I am currently expanding my Homelab setup, and want to buy a 10TB drive, for media storage. It’s a Seagate Ironwolf disk, so perfect for the job. But, it’s second hand. It was originally bought in 2019, but stopped being used after 2022. Only used for static storage, it’s been booted less than 50 times. I can get it for 1/3 of the original price.
What do you think? Are there any rules about buying used storage I should know about before buying it?
dont: Used HDD are not worth the risk/cost as the chance of failure outside of warranty is too high. Maybe: Enterprise SSD’s, sometimes you can find low ware SSDs that are cast off from enterprise organizations at reasonable prices, often more so if its used SAS as average consumers need an HBA to utilize the drive. Be cautious as some SSD’s are discarded because of firmware bugs that cause early failures.