Hitachi Ultrastar HUA723020ALA641 2TB (Manufacturer refurbished)

Currently, ebay has this Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 HUA723020ALA641 2TB 64MB cache Internal Hard Drive (Manufacturer refurbished) under US$ 35 + a FREE S/H. I really am in a need for a SATA HDD to put into my computer. However, I am a bit nervous about a manufacturer refurbished product. What do you all think?

I vote no, and just save the pennies for something at a retailer like Best Buy. Hitachi hard drives are extremely durable though (HUA in beginning of model number is good indicator, not AK) loud in their own way, but if you look around at Hitachi refurbs it's a lot of times units that have been running constantly in a server rack for three years.

Unless you had four of those in a little rack to save money up front and then replace one at a time when they blow out.

Too scary for my pennies...

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-= Cloud 9 =-

Joey,

What you said makes sense. In other words, the HDD could be at the end of its life and is awaiting to go dead within a year or so, especially if used as a 24/7 storage.

Look for old NAS with disks. those with RAID. A vew years ago I've managed to get 4x 1.5 TB seagate drives and an old Intel NAS for 100 euros.

These disks have been up for 3+ years before I received them, shut down less than 10 times, according to their SMART.

Lately I got 2x 500 GB hitachi drives + a very crappy thecus NAS (that I'm probably cannibalizing for parts) for 25 euros, again, disks remained up for 5 years (manufactured in 2009), shut down a few times.

Figure:
7200 rotations per minute x 60 = an hour. Times 24 is a day. Times 365 is one year. Times 3 is three years.

Makes 11,352,960,000 or over eleven billion spins on one lube job. But they got their money's worth!

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-= Cloud 9 =-

>Makes 11,352,960,000 or over eleven billion spins on one lube job. But they got their money's worth!

That's (relatively expensive) low-friction very hard metal bearings for you.

You don't want even synthetic grease in a hdd, platters must stay VERY clean, grease goes everyhwere with heat.

bobafetthotmail Wrote:
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> >Makes 11,352,960,000 or over eleven billion spins
> on one lube job. But they got their money's
> worth!
>
> That's (relatively expensive) low-friction very
> hard metal bearings for you.
>
> You don't want even synthetic grease in a hdd,
> platters must stay VERY clean, grease goes
> everyhwere with heat.


I'm amazed by it all. I still have a couple Seagate Barracuda SATA 1's here since late 2004; they've been worked - torrents at night and multimedia in the day. I have to remind myself they could fail someday. The major companies have their hits and misses; before the Seagates it was WD hard drives, just load them up with all your precious stuff and WHAM it's gone. "Oh, no problem I have a backup on another WD WHAM that's gone too. Computer store fresh out of business... crickets... or is that the hard drive spinning-up? Nope, it's crickets.

As long as this is the Off Topic section, might I opine, that shoes and hard drives are the items you don't know how good you've got it until years later and then you wish you'd have bought 10 of them because you can't get them anymore and all that's available is meh.

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-= Cloud 9 =-