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 ?
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.