20TB Seagate Exos X22 Enterprise 3.5" 7200 RPM Hard Drive (Recertified) Expired

A vast majority of drives that come back are from firmware and/or software errors. Nobody is cracking the drives open. All of them are usually used, but some are overstock from spares pools. On occasion there may be some external board or connector replacement but that is super rare. A vast majority undergo NO physical modifications.

As enterprise drives have 1.5-2m MTBF and high duty cycles getting one a few years old then putting it in a home server where the duty is typically low doesn't really kill their lifetime (they may last 5+ years). However you don't REALLY know how they have been used. There are a lot of Chia drives starting to show up now that Chia farming not making so much $$$ and those drives are hit hard.

So when they come back they do the normal electrical and bench testing, flash new firmware and test for OOS (out of spec). The OEM then resets the SMART data and sends it into the channel. That is manufacturer recertified. Then the manu typically offers a warranty directly with them. If the warranty is not with the OEM it doesn't matter what they say it is not manu recertified.

The second class is returns where a seller buys off the market and does the refub themselves or buys from a refurbisher. It may or may not be as rigorous as the manu and the warranty is offered by them (as in this case). Depending upon the drive they may or may not be able to reset the SMART data (some ent drives require manu keys to do that).

The third class is OOS. Out of Spec. These are drives that are marginal or fail certain conditions of the refurb process. They flash special firmware on these to "dial down" the performance and or address the spec issue. The seller will put a warranty on these. MDD is a perfect example of OOS drives offered by SPD. I like to buy these for capacity and they offer a 5 year warranty. They are also significantly cheaper than the other two. I rigorously test them first before putting into service


This is very informative. Thanks! What is the method you used to test the MDD drives rigorously?

Absolutely no reason you can't chuck these in a desktop sans RAID, it just happens that many people buying drives this big are hosting large arrays for media servers, VM storage, backup, etc.

Two things:

1. Your preproduction should likely be on SSD/NVMe because they are so much faster. Post and and archive can go on these for capacity. i would personally not use a single HD for pre/editing. You can use the HD as a backup target during this tho. If you are a casual user then maybe. I have three tiers NVMe -> SSD -> array (HD)
2. These are enterprise drives so they will be loud and take up more energy (generating more heat) so you should ensure you have proper ventilation in your desktop.

Is this good for surveillance?

There is a surveillance line but above it is the server line. Imagine demands of ten cameras writing vs 100,000 people accessing data at any one time…

Think of all these "seller refurbished" drives as used drives. There's really no way to refurbish a hard drive mechanically. The motor and bearing will wear and the helium seal will weaken, there's nothing they can do about it. But this model of hard drive is only out for 2 years, so at most you'll get a 2 years old drive. Which should still have 3 years of design life left.

HGST no longer exist. New HC drives now have the WD label on them (I have one a year ish old), but IMHO they are the best enterprise drives. If I had a choice and one comes along at a good price I favor them but most refurbs out there these days are Seagate. It ebbs and flows though. Last year Sept/Oct there we a ton of HGST drives out there. Toshiba aren't bad either but the NA channel for them is small, so you don't see a lot of them refurb here.

So in the US its really now Seagate and WD and all their flavors. So we are down to Coke vs Pepsi (if you are old enough to remember). Toshiba is like RC Cola

Whatever you do, do not put these in a raid5 or raid6 or raidz1 or raidz2 (in truenas). Only mirror / raid 1 / 10

just received mine, manufactured in september 2023

power on time: 25 hours