 We've told you this so many times, buying used hard drives is not worth risking your data. But sometimes, you see an offer you just cannot refuse. We took that risk and bought eight used hard drives from eBay, totaling 136 terabytes for $2,000. That's almost half the price compared to new. Really impressive savings. But just like buying used GPU on eBay, there's a real chance that new to you, high capacity hard drives were used for crypto mining. So is even this great deal worth it? There's a chance your parts arrive with one foot already in the grave? I'll tell you where and why these drives are popping up for sale, what red flags to look out for, and when you should consider making an exception to the don't buy used hard drives rule, right after I tell you how to make an exceptional segue to our sponsor. Ridge, Ridge Wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. The bulge in your pants shouldn't be from your wallet. Dang it, use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. The shameful truth is this isn't even the first time we've bought used storage. My personal hard drives are from a dead NAS and are currently dying. Years ago Linus splurged on 24 used SSDs for a server at home, but the only reason he was comfortable taking that risk was that he had been reassured by another buyer the SSDs were in good health. So he bought them. This time though, we don't have that luxury, but what we do have are some very attractive prices. $200 for 16 terabytes, when the cheapest new drive with same capacity would be in the neighborhood of $300. So why are they so cheap? Supply and demand, wow. A huge volume of drives are being dumped on eBay, marketplace and the like. Some from everyday people, some that were refurbished and some from unscrupulous users that use the hard drive to mine cryptocurrencies. But how much does that hurt them? Well, there are many coins you can mine on a hard drive today. We tried it in the past. The most popular by far is Chia mining. It was so popular at launch in May, 2021 that Seagate was even considering making an entire line of cryptocurrency specific hard drives. Sure, anyway, Chia mine hard drives should be pretty safe to buy since Chia runs on a proof of space algorithm. So once the drives are filled with the plot data from Chia to prove the space or capacity, very little read or write activity is required while mining that space on the drive. That means that drives used in Chia mining are barely used which is enough justification for us to roll the dice on eBay. We settled on two 16 terabyte WD UltraStar HC5500s, two 16 terabyte Seagate XO16Xs, that one? Yeah, this one right here. And four 18 terabyte Toe Shave. Oh, fuck me. And now they're here. Let's compare what was advertised with what we actually got. Our two WDs were listed with up to 2,100 hours of power on. Yeah, not so much. We got drives with 2,300 and 2,600 hours, a bit above the stated value, but in the grand scheme of things, those extra 10 or 20 days of power on time aren't really a big deal. On the flip side, the Seagates were expected to arrive with up to 11,000 power on hours and instead they just had like 234, 213 hours. Damn score, but still, is that a lot or a little? In the enterprise world, the expected lifetime is around 45,000 hours, but anecdotally, some of our staff have drives with 50 to 60,000 hours. Ultimately, it's hard to say when a drive is too old to use. Higher hour drives are typically cheaper, but they also might not last as long. Only you can decide if it's worth it for your needs, but we'd recommend 20, maybe 25,000 hours as a safe ceiling. Lastly, our four Toshiba drives. The packaging just speaks for itself. This is what our other drives came in. Now, you can see here, ESD bags, this foam, hold your hard drives in, and this is how the Toshiba's arrived. Not great for mechanical devices with moving parts. Like, just look at the SATA connectors on this one. I noticed that the corner is just completely bashed in on this one. Oh, it's just actually broken. Oh, fantastic. A quick sound check on the Toshiba's tells us the other drives were damaged as well. Huge bummer. Unfortunately, this buyer didn't accept our returns, but no matter. The buyer protection on eBay is excellent, and we're able to use the money back guarantee to get our cash back. But physical condition and power on ours aren't the only way to diagnose our drives. It's time to pull the rest of the smart data. Thanks to the cloud backup and storage systems experts at Backblaze, we know that some parameters are better indicator of failures than others. The combination of attributes five, 187, 188, 197, and 198 can accurately predict an impending drive failure 76.7% of the time. And how did our other drives fare? Flying colors. It's golf rules, and we have zeros across the board, or at least as far as we could tell. See, every drive manufacturer has different ideas about which of the many specific smart attributes they should monitor. Seagate gave us all five, while neither WD or Toshiba include 187 and 188. One blemish though, was that despite its low power cycle and on hours count, attribute 199 on one of our Seagate Exos drives was flagged as concerning. This rather nebulous error count increases when there are infinitesimally short drops in communication between the controller on the hard drive and the SATA controller on the motherboard during a data transfer operation. These drops are almost exclusively caused by things like a bad or loose SATA connection or a faulty SATA controller on the host system. So ultimately they're safe to ignore so long as they aren't reoccurring. And if confirmed the cabling and the controller are both good. The final thing we can glean from our smart data is the evidence of crypto mining, farming, whatever. We're looking at three specific signs. High power on hours, a relatively low number of total reads compared to those power on hours and a total write amount that is roughly equal to the size of the drive. Although that's no guarantee. With a quick conversion and a little math, we can see our Seagate drives have a total reads and writes that are staggeringly high, given their 250 ish power on hours. It's also roughly twice their capacity, which according to our friend Wendell from Level One Techs could be due to one of the integrity checks that might run while refurbishing a drive. And lo and behold, they've been etched to say they're recertified. Weird since there was nothing about that in the listing. Well, we can only speculate on their history, but it's possible these are gray market drives from a batch of drives that had their tilt indicators tripped during shipping or were sent back as an open box return. Drive failure is mostly common when a drive is new, they may be DOA or fail within a couple of days of use. So these drives could have been through all of that before being recertified and then sold to us. Checking the Seagate website for warranties has both drives report back not warrantied by Seagate, which in theory means that the recertifying company offers an alternative warranty. And this 30 day seller warranty is exactly that. 30 days is in quite the five years that Seagate offers from authorized sellers, but it's a heck of a lot more than zero days. Lastly, our WD drives continued their trend of ignoring useful features and chose not to log total reads and writes. Thanks WD, this makes it difficult for us to even speculate on their history, but at only a hundred or so days of power on time, it seems unlikely they are part of a farm because having the patience to allow those rewards to slowly accumulate is essential for returning a profit, especially when factoring in upfront costs and power consumption. And you should factor in the power you feel with a screwdriver from lttstore.com. They're actually very good. Now it's time to do something with these drives. Seeing as we have this much storage on hand, let's do it to make just a janky DIY NAS and compare its price to an off the shelf prebuilt NAS. The keen eye among you may have already noticed though that we paid more for our 16 terabyte drives than our 18s. So it seems like a good time to note that we had some time constraints that prevented us from getting the absolute best bang for a buck on the hard drive. Namely, we wanted to get a variety of different drives from different sellers and they had to be able to ship it to us up in Canada, further limiting our choices. Our best deal was easily the recertified Seagate drives that came with an 80 gigabyte per dollar compared to 50 to 55 gigabytes per dollar brand new. That's two used drives for the price of one and a half brand new. And if you happen to need a drive, we'll have the links for both new and used down in the description. Oh, here we go. Oh, wow, that's heavy. Good old steel chassis. Assuming we converted our trusty old $69 gaming PC into a NAS and assuming we loaded it with these 16 terabyte Seagates, which ideally would have been the Toshiba's if they worked and then you factor in some money for cables and a hard drive cage, we are sitting right around 71 gigabytes per dollar. Meanwhile, a pre-configured NAS with that much storage space comes in at $1,622, meaning 39.5 gigabytes per dollar. What could you do with that extra $720? How about buying another three full hard drives or building a whole other PC? Not to mention that the $69 PC can still do all the normal things you expect a PC to do while a dedicated NAS has a singular purpose. But it's not just about spending less on your NAS project. You can also afford to buy more drives that you can dedicate to parity. For example, choosing to go with RAID 5 instead of RAID 1. Those used drives may be less reliable overall, but at some point, the extra redundancy makes it the safer move. But there's a few things we haven't touched on so far with this price discussion. Sales on new hard drives and shucking. Shucking hard drives involves buying a drive generally intended to be used externally and removing all of the unnecessary bits to just get to the 3.5 inch hard drive inside. As an example, you could pick up one of these 18 terabyte external WD MyBooks brand new for 280 per drive, meaning 64 gigabytes per dollar. Substantially closer to the cost of a used drive than to the cost of one that was intended to be used internal all along. As for sales on new drives, this is essentially a matter of patience. We've seen the price of a brand new 18 terabyte drive fall as low as $300 and new 16 terabyte drives have gone on sale for 245. Again, not as cheap as used, but it's got a lot of benefits like a full warranty, known history and zero power on hours. With all that said though, can I ultimately recommend using used hard drives? It's all going to come down to just your personal comfort level with risk. If you are storing something easily replaceable like Steam games or media files, you might be pretty excited to get a bunch of capacity or redundancy for the same amount of money. But if you're storing family photos or important documents, well, those are worth a heck of a lot more than a game save to most people and also just use Steam cloud saves. And knowing they're on a new drive might help you feel more at ease. Regardless of what drives you end up with, you should have a good one, two, three backup strategy in place. Three copies of your data on two separate mediums with one stored off site. I personally prefer the one, one, one. Just one drive. One drive already failing one location. These questions about risk aren't something we can answer for you. It's up to each individual to decide on their own, but for our part, yeah, it's kind of worth the risk. We've definitely had a bunch of change of opinion on used drives and we'll be considering them in future when a bill calls for the most terabytes for our dollars. Just like how this video calls for the most segue to our sponsor. Vessi, Vessi footwear. They're known for being lightweight, easy to pack, and most importantly, warned by me, just joking. Most importantly, they're water resistant thanks to Dymotex technology. 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