Are refurbished or RMA'd hard-drives reliable??

[ranalli]

Are these drives as reliable as their new counterparts??? Anyone have any insight on this by any chance??

Thanks,
Ranalli

 

[Davegod]

personally, nay other component can be replaced easily, taking pretty much only aslong as it takes to deliver. If a HDD goes down otoh, you will lose any data, files etc since your last backup - even then a reformat & os reinstall can take a long time, especially if your a Type A personality fiddling and tweaking eveything how you like it. Not something to skimp on IMHO. I think that since these individual drives have already been rejected by someone, chances of it being a duff drive must surely be greater - its not exactly common for hdd's to be incompatible with someone's soundcard or something.

 

[jasonsRX7]

I agree with Davegod. As a rule, I won't use any refurb anything. Seen lots of refurb HD's fail within days after installing them.

WD passes some of their bad drives to another company to be refurbished. I have a refurb WD laying here that has been relabeled Magnetic Data Technologies. It came out of a refurb HP machine that also bit the dust. The drive is in bad shape, it's physically beatup on the outside...

Leave the refurbs alone

 

[dkozloski]

I have been using refurbed SCSI hard drives for many years along with most of the professionals I know and have never had a failure. Refurbed junk is still refurbed junk but refurbed good stuff is still good stuff.

 

[jasonsRX7]

Originally posted by: dkozloski
I have been using refurbed SCSI hard drives for many years along with most of the professionals I know and have never had a failure. Refurbed junk is still refurbed junk but refurbed good stuff is still good stuff.

Someone had a failure with those drives or they wouldn't be refurbs . When you're looking at buying a refurbished drive, how do you weed out the junk from the good stuff? I see it like this, IDE drives are cheap enough now to not have to buy refurbs. 80gb drives are under $100, how much cheaper would a refurb be? If you buy SCSI, you're either looking for performance or reliability and if it's reliability you're after, you shouldn't be as worried about the cost.

But hey, that's just what I think.

 

[dkozloski]

There are tons of refurbs that have never been failures. Servers are upgraded and arrays of hundreds of drives are turned in on trade. The traded in drives are refurbed and sold for spares or for upgrades. There must be thousands of drives and controllers circulating in the used market. Joe Blow end user never sees them but the professionals do.

 

[jasonsRX7]

Originally posted by: dkozloski
There must be thousands of drives and controllers circulating in the used market. Joe Blow end user never sees them but the professionals do.

Then Joe Blow end user should probably buy a new drive. Joe Blow end user probably doesn't have an account with Insight or Ingram where his CSR calls up and says "hey just got a bunch of drive pulls from one of our customers. You interested?"

I mean, you're not wrong, there are good drives out there, but if Ranalli is going to hop online an order something that says "refurb" just cause it's cheaper, the chances are he's going to get a drive that's been given the quick once over and sent out the door.

EDIT:
Just wanted to add that lots of vendors selling system pulls will note so in their description, and not simply "refurbished" because they want to distinguish from the repaired items.