I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.
I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.
In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?
Direct from Seagate wouldn’t be bad, check their store first to see if you can cut out Amazon.
I was talking about random reseller stores. “Manufacturer refurbished” for things you can’t see is almost always a good idea. The manufacturer has their brand name on the line and usually go over common fail points and replace if it looks worn.
Stores/Amazon doing “renewed” means they tried to cover up superficial damage and is completely different. It might look ok on the outside and be complete junk on the inside.
Think of “renewed” as “open box returns” except it might have taken the last user 5 years to return. It’s a much worse gamble.