Out of curiosity, how old was that drive?

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.

Depends.

If it’s “buy from Amazon” then you can return it with no issue if shits bad.

If Amazon is just the middleman, than the seller could be scamming and will either fight returns or just close up shop. I wouldn’t buy any used electronic over $200 from a middle man because of that, so this is kind of on the line.

But modern HDDs hold up a lot better than they used to. I tend to “ship of Theseus” PC builds and I’ve got some HDDs probably 15 years old that are still going strong.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard anyone say a HDD failed. Just people remembering what it was like 25 years ago. We don’t think of innovation with old tech like HDDs, but there’s been a lot of improvements to the parts that used to fail regularly.

Exos x18 are enterprise drives that came out last than 5 years ago, I can’t imagine they were replaced because they’re all bad, just companies upgrading to newer tech. So should be fine and last you well over a decade.

Yeah, dude tried to open his own personal Netflix and is surprised it got taken down.

From post history he managed to keep it up for less than a month.

I’m betting by “friends” he meant either online friends he’s never met, or people he wanted to impress.

So they gave zero fucks and handed it out to more people. Like, just the idea that you’re giving it to so many people that you actually buy a domain?

There’s a reason everyone isn’t already doing it already.

The entire existence of computers outside the last five years…

Yeah, that’s crazy.

I guess all those $100 deals were used too.

So I guess at least used prices went down?

But I remember years ago a shuckable 12tb for like $120-140 on sale wasnt unusual on buildapcsales.

considering they’re used server parts.

That really should be in the title…

I dunno, I’m one of those people who never stops using a drive until it breaks, and they never really break anymore. Oldest in my current PC is probably 20 year old HDD.

So yeah, these probably are fine and will still last a long time. But for like $20 more you don’t have to worry about losing the data on it.

Edit:

Apparently prices just haven’t changed in half a decade or longer? I knew prices went up for COVID, assumed they went back down at some point.

Honestly, servers are about the only use for HDDs these days.

It’s better to have huge files on a HDD than small ones on an SSD. So get a SSD for operating system and programs. Then a large HDD for media.

https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-hard-drives

You don’t need anything fancy, and you don’t need to deal with multiple drives.