An article I read recently claimed it’s dumb to buy refurbished hard drives for your NAS because “refurbished drives were returned because they weren’t working, so why would you want your precious data stored on them.” This is dumb. Let’s talk about why.
It’s simply not true that refurbished drives were returned because they were broken. It’s much more likely that a refurbished drive is being sold because it was rotated out because the company using it had a policy of replacing drives on a schedule, or because they needed to upgrade a NAS to bigger drives, or because they went bankrupt and the drives were bought at auction, or because it turns out they needed less storage than they thought they did.
Obviously, before buying a refurbished drive or any other refurbished hardware you should check the reputation of the company selling it and make sure they’ve been around for a while and have a good reputation. If you do that, the odds are excellent that any refurbished drive you buy will work just fine.
Now, let’s talk about the precautions against data loss you should always be following regardless of whether you choose new or refurbished drives:
- Your NAS should be configured to survive a single drive failure and allow you to replace the failed drive and recover the array automatically.
- Drives fail whether they’re refurbished or not, so you should always have a cold spare on hand to replace a failed drive so the array can recover.
- You should be backing up the precious data on your NAS to somewhere else other than the NAS (the 3-2-1 rule applies).
With these essential precautions in place, your data is safe whether you use new or refurbished drives.
Finally, let’s talk about price, by way of an example…
The cheapest new 8TB drive on Newegg currently costs $160. The cheapest refurbished 8TB drive there costs $110. If you have a four-bay NAS like I do, five new drives (remember, you should always have a cold spare!) cost $800; five refurbished drives cost $550. Even if you decide that new drives are less likely to fail and therefore you can get away without a cold spare, four new drives cost $640, which is still 16% higher than five refurbished drives. When you buy refurbished drives you can get more storage space for less money.
In short, using refurbished drives from a reputable vendor in your NAS is not only a reasonable idea, it’s a good one that will save you money.
