datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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Depends. Are we taking refurbished, or returned sales?
Refurbished is going to have to be hella cheap to consider it for a highly redundant storage of unimportant things maybe raid 10 backup storage it something.
Returned sales are mostly still as good a new and returned for various unrelated reasons. As long as I get full warranty and right to return as if it was brand new, i don't mind.
I run used disks with tens of thousands of power on hours. Yes the risk of each disk dying is higher but only marginally and the cost is dramatically lower. To avoid data loss when they die, I have functioning backups. This system is working really well for me.
oh, yeah, returned drives are a maybe. still gotta check it out to make sure it wasn't returned after being dropped or worse, but it could be fine.
Yeah if I had full warranty I would be happy taking a punt but not sure I should take the risk... probably better to wait for a sale
Having worked at Amazon processing customer returns, you do not want to buy drives that have been processed through Amazon customer returns. We took them in whatever package the customer sent them in (I've seen gallon size ziploc freezer bags), which are just tossed into a big UPS box with who knows what else, then jittered around on conveyor bars, and then it goes into a thin plastic bag (not anti-static), thrown into (this is not an exaggeration, a lot of employees toss the items in like Kobe, it gets boring after your 900th item this week) big plastic staticky tote bins clunking around underneath who knows what else, jittered and clunked on the conveyors again, and then eventually sent to the warehouse deals desk. All protected by nothing more than a thin plastic bag.
I'd actually trust the refurb more than returned customer purchases.