Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
I've bought several used/refurbished drives from Amazon. Always HGST. I have not had any issue with them yet and some have been going for 4-5 years.
There are caveats though. The ones I bought have had the smart data wiped... So there is no way to know exactly how many hours they really have on them. Also the label is replaced so there no way to see manufactured year. I have no idea how old or beat up these things really are.
I don't put anything important on them. Just backups.
First thing to do is check SMART data to see if there are any fails. Then looking at usage hours, spin ups, pre-fails / old-age to get a general idea how worn the drive is and for how long you could make use of it depending on risk acceptance.
If there are already several clusters relocated and multiple spin up fails, I'd probably return the drive.
Apart from all the reliability stuff: I'd check the content of the drive (with a safe machine) - if it wasn't wiped you might want to notify the previous owner, so she can change her passwords or notify customers about the leak (in compliance to local regulations) etc. - even if you don't exploit that data, the merchants/dealers in the chain might already have.
I will just paste my standard procedure when I onboard any new (or used) drive: Everybody has their own ~~skin care~~ HDD check routine. This is mine:
I first check the SMART status with CrystalDisk, after this a short smart test, full surface check with Macrorit, full h2testw run, CrystalDiskMark, and then I check with CrystalDisk once again if anything besides power on hours did change.
Will take some days for a large drive but in terms of work hours we talk about less than 5 minutes and it covers pretty much anything without being too excessive.
How easy is it to wipe or fake SMART data?
wipe or fake SMART data
My guess would be that it's stored in some kind of non-volatile memory, i.e. EEPROM. Not sure if anyone ever tried that, but with the dedication of some hardware hackers that seems at least feasible. Reverse engineering / overriding the HDD's firmware would be another approach to return fake or manipulated values.
I haven't seen something like that in the wild so far. What I have seen are manipulated USB sticks though: advertising the wrong size (could be tested with h2testw) or worse.
I've bought used / refurbished (not sure which) with erased smart data. It being all zeros was a clear sign of erased / tampered info. After running badblocks some relocated sectors showed up.
personally, i would never buy a used drive
Depends. Are we taking refurbished, or returned sales?
Refurbished is going to have to be hella cheap to consider it for a highly redundant storage of unimportant things maybe raid 10 backup storage it something.
Returned sales are mostly still as good a new and returned for various unrelated reasons. As long as I get full warranty and right to return as if it was brand new, i don't mind.
I run used disks with tens of thousands of power on hours. Yes the risk of each disk dying is higher but only marginally and the cost is dramatically lower. To avoid data loss when they die, I have functioning backups. This system is working really well for me.