I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.
I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.
In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?
I wouldn’t buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I’ve ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I’ve owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drives as to be useless.
Anecdotal, yes, but it’s happened enough to me that I’ve been soured on them for life.
That’s the exact opposite of my experience, if we’re talking anecdotal evidence. I’ve had 3x WD Red drives die within the warranty period,so thankfully I wasn’t out of pocket, but I now avoid them. Never had a Seagate go bad, but my goto is now Toshiba.