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Swore off refurb drives for shop clients until one saved a $1,200 recovery job last Tuesday
For 2 years I refused to put refurbished drives in any client machine, mostly because a batch from a guy on Craigslist died on me back in 2021 and I ate the cost. Last Tuesday a walk-in at my shop on Foster Road brought in a Dell with a dead boot drive and no backup, and the only matching drive I had on the shelf was a refurb I pulled from a decommissioned office PC. I cloned his old drive with ddrescue in about 40 minutes, dropped the refurb in, and it spun up clean with 100% health on CrystalDiskInfo. I still won't use them in new builds, but for emergency swaps where someone has zero backups I'm starting to think the math is different. Any of you run refurbs as a regular thing, and how do you test them before they go out the door?
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white.sarah15d ago
How many hours of stress testing are you actually putting on those refurbs before they leave the shop, or are you trusting the SMART data and calling it good? The thing that would worry me about using one for an emergency swap on a machine with no backup is that you just moved the client's only copy of their data onto a drive with unknown history. What's your plan if that refurb dies in three months and they come back at you? SMART can look clean right up until the moment it doesn't, and ddrescue doesn't tell you anything about how much life is left in the platters. If you're going to make this a regular thing I would want at least a full surface scan and a week of power-on hours logged before it touches a client's only drive.
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