HGST Deskstar 4TB 3.5" SATA NAS Hard Drive

HGST Deskstar 4TB 3.5" SATA NAS Hard Drive
Price: $139.99
Shipping Options:: $5 Standard
Shipping Estimates: Ships in 3-5 business days. (Wednesday, Oct 14 to Monday, Oct 19) + transit
Condition: Factory Reconditioned

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I have bought a bunch of Seagate drives both here and in amazon and have always been refused warranty service for refurbished drives.

Any idea what the warranty process is on these?

Refurbished hard drives…?

That’s about a good idea as trying crack for the first time

As an IT professional, these Hitachis are my go-to for large storage - This exact model, in fact, though I typically buy hard drives new. These are not the absolute pinnacle of perpendicular magnetic recording technology, and do not have the greatest total data storage density… BUT, they are the best price/storage/performance ratio out there. Way cheaper per TB than buying the newer 6TB or larger models. These outperform Western Digital Red 4 TB and many other drives handily in speed, due to the faster 7200 RPM spindle speed, and at similarly low noise and power levels. Plus, the NAS variants of the Hitachi drives work very well both in regular desktops, as well as in NAS or server settings. They are not perfect, but they strike a terrific balance.

I personally have eight right now; six are running in a RAID array (RAID 10 - I gave up on 6 because of the loss of performance with my RAID controller) in a Dell PowerEdge server for media, and the remaining two are in my desktop, running in an asynchronous backup scheme for photo and video work. Love, love, love them! I used to swear by WD Black drives, or Seagate hybrid SSHDs, but these are easier to trust.

P.S.
While I am not sure about the warranty service on these, I do have a lot of experience with older and used HGST drives. They have proven far more reliable than almost any other brand that I have used in my nearly 20 years of experience with computer hardware… As long as they were refurbished by someone authorised by Hitachi, you should be in decent shape. Their MBTF (mean time between failure) is orders of magnitude better than most competitors, and reviews are far more consistently positive than most anything else out there.

CAVEAT EMPTOR
Despite my singing praises here, I do not usually recommend buying refurbished hard drives. I bought my keyboard, mouse, monitor, PS3, TV, router, server, and plenty of other stuff refurbished, and recommend it in many cases. Having worked in electrical engineering as well as IT, I often feel better knowing that the refurbishing tests are more thorough than initial testing for new products before sale, and therefore my likelihood of having to make lemonade are greatly diminished. This is especially true of Apple products - I never buy those new.

If you can afford to wait, you can occasionally find these on sale for <$160 new at places like Newegg. But if money is a huge concern, these may serve you well. Or you could opt for WD Red 3TB drives.

$0.02 contributed for the day.

Yeah, it’s a tough sell…kind of like buying a rebuilt engine or transmission…any mechanical part can not be 100% refurbished to new factory condition. Having worked in PC refurbishing before, I can tell you that 9/10 things are not thoroughly checked. Often these drives will receive a sector remap, quick test and perhaps a firmware update. Now that isn’t to say that isn’t all they need, but it’s a significant gamble considering many (but not most) drives are in fact returned with significant issues. But some might just be returned barely used or not used at all, in perfect working order.

“Warranty: 6 Month Western Digital”

Huh??

Down to basics: HGST drives good. Refurb drives bad. You make the call.

If these were new, my favorite source of info on drive life is Backblaze, who have 45000+ drives in operation and can actually give statistics. There’s a nice bar chart of drive deaths, and HGST is the best.

Which of course says nothing about an individual refurb drive.

Why risk refurbished when you can get a NEW WD Red 4tb for $149 shipped free with no tax?

Linky

I’m still dealing with crap “refurbished” drives running hot or failing prematurely. Never again.

Western Digital owns HGST.

I got 3 of these on Newegg less than 2 weeks ago. While I can’t speak to their life, they’ve been running nicely in the TS-431+ NAS I bought on here a few weeks ago.

Edit note: Mine are not a refurb

The exact drive being offered here is $170 on NewEgg, new, with free shipping and no tax.

The total cost for me here would be $152.67 (your tax amount will vary, of course). The question becomes: Is getting a refurb worth saving $17.33.

ALL hard drives eventually fail. I run a clean room for a living and will say that I seldom get Hitachi in for recoveries. IMHO Seagates are the worst and Western Digitals fail too however they are far easier to recover data from. The problem with these drives is that when they fail your usually looking at a catastrophic failure where the heads crash into the platters making your data virtually unrecoverable. However, if you ran these in at least a RAID 5 (3 drive minimum)or even a Mirror (2 drive) and stayed up on it when a drive failed, you could recover from such a disaster. Assuming your hardware supported those RAIDS or you were using Windows Storage Spaces (awesome by the way) which is included in Win 8.1 and Win 10. My food for thought today.

Another data point: The last three failed drives I’ve had to replace for people have been HGST, and the data on most partitions was unrecoverable due to the mechanical failure mentioned above. Two were laptop and one was from a desktop. All three exhibited the infamous loud random CLICK. I’d steer clear of these refurbs.

Not unless they are giving you a better warranty…

Not worth the chance…Even in a RAID NAS configuration…

Just not a big enough price delta…

From a previous computer company service manager…

And…

To use these in a safe RAID 5 configuration, I need 4 of these. But woot will only let me buy 3.

Pass here too…

These are refurbished. I don’t care what RAID config you’re using, the word “safe” does not apply.

Though I wouldn’t buy one of these as a PRIMARY drive for the OS, if I needed one or two, I would just use them off offload snapshots of my NAS box, unplug it and put it away till needed. I’ve gotten some refurbished items from WOOT in the past and have mixed feelings. A 7inch asus tablet looked like it has been used as a frisbie but it worked find and has for the past year my kid has been using it. The other, it’s a month old but the HP Z210 I got seems to have come with a new drive as per it’s serial on the drive. So, something else must have been fixed on the PC. Just like buying a used car, you take your chances but don’t bet your life on it’s reliability. Heck, with that said, you can’t do that with a new car either.

When I was building my NAS I was trying to decide between this drive and the WD Reds. Ultimately went with the WD Reds since for a NAS, the slight extra performance from 7200RPM wouldn’t really be realized (network is the bottleneck) and the additional heat and power draw with multiple drives wasn’t worth it. In general, though, these are better drives than the WD Reds.

That said: would never skimp and save a few bucks to get a refurb (6mo warranty) versus new (3y warranty). That’s just plain stupid.

It’s an internal drive. Why is it called a NAS drive? It doesn’t become a NAS drive until you stick it in a NAS appliance.
NAS = “Network Attached Storage”