Zee09
$200 Site Donor 2023
Amazon sells them and I wonder why anybody would buy one. The price difference is peanuts..
Renewed Hard Drive
- Thread starter Zee09
- Start date
Doesn't make any sense to me, but I've heard of some people who talking about maybe buying a hard drive from a thrift store as a cheap backup drive. Like at the Salvation Army or Goodwill, where they're supposed to make sure they're properly wiped first. I'd think $15 for a 4 TB mobile drive would be reasonable.
Maybe as part of a RAID or mirror.
Funny you say that I just got a renewed router and its doing fine. Didn't come with any instructions at all though. Price difference was only $15 from new one but figured why not give it a try..
I can see buying a bunch of identical enterprise-class drives for a noncritical home lab environment or something, as long as they were cheap. Maybe.
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- Oct 25, 2021
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It can be a crapshoot
I once bought a Western Digital 74GB Raptor from newegg and it was a recertified. Still have it today and enjoy firing up that windows xp machine every now and then just to hear it seek. I miss the days of the loud seeking drives.
Slow by todays standards but when they were king, and you combined them in RAID 0 it was like having an SSD back then.
Today I would never buy computer components that were refreshed.
Slow by todays standards but when they were king, and you combined them in RAID 0 it was like having an SSD back then.
Today I would never buy computer components that were refreshed.
I've done it, and was satisfied. A guy had a box of them at a flea market. Picked one out, no issues at all.
Today though, why wouldn't you just get an SSD and be done with it?
Today though, why wouldn't you just get an SSD and be done with it?
Zee09
$200 Site Donor 2023
Weirdly I worship the seek and defrag... I guess we are just mechanical people eh?
I personally don't buy them, but I can see why someone wants to cheap out and use it for cold storage archives. I have a couple HDD loaded with family photos and store them in relative's house just in case my home gets burn down. It is a cheap insurance and I don't need it running every day, as long as the data retention is high like 5 years it is all good.
The biggest issue with an SSD is endurance and possibly charge leakage if it's been sitting around for years. I wouldn't worry so much about the data but about all the bookkeeping stuff. I believe the biggest issue with a hard drive would be bearing wear.
But then again a hard drive is probably going to have some sort of flash memory (for the firmware and diagnostics) on it too, and that could fade over time.
Zee09
$200 Site Donor 2023
I fired up a 10 year old SSD a few weeks ago. Computer was stored away for 7 years unplugged. Back then I had many fail of the same model so I was surprised.
I'd be worried more about maybe the firmware fading. I'm wondering if there are older PCs that no longer work because the BIOS on traditional PROMs faded. I heard typical data retention was 10-15 years.
At least with firmware on flash, I'd think there's some sort of periodic refresh going on.
I have some older devices that still work after 30 years, like calculators. However, their programming is typically in some sort of mask ROM. Pretty much all of the SOC devices that I've worked on used mask ROMs. Made it really interesting trying to make a fix. But a lot of times we could make revisions with just metal layer masks.
I am not sure about firmware fading of each product, but one thing I know is the firmware are usually stored in the more resilient than data area. If the data is stored in TLC then firmware will be stored in MLC or SLC, if the data is stored in HDD's higher density area then the firmware would be stored in the lower density area, if the data is stored in SLC then firmware would be at least stored in SLC with 2 copies, etc. I think the idea is, if your firmware is trashed then your data would be already long gone, so there is no loss if you can't boot anyways.
SSD data refresh only happens if your drive is powered on, its data retention when powered off in room temp is only 1 year. HDD's data retention is typically 5 years powered off in room temp. The way I see it, if the HDD is warranted for 5 years and you wrote a cold archive onto it before warranty expire, it should retain for another 5 years, so the firmware has to last 10 years from manufacturing date to expiration. I think the way they store firmware should last at least 10 years, or double, of the data area's 5 year data retention.
SSD data refresh only happens if your drive is powered on, its data retention when powered off in room temp is only 1 year. HDD's data retention is typically 5 years powered off in room temp. The way I see it, if the HDD is warranted for 5 years and you wrote a cold archive onto it before warranty expire, it should retain for another 5 years, so the firmware has to last 10 years from manufacturing date to expiration. I think the way they store firmware should last at least 10 years, or double, of the data area's 5 year data retention.
like rebuilt vehicle parts, depends on the quality or NOT of the work!! on the vehicle thing i put 3 cheaper rebuilt alternators on an older car that did NOT output to spec, BUT the professional built NAPA alternator lasted + went to the new owner!!! if theres little or free labor trying the cheap stuff is ok but pay someone to replace several items increases the $$$$ + savings are LOST!!
Nobody takes apart old harddrive to "renew" them like replacing bearing. They are build in cleanroom and the only thing the "rebuild" does is sort them based on the amount of life left (reallocation, power on hour, etc) and put a new label on it before selling them. They are used with their own warranty, sort of like a used car with an aftermarket warranty.
If the price is right and you only need it for what you need it for, it is probably ok. My main concern is if you don't have any redundancy and you cannot afford the down time, it is not worth the savings. If you use it to archive and you have a lot of redundancy (like the cold off site storage I mentioned above), then it is worth using.
I wouldn't use it as my boot and application HDD on my desktop, not worth the savings.
If the price is right and you only need it for what you need it for, it is probably ok. My main concern is if you don't have any redundancy and you cannot afford the down time, it is not worth the savings. If you use it to archive and you have a lot of redundancy (like the cold off site storage I mentioned above), then it is worth using.
I wouldn't use it as my boot and application HDD on my desktop, not worth the savings.
