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?
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!