What is the condition of used HGST HUH721010ALE601 10 TB Helium drives sold on eBay?

[Thinkcat]

Hello

I am looking to buy three of these for my NAS (RAID1, either two-way and one spare or three-way). I know drives sold by Insidesystems in Denmark have been run for 3.5 to 4 years and 1400 TB written during that time. But there's also iuppiter B.V. who sells these in the Netherlands. These cost a bit more on average, but I'd like to know if anyone has bought any from them and if so, what are the corresponding stats?

Also, what does "100 % health" mean technically? Or A-grade? I also doubt you can really "refurbish" a hard drive.

 

[slidermike]

Sounds like questions the seller could/should answer for you as the source of truth. Good questions.

 

[mach3.2]

Sounds like some arbitrary number, how do you even quantify 100% health on a used/reconditioned hard drive?

A clean SMART report doesn't mean the drive won't fail tomorrow, and in this specific scenario, does the health fall from 100% to 0% in an instant upon failure?

Some questions that you should consider instead:
- How's the warranty like on those drives?
- How much cost do you have to incur in the event of an RMA?
- Can the seller be depended upon to backup said warranty? Do they exist long enough for you to trust them?

 

[Thinkcat]

I asked for smartctl devstat or attribute data now. Will see what happens.

 

[nabsltd]

Sounds like some arbitrary number, how do you even quantify 100% health on a used/reconditioned hard drive?

If SMART data has been wiped, you don't. But, with intact SMART data, a drive that has no relocated sectors would be considered close to 100%. If there were also very few retries on read and writes (as a percentage of total), that would push it to 100%.

Sure, it might start going bad tomorrow, but that's true of anything.

 

[Thinkcat]

They did not respond. So I bought a few drives from Insidesystems. There's probably not a big difference in quality, but there was suddenly a -5 % coupon, so I went for it. Valid until Apr 13, though I am not sure who it is available to.

 

[homeserver78]

I asked Insidesystems how they calculate HDD "health level" (their FAQ says all HDDs they sell has a "health level" of at least 80 %...):

How do you calculate the "health level" (term from your FAQ) of the used HDDs that you sell? Specifically, do you allow reallocated sectors?

At the moment I'm looking at your HUH721010ALE601 drives. Can you say anything (order-of-magnitude estimate) about the power on hours of these drives?

Unfortunately I got a non-answer back:

Our test software shows the number of reallocated sectors and how long the disk has been running.

Have in mind that you can't expect zero when it's refurbished.

Let me know how many you are interested in – then we can test them for you

Well, duh! I don't feel like spending energy trying to pry more info from them, and I also noticed they sell the same drives for a lot less via Ebay for some reason, so I won't spend more time on it.

I would have expected that the ~200 drives they show as in stock would all be tested already with all smart data in some kind of database, but apparently they only test the drives before shipping, then? And they probably use some black-box program that displays a "health level" without them even knowing what it means, then... Don't know how else to interpret the reply. Disappointing.

 

[homeserver78]

So I bought a few drives from Insidesystems.

I would be interested in more info about the state of the drives once you get them!

 

[mach3.2]

Our test software shows the number of reallocated sectors and how long the disk has been running.

Have in mind that you can't expect zero when it's refurbished.

Let me know how many you are interested in – then we can test them for you

Something tells me they don't consider drives as defective even if they have a few relocated sectors and wouldn't mind sending them to you, especially if you just hit buy without talking to them... But at least it sounds like they are not resetting the SMART info.

personally, that's a non-starter.

caveat emptor.

 

[kryten]

They probably use hard disk sentinal for the drive health and just wipe the disk.
And prefer to sale in bulk and if a couple fail, just refund.

 

[Thinkcat]

A quick question. I will write a longer report about my experiences soon.

If a disk has 6 Offline_Uncorrectable according to smartctl -a, should I be worried? At least smartd of TrueNAS complains about it twice every hour, but if the disk can be read from and written to with no problems, is it really defective? Both Reallocated_Sector_Ct and Current_Pending_Sector are zero.

I tested the disk with hexdump to see that it was full of zeroes. I could have used badblocks or dd also.