Whats the opinion on second hand hdds?

whats the opinion on second hand hdds?
Anyone had experience with them? Thinking of getting a bunch of them dirt cheap to use as archives/ for not super important stuff

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I have like a dozen of them, mostly HGST 3TBs. Those can be had for under $50, which is a pretty good price per terabyte. I've had a few that coughed up bad sectors or I/O errors, those were all resolved by ZFS or Btrfs's scrubbing and redundancy features.

There's really no reason not to buy them considering the amount of money that you're saving, and the fact that you have to protect against drive failures with redundancy and backups regardless of whether you buy new or used drives.

Just check SMART and you're fine.

Just keep up backups like you should and you'll be fine

I run 2 HGST drives. Been 2 years for one HDD, and 1 year for the other. Rocking solid.

I bought a bunch for my secondary computers, honestly if anything they fail less than new drives.

They're good for mirrors but nothing else, you don't want to make a RAID5 out of them and have a second drive die while resilvering.

If you're bothered by RAID5's lack of redundancy while resilvering with used drives, you should be bothered by it with new drives. In any case the used drives are so much cheaper that you can, say, buy six of them and do RAID6 instead of buying five new drives and putting them in RAID5. The extra redundancy makes the used drives arguably safer for the same (or lower) cost.

Dont by “used hdds” on ebay. Its a cheese pizza market and its fucking disgusting.

I recommend not trusting them. I've never had a good experience with a used HDD.

Buying second hand HDDs is like buying Second Hand Toilet paper, the existing shit on the paper in this case being someone data which sure as fuck wasn't securely "wiped"

they can work. do a full error scan, and don't buy any models with high failure rate like the old 3tb seagates.

Then "securely wipe" them yourself?

well its not your data being exposed if that happens, now is it?

for what its worth I ran photorec on one of my used drives when I got it, the drive had been zeroed.

I use them to store my pirated music

Why do you think that should bother me?

I bought a 1TB WD from a guy on craigslist and it is still fine ... maybe ten years old?

I only buy 2nd hand HDD's from reputable sources such as dedicated shops or from people I know who know how to properly wipe disks. I got my hands on a Seagate Barracuda 2TB for $15 as factory refurbished. I wouldn't trust them as my only copy though. Always make backups!

just put them into an HDD dock and run fucking DBAN for a couple passes. Even just using a slow format with wiping blank space

Why bother? Just slap a new FS on it and call it a day

>b-b-but what if the FBI comes to my house for no.reason and digs through unlinked disk sectors on my harddrive and finds something illegal?!
Get real.

potential viruses and/or sensitive data. It takes less than 3 hours to fully format a larger capacity drives and it only takes one time.

>not scraping some roastie's drive for her nudes
Never gonna make it

>viruses
Just put your own FS on it retard. Why would anything left behind get executed?
>sensitive data
Data belonging to the previous owner, not yours, so who gives a fuck?

>It takes less than 3 hours to fully format a larger capacity drives and it only takes one time.
>3 hours

You are retarded.

It's more like buying a house and the previous occupants left all their furniture. If you don't want it just get rid of it.

If the owner of that data didn't care enough to wipe it explain why I should.

potentially getting fucked is good enough.

Personally, I would be wiping used drives without ever knowing what may or may not be on them for deniability reasons, and never go to cops if you find something... incriminating, its best to dispose of it an act like you never saw it, this is lawyer advice because if you find something and go for a report, it allows cops probable cause at which point you have a real chance they just plant something.

as for other risks, they are rare, but there are some rootkits that embed in firmwares, not sure how you would go about checking for them, but just know it could possibly infect everything.

>potentially getting fucked is good enough.
Irrational paranoia. Format it with a fresh filesystem and you're fine. Anything else is a waste of your time.

My power is $.08/kwh and when I did the math recently new 10TB hard drives ended up cheaper than used 3TB drives after 18 months because of power costs. Probably fine if you want a cold storage backup for whatever reason.

well a home user, even a hobbyist, is unlikely to need the drives spun up and working hard 24/7. If you have them spinning for eight hours a day on average then you have a 4.5-year payoff period, which for me is fast getting to be lengthy enough where I don't care.

I have 4 WD blacks running in raid z1. They've worked for a long time and I don't worry about them failing despite being bought second hand.

Most places will allow you to return drives that break if it's shortly after you got them. I run every hdd I get through a battery of texts to find if there is anything wrong. If they throw errors I open up a return and that's that.

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