I’m in the marked for a used 4TB for my offsite backup. As I’ve recently acquired four 12TB drives (about 10000 hours and one to two years old) for 130€ each, I was optimistic. 30 to 40€ I thought. Easy.
WRONG! Used drive, failing SMART stats, 40€. Here is a new drive, no hours on it. Oh wait, it was cold storage and it’s almost 8 years old. Price? 90€ (mind you, a new drive costs about 110€). Another drive has already failed, but someone wants 25€ for e-waste. No Sir, it worked fine when I used Check-Disk, please buy. Most of the decent ones are 70 to 80€, way too close to the new price. I PAID 130 FOR 12TB. These drive were almost new and under warranty. WHY DO THIS NUMBNUT WANT 80 EURO FOR A USED 4TB Drive? And what sane person doesn’t put SMART data in their offerings??? I have to ask at least 50 percent of the time. Don’t even get me started on those external hard drives, they were trash to begin with. I’m SO CLOSE to buying a high capacity drive, because in that segment, people actually know what they are doing and understand what they have.
Rant over.
What gives? Did these people buy them, when they were much more expensive? Does anyone now a good site that ships refurbished drives to Germany? Most of those I found are also rippoffs…
With 4 TB, the price difference is quite painful (at least for me). With anything below, I’d buy an SSD without thinking twice.
My point was more that there are likely fewer people who bought them new so that would limit the availability of used drives of that size.
People might also replace a 4TB HDD with a 2TB NVMe or SSD if they value speed over capacity.