Late last year I decided to take a chance on some recertified ironwolf 10TB drives, and they seem to be doing well so far. (I was encouraged to try them after seeing LTT experiment with these kinds of drives from server parts deals)
However, my offsite backup truenas machine now appears to have a dying ironwolf 4TB (3 months out of warranty!💩) due to failing smart tests, but when looking for a replacement drive, I can only find new ones (and a new 4TB costs as much as the 10TB did for me a year ago).
I’ve heard seagate has made an official ebay shop for recertified drives - have they been cracking down on the practice in general? Was the idea of these drives simply too risky? Am I just terrible at searching for deals online?
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Goes in waves and based on vendor. My build is based on 18tb drives and 6 months ago when a drive in my array failed my go to vendor (serverpartdeals) had no stock in that capacity. Like 0 units. Had to use my backup vendor (go hard drive) who in my experience is slightly more expensive.
Looking now spd has 18tb back in stock with several models to choose from. 10tb too but much less options (literally 2). Prices are wack nowadays - in 2023 I could get a refurb 18tb exos drive for $180 and now it’s $270-290. Fucking wild and I’m glad I built up my array when I did. It’s generally the cheapest decent option in that capacity; goharddrive has some cheaper options (Toshiba for $230, unaware of statistics for that drive, MDD for $260, rebranded exos drives so a slightly better deal but still way over 2023 prices).
That all said my array is 15 refurb drives and has been going for like 7 years now. Drive failure rate is low, 3 failures in that time. 2 drives was replaced by seagate with a brand new drive bc the spd drive still had mfr warranty left. The 3rd was an HGST that didn’t have mfr warranty but did have spd warranty and they replaced it immediately with an equivalent drive (they didn’t have more HGST at the time). That said I do worry seeing times where they are literally wiped out of stock; if I need a drive replacement I need it asap and if they have nothing on hand does that mean they hold none back for warranty replacements? Sure hope not.
Struggle to recommend them now though because the prices aren’t worthwhile. A new 18tb exos is 280-290 on amazon. Why the fuck would you buy a refurb when a new drive is only $20 more or the same price???
This is my issue now, I need more storage and the prices are ridiculous. I dont see them getting better soon, either, so I’m probably going to buy new.
Seagate just broke up a massive counterfeiting ring where drives were being passed off as new and having their SMART values tweaked. That’s a good part of the reason they’re controlling the refurbs so that they can check them. It’s also why you saw Seagate getting hammered in the BB charts.
In my experience, they come in waves. They come either as data centres seek to replace or renew existing drives, but as a result, there aren’t as many lower capacity drives available. Lately, I’ve only seen 10+TB drives under a recertified banner, though you can find lower capacity drives that are “refurbished” instead. They will have the power-on hours to match though, as these are the refuse from those sorts of drive replacements.
You may find better luck with local used marketplaces if you only need cheap storage. Otherwise, they do seem less common if you don’t need large capacity drives.
It’s definitely dried up a fair bit over the last couple of years. In January 2025 I got some recertified 12TB Ironwolfs for $140 each from GoHardDrive, and that was already a fair bit over what they historically had been. Same drives are now $200 on GoHardDrive, and $220 on Amazon. You can just get them new $250, so at that point I barely think it’s worth it to get recertified unless you’re really stretching a budget. I’m sure the businesses are very happy with the demand they got now, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that LTT and other Youtubers covering these sites really drove up demand and prices.
Also, the smaller drives are a lot harder to find recertified these days since enterprise users will usually go for much larger capacities, so yeah, for 4TB you’ll probably have to go for new. You could also just get a larger drive and only use 4TB of it, assuming this is going into some kind of array. Upgrade the other one at a later date, then just expand your pool!
What region are you in?
Europe
I’d heard of servershop24 when I lived in germany, though I never used it. A quick search also showed give1life
I got 3 14 TB Seagate Exos drives from here like 3 years ago. They’ve been working great.
I just bought some recertified Western Digital drives on eBay. First time.
3 out of 4 of the drives weren’t detected by the OS… I’m in the middle of RMA right now. They received my broken drives last week, but I haven’t heard anything back yet…
All the AI Slop has to get stored somehow
