I’m in the marked for a used 4TB for my offsite backup. As I’ve recently acquired four 12TB drives (about 10000 hours and one to two years old) for 130€ each, I was optimistic. 30 to 40€ I thought. Easy.
WRONG! Used drive, failing SMART stats, 40€. Here is a new drive, no hours on it. Oh wait, it was cold storage and it’s almost 8 years old. Price? 90€ (mind you, a new drive costs about 110€). Another drive has already failed, but someone wants 25€ for e-waste. No Sir, it worked fine when I used Check-Disk, please buy. Most of the decent ones are 70 to 80€, way too close to the new price. I PAID 130 FOR 12TB. These drive were almost new and under warranty. WHY DO THIS NUMBNUT WANT 80 EURO FOR A USED 4TB Drive? And what sane person doesn’t put SMART data in their offerings??? I have to ask at least 50 percent of the time. Don’t even get me started on those external hard drives, they were trash to begin with. I’m SO CLOSE to buying a high capacity drive, because in that segment, people actually know what they are doing and understand what they have.
Rant over.
What gives? Did these people buy them, when they were much more expensive? Does anyone now a good site that ships refurbished drives to Germany? Most of those I found are also rippoffs…
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There are some decently priced drives available used on eBay and Mercari, but they tend to get snatched up pretty quickly. Official refurbs are probably your best bet if you don’t want new, I know B&H sells official refurbs.
The main issue is people think ‘I spent $200 on this, it still works, I’ll sell it for $150 used’ and don’t bother checking what is actually selling. Both eBay and Mercari have a sold listings filter, which is a great way for both buyers and sellers to figure out what things are actually worth.
Serverpartdeals.com is my source for attractively-priced manufacturer refurbished drives.
https://diskprices.com/ is another good one
Wow. Thanks for sharing this site. This is awesome
Yeah, that seems to be the case. I’ll be on the lookout for official refurbished drives, thanks for your input!
Are there even that many people still buying HDDs that small considering SSD and NVMe are not that much more expensive and a lot faster?
With 4 TB, the price difference is quite painful (at least for me). With anything below, I’d buy an SSD without thinking twice.
My point was more that there are likely fewer people who bought them new so that would limit the availability of used drives of that size.
People might also replace a 4TB HDD with a 2TB NVMe or SSD if they value speed over capacity.
There is quite a price difference, at least here in Germany. It easily be double, if not more… I’d love to use SSDs, but can’t afford them right now
Agree 100% about the smart data and hate the excuse of “I have too many drives…” but I guess I understand since they’re a wholesaler. They mostly rely on their vendors for the testing. The only words of advise I can give since I was in the same exact shoes as you a couple months ago is this on ebay: stick to known sellers (serverpartsdeals and goharddrives are the big, reliable ones on there), aim for something less than 5 years old since actual powered on hours aren’t really reliable like miles on a car, look for a seller warranty and a free return policy not a manufacturer warranty since they were kinda a bitch to deal with, make sure you message them about packaging the drives correctly (bubblewrap + antistatic bag + box) can’t tell how many of them thought it was fine sending a drive in a yellow bubblewrap envelope, and the biggest one is multiple drives since you already have that covered I don’t need to explain it. For 4tb I wouldn’t go anywhere above 35$ USD think that’s 33€ but could be wrong. I wish you luck
I bought Seagate 12 TB refurbished for 120€, I dont know is that a good deal, but that thing is noisy! Working fine tho. Its from amazon.de and they have 4TB WD blue for 70€, also refurbished. Yeah its not cheap imo
I didn’t even think to look at Amazon, but for 12TB, that is an okay to good price. Too bad the 4TB is inappropriately expensive…
Seagates are the loudest drives I’ve owned
I was thinking how loud it can be, but now I know 🤣 it cost 50% of new WD red and that makes it a bit less noisy
Which ones do you have? I have a seagate ironwolf 4TiB which is literally silent. I had it running 24/7 next to my bess headrest without issues.
Then I bought 2 Toshiba MG series 16TiB drives and I can hear those with my door closed while they are 2 rooms away whenever there are write operations
Very bad value idea buying used drives
If you check it and run it through a course and a decent one year guarantee, you should be fine. If it doesn’t fail then it won’t fail for quite some time.
Just make sure to put it in some RAID or parity
I just swapped my >10 year old WD Reds with refurbished used drives at 1/3 of the price, just because i need more space, these things last if you take some care.
Depends how you buy them. You can sort of smell the duds by the way they don’t post SMART or post incomplete parts of it. If the SMART looks good and the serial matches the SMART it’s good odds it will be fine.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PSU Power Supply Unit RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
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I have no idea why, but I made the same experience. Used drives are in most cases much overprized. Often far beyond the price/TB of new, larger disks.
Could it perhaps be specific models that are no longer manufactured? I was checking out the price I could expect for one of my old PSUs and found that it was apparently a particularly well liked unit for some reason, and so it’s used price was a fair bit higher than expected.
My guess is that it is often hard for people to grasp that HDDs loose value much faster than other items they own. New HDDs are larger and offer better price per TB, and older HDDs have a higher risk to fail.
I can buy new HDDs at 16€/TB, why should I spend 12€/TB on a used disk?
With the right timing/deals you get them even cheaper. Mindfactory had 20 TB Seagate exo drives on a deal for 219€ (~11€/TB) The 18 TB Seagate exos were often on 239€. (13.2€/TB)
Where did you got these new 16€/TB HDDs?
Mindfactory is a good store for middle Europe. But not sure where they ship to.
One of the best offers I could find is 300€ for 20 TB, which makes exactly 15€/TB.
Good to know I’m not the only one!
Always buy new drives
I’ve had great success with used drives so far, mind you I only buy slightly used with lots of remaining warranty… Saved me tons.
I got three, used Samsung 970PRO M.2 drives for $40 each. Looking at them with Crystal Disk and one is 100% health, one is 72%, one is 52%. I dont see the 52% reaching 0% before my system is replaced within the next 5-7years.
Seeing that my Samsung 512gb only lost 5% in 5 years and I made many transfers I really wonder how the previous owner got to 52%
Proxmox eats consumer grade SSDs (at least that’s what people are talking about)
I wondered the same thing.
I got one or 2 4 TB drives (Seagate IronWolf). If you’re interested in 5-6 year old NAS drives that got replaced with larger capacity ones, send me a message and I’ll send you the smart data. I wasn’t planning on selling them, but they’re not being used anymore so I might just as well.
Thank you for your offer, but these are too old for what I want to do with them. Cheers!
Understandable. Good luck hunting for drives!
I see a ton of price fluctuation in used drives. One way I’ve had some success is in seeking out drives sold in lots. Often I’ll also see SAS drives sell for less than a SATA drive of the same size.
I’d be scared to be ripped off in a lot. Do they show drive stats before sale?
Depends on the seller. It’s pretty easy to drop the seller a line and ask for details (and if they’re unwilling to provide them that could be a red flag). I had two drives die during burn-in once. I try to pick reputable sellers and they were pretty quick to replace them.
Guess there is more interest for those drives. Much more ppl need 4 TB drives. Only lunatics buy drives over 10 TB.
But just guessing
Only lunatics buy drives over 10 TB.
Hey! No need to call us out like that.
I am actually surprised how many did not get it.
Hej. I need all of that data. And those movies too. But yeah, seems to be the case. Weird, that people buy those drives, when 12tb aren’t that much more expensive. We’ll, but here I am but only because I had an old but okay 4TB drive lying around.
