Any experience with 'refurbished' WD HDDs?

[tic226]

I got five 2TB Western Digital RE4-GP drives last week, contacted the ebay seller beforehand and been told that the drives are 'refurbished'. After arrival i checked SMART data, ran badblocks and did some load testing however i found two things that look strange to me:

1. The SMART data has been wiped except the power-on-hours, which showed between 47k-49k hours. Is it impossible to wipe the power-on-hours data from these types of drives?

2. The drives didn't come with a 'white label' like so many other refurbished drives i read about, i expect that after refurbishment the drives are marked at least. Checking the serial numbers with WD shows them as OEM drives.

One of the drives has 7 reallocated sectors and after some stress testing the number didn't increase. But in light of the above stated i am contemplating returning at least the drive with the reallocated sectors.
Has anyone experience with refurbished WD drives?

 

[Tom5051]

The GP series drives (green power) are only up to 5,400rpm drives (they are green drives with TLER enabled) and they stopped making them years ago.
I wouldn't put any data that I couldn't afford to lose on a drive with any reallocated sectors.
Seems that some ebay sellers have worked out how to fudge some or all of the smart data so personally I would only trust a drive that I purchased new from an authorised reseller.

 

[tic226]

The GP series drives (green power) are only up to 5,400rpm drives (they are green drives with TLER enabled) and they stopped making them years ago.
I wouldn't put any data that I couldn't afford to lose on a drive with any reallocated sectors.
Seems that some ebay sellers have worked out how to fudge some or all of the smart data so personally I would only trust a drive that I purchased new from an authorised reseller.

Oh.. damn, i didn't know about the -GP thing, didn't expect 'enterprise drives' to even have 'green' functions.
I was against buying used/refurbed drives but decided to buy a few of those anyway (i blame the whisky), looks like i paid an expensive lesson.

 

[Tom5051]

I've still got a couple of 2TB RE-GPs in use here at home and they are plenty fast enough for networked storage over 1GBe. So don't think they are not good drives because they are very reliable.
Just not a good sign when you get reallocated sectors.

 

[tic226]

I will use the four good ones and get a replacement for the drive with the reallocated sectors. I got them for my homelab, there will be nothing important on them but for the price of the five used ones (~220EUR) i could've gotten three new ones of the type i already use (Toshiba DT01...).
At least now i learned first hand that buying used/refurbed can be a good deal but new drives are a safer bet.

Thank you for your guidance in this matter

 

[Tom5051]

The latest WD RE drives are essentially a 7,200 rpm black drive with a few internal tweaks and TLER enabled. You used to be able to enable and disable TLER on WD drives with a jumper but not anymore.
Really you want TLER or other manufacturers equivalent enabled if you are using the disks in a hardware RAID array. ZFS is able to wait longer for a disk to recover from an error.
Here is a Wikipedia article on TLER and what it does:
Error recovery control - Wikipedia

 

[tic226]

I was under the impression that software RAID (mdadm in my case) doesn't use TLER and generally waits a lot longer than a hardware RAID controller so i didn't look for that feature at all.

I'm always having a hard time finding detailed spec sheets for HDDs (except WD in this particular case), like which drives use shingled tracks and which ones do not. Is there a list providing an overview of different drives/manufacturers and their features?

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Seems that some ebay sellers have worked out how to fudge some or all of the smart data so personally I would only trust a drive that I purchased new from an authorised reseller.

It isn't hard. There's an somewhat-standard serial port on many drives (look for a row of 4 pins). Once you get in there, there's a command (N1) that creates an empty SMART sector.

 

[tic226]

It isn't hard. There's an somewhat-standard serial port on many drives (look for a row of 4 pins). Once you get in there, there's a command (N1) that creates an empty SMART sector.

It's really dead simple, on some drives even updating the firmware (SSDs) resets the SMART table. I was just astounded that the power on hours entry on these 5 HDDs remained intact.