbishment work was performed on them. I don't think the risk is worth it.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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If you aren't using raid then you are prepared to lose some files if a disk fails, so, as long as the warranty is good, a "renewed" drive shouldn't make any difference. However, as has been mentioned, $10 off seems a very small reduction; I'd expect this disk to be open-box, 1 or 2 power cycles and power on hours in single figures and even then I'd haggle.
If you were using raid, then using a "renewed" disk shouldn't be a problem, but again $10 seems a pretty low reduction.
Not using raid and expecting that a new disk would be less likely to fail than a "renewed" one is just being optimistic.
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Sadly, my old NAS fried a disk port, and that fried a disk, or a disk fried itself and that fried the disk port - but since Seagate made all the disks and the NAS itself, it's a moot point which did which.
Certainly the disk from port 2 is dead, and if I plug anything into port 2 the whole NAS locks up solid. And somehow, that destroyed the whole volume at the same time so all my info is toast. Never mind, I have the important stuff on offline archives, but I've lost all the JPG, MP3, and MP4 I loaded on from phones, CD's and DVDs over the years.
So, I've replaced the disk with an identical one to keep them the same, and bought a new NAS - QNAP TS453 this time. It's currently building the RAID volume which'll be a while longer as 16TB of disks is a time consuming process even at 6Gb/sec.
But test writes even while it's doing that show it's about 4 times faster write speed than the Seagate, and that should improve once the volume is complete.
And it supports SMB3 so Windows likes it!
But it can do other things: LDX and Docker containers ... including SQL Server as supplied in Developer Edition 2019 by Microsoft.
That could be well worth putting on ... anyone got experience loading a docker SQL/Linux combo? (I know, I know - linux is the devil's OS but I don't have to touch it once it's running and it'll export it from my dev PC).
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I have a 9 year old Synology NAS with 4TB of mirrored drives. In the last couple years, I've moved most stuff to the cloud and archived the remainder to external USB drives. When the NAS dies - I'll unplug it and forget it. Life is too short to manage home networks. 
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fgs1963 wrote: Life is too short to manage home networks upload to / download from so-called cloud services
FTFY.
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Yep. 8Mb/s upload vs 100+MB/s write speed? Not a contest.
Even with the Seagate, I got 35MB/s writes.
[edit]
"200+MB/s write speed" changed to "100+MB/s write speed" - finger trouble. Should have spotted it, given my LAN is "only" 1Gb/s ... which will clearly put an upper cap on transfer rates. 
[/edit]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
modified 11-Aug-22 1:19am.
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To each their own. I analyzed my usage and decided the cloud was a better choice.
Just curious… what kind of big data files are you transferring so frequently that makes local network storage so important.
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The bulk of the big stuff is movies - I ripped all my DVD's to MP4 so they were all available without a change of physical disks. Since each one averages out at around 3GB, that's a significant amount of data to try and squeeze through an 8Mb/s upload!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Do you use a media server like Plex or Kodi? Or something more basic like DLNA?
I didn’t move movie files to the cloud (just too damn big and I don’t want to pay for that much storage). I currently use Plex on my NAS but find that I almost never use it anymore. End up streaming from Netflix, Prime, Apple TV+, etc… As a test (for when the NAS dies eventually), I copied the movies to an external USB drive and can plug it into the TV directly and use the TVs menus to access. Works fine.
No doubt, a media server NAS is slightly more convenient - I just decided the ~$1000 cost wasn’t worth it for my use.
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Hmmm,
Life is too short to wait most of the day for the 1Gb of video you want to watch to transfer from the cloud to your PC at approx 2Mb per sec (providing the connection even stays up for that long).
Don't forget that only a small proportion of the world (and not much more of the 'prosperous' west) has fast, reliable cloud connections.
I am not hopeful that, having been offered fast fibre internet, it will actually be provided by the 10th anniversary of that first offer... (9 years, 7 months and counting!)
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OriginalGriff wrote: Seagate made all the disks and the NAS itself
The cynic in me wants to say "well there's your problem right there".
Maybe it's just my bad luck, but all the Seagate drives I've ever owned are dead. I tend to only buy WD, and of all WD drives that are no longer in service, it's because their low capacity doesn't make them worth using anymore, not because they died. They got retired still going strong.
I was even given an old system from work a good while back. 4 Seagate drives...2 were dead, and another one couldn't even complete a format request. My bias is entirely based on my own experience. YMMV.
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My experience matches yours. Seagate drives fail when they're 18 months old or the data on them becomes critical to your job, whichever comes first. We have a couple RAID arrays originally built using Seagate drives but are now populated with Western Digital.
Software Zen: delete this;
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