[ale] OT: Refurbished HDD

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Boris,

Seagate sent me a couple of refurbished drives when I sent in original ones for a warranty claim.  I presume anything wrong with them has been replaced or repaired by the factory.  The first thing I do to any drive, new or refurb, is to write it full with random data then run anywhere from 1 - 5 non destructive read write tests on them with either bad blocks or spinrite.  This forces the controller to attempt to read and write every sector and, hopefully, will expose any flaws.  This takes about 3 days for a 1 TB drive, so you can be pretty sure they don't test it that thoroughly at the factory.  Then I check the smart stats.  If it's showing any bad sectors, or certainly more than a single digit number of them, it's toast and goes back to the source.

I run another non destructive read write test on each drive 2 - 3 times per year as well as a smart check.  If you had an SSD, you'd probably want to do a read only test.

I found a neat Windows utility called crystal disk info which will monitor the smart stats and the temperature of the drive every 10 minutes or so and will email me if anything is amiss.  I'm putting that on all my systems.  I'm sure there's a way to do this in Linux, but I don't know what it is.

A "refurb" from Micro Center might mean much less than it does having a "refurb" from Seagate.  I would be hesitant to buy any drive without a 5 year warranty.  My refurb drives still have the remainder of my original 5 year warranty intact.

Sincerely,

Ron


Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com> wrote:

>I see a lot of these for sale at MicroCenter. What "refurbished" is
>supposed to mean for HDD?
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