$13/TB Sata Recertified Drives

[Wasmachineman_NL]

I'm in Aus, I would check out their postage costs to your location. I purchased 3x 16TB Exos X18 drives at US$199 each (they are out of stock now), was $93 for shipping. Even with Amex taking a cut on the exchange rate it came out to ~AUD$1100, which for 48TB of raw space is soooo much cheaper than anything I can find in Aus.

That is AUD$22.90/TB vs the best I can find on any retailer in AU being a drive that I have to shuck and therefore loose warranty on.

The packing on these HDD's was amazing too. Came in a box designed for 5 drives, closed cell foam around each drive and then double boxed with bublewrap around the inside box.

Mailing them is not a issue, getting raped by Customs is.

That and $200 for a HDD, meh. If I actually was running out of space I would have gotten some and have them shipped to my contact in the USA.

 

[i386]

I'm currently using 32 recertified white-label EXOS 16 16TB SAS drives. They've been flashed with retail seagate firmware and have been rock solid since they were deployed and I'm super happy with them.

Do you remember what firmware they had before you flashed them?
I got 4 x16 that seem to be oem versions, serial numbers are not recognized by seagate and firmware version is "SB40" instead of "sn04"...
Also did you use the seagate tools for the "cross flash" or something else?

 

[itronin]

Do you remember what firmware they had before you flashed them?
I got 4 x16 that seem to be oem versions, serial numbers are not recognized by seagate and firmware version is "SB40" instead of "sn04"...
Also did you use the seagate tools for the "cross flash" or something else?

sort of kinda of remember. ad showed retail exos16 drive. what I received was most def OEM, though marked "recertified) the firmware was something that ended in like 002 and looked very generic. there were NO stats coming back from the drive really at all. Need to find the thread on this deal as I posted some info there and a kind soul posted (at the time) the latest exos 16 firmware.

the vendor was VERY supportive though and a bit embarassed as they did not realize these were white label recertified drives. Ultimately I ended up helping them so they could flash the drives before selling them. They were also able to get updated firmware from seagate.

 

[itronin]

Do you remember what firmware they had before you flashed them?
I got 4 x16 that seem to be oem versions, serial numbers are not recognized by seagate and firmware version is "SB40" instead of "sn04"...
Also did you use the seagate tools for the "cross flash" or something else?

yeah ignore what I said above about the firmware number...

see this thread

I seem to have a hole in my memory. thanks covid.

my recollection is that I used seachest tools on a linux vm with the hba passed through to the vm.

worked fine updating the firmware and reblocking to 4k.