Are USED Hard Drives Worth it...? (The Tech YES Buyer's Guide)
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 1. 07. 2024
- Used Hard Drives for me... are a crucial element of a Used PC, but they are often not spoken about... really anywhere.. So today I am breaking it down from start to finish, how to spot good and dogy drives, and once I get them how to test for failures in relation to power on time and error scans.
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#used #tech #howto - Jak na to + styl
What's your experience with Used HDDs? Let us know below!
I took this bogan guy from Queensland to a Taiwanese scrapyard where we picked up a bunch of cheap driveys from a guy who gave us a hard time.
I had a used Seagate as backup. RIP.
I take old hdds from old computers i don't always buy hard drives
Old hdds is also good Temporary Boot drive till you get ssd
Tens of used HDDs and have never had a problem, use them in my own system. I have had a few SSDs die on me however.
For me its a 50/50 kinda at the point to not buy stuff from people here in south africa most are just looking to take chances at best
The only time you want to hear those HDD noises is on Floopytron's songs.
Floppotron*
It seems like hard drives are designed to last for a long time. My oldest Toshiba laptop's hard drive is the original 4.1 GB from 1998. Still works fine today with no bad sectors at all even after 21 years.
I just got rid of an old Dell desktop that was running Windows XP. The processor was failing. But it had the original 250GB HDD in it and was still going strong. It was too old for Windows 10 because there was no drivers for the hardware.
Toshiba
Best HDD i've ever owned Hitatch 250GB! PRetty fast and i have like, 7 of them, 5 used, and none of them have any signs of failure, despite being over a decade old!
They obviously shoud last a long time , data is important but they might fail
@@namesurname4666 same hard drive even still works today in that laptop, now going on 23 years old that Toshiba laptop
New SSD, used HDD
Games aren't sensitive data
Savegames are though, so be sure to keep 'em on the SSD people
@@pixel_vengeur391 true
I've lost countless hours of Skyrim saves when my hdd failed (OS and games where there)
@@Davix-tt9sh cloud saving is a thing
@@illusionlb There are cases where even cloud saves got corrupted
@@illusionlb not on cracked games (No, i'm not gonna buy skyrim again, Todd Howard)
my Hitachi 1tb hdd is from 2009 and has 51000 Hours of workingtime
and its still in my main pc
edit: i make regular backups of all my drives (old/new/hdd/sdd)
Hitachi hard drives are strongest hard drives
Mixa Tutorials hitachi wands too (Lenny face)
Older drives where built to last!
Hitachi last longer for me too, deskstar series are superb for home use.
Ultrastar is the best running raid 0 (I have 4 2TB drives on raid 0)
inb4 "i lost all my data"
I love how the hdds you show that don't work are seagates. I just found a hdd making that clicking noise. of course it was a seagate. lol.
Yep. 3 of my failed drives were Seagates drives. My other one was an old Toshiba drive from 2009.
Seagate are garbage. They are worthless new. Better using WDC RED or Black drives. HGST drives are also pretty good quality. I can't speak for Toshiba, I only owned one which my dog broke by knocking it off the table when plugged into the USB dock. That is one thing that mechanical drives have a difficult time with, is exposure to G-Forces. For this reason, if you have a laptop, you are better off with a higher RPM hard drive or a SSD drive.
Jason Tam I mine crypto currencies with hdds and everyone mining with hard drives call Seagates âShitgatesâ because they fail way more often then Wd drives
@@ejweir4675 how much bandwidth do you need for 10tb of blank storage?
I'm in the PC business since 1999. Already then, Seagate was very unreliable. Having said that, I have seen both SG and WD drives failed.
Please make a video on how you get rid of your broken or useless components. I really would like to give more awareness on getting rid of stuff without making the environment a trash-bin..
I second this!
Well here's a few suggestions, put it on eBay for next to nothing let it be someone else's problem, send it off to a recycling center some of them will even pay you or offer to give them away on some electronic engineering forum, I'm sure some guy on there could find a use for the parts or depending on what it is, use it to repair another component.
Drop them off at big chain electronics retail stores like Bestbuy. They charge recycling fee for any new item purchased from the store. They collect old electronics too.
it came from the environment, putting it back is not "trash". that is just propaganda from the tree fking environmentalists
@@Blox117 yeah, all these phenolic compounds in the PCBs were totaly formed by natural processes and "won't" cause all sorts of shit if it gets in the water supply
Pro tip: make sure to turn off the quick scan option in HD tune cuz the results from the quick scan is not accurate.
Quick Scan should not be used alone to show that a drive works. It can however sometimes show when a drive fails.
This is how i do my (used) hard drive checks:
1. Check SMART: If any bad sectors or seek errors, drive is bad, if good, go to next step
2. (Optional) Check HD tune quick, if any red squares, drive is bad, if good, go to next step
3. Check HD tune full, if any red squares, drive is bad, if good, go to next step
4. Wipe drive if used.
5. Check SMART again for any new errors
I do all of this with a copy of hirens boot CD 15.2, a free live cd/usb tool with hd tune included.
My experience with used HDDs: They're fun. Just assume they're gonna break anytime so only put worthless stuff on there. I like to use GeForce experience highlights to save every singe kill I get on my hard drive :D
Yeah these used drives can be useful to store Steam games, emulator ISOs, movies, that kind of thing. Keep writes to a minimum, mostly read from it, and things should be ok. Use "symbolic links" to point to files on other partitions. For example: keep the "core" of your game (graphics, sounds, levels, etc etc) in this partition but store your savegames and preferences (files that are written to constantly) on other partition, pointed by a symlink.
Lol you must be bad or you've got a petabyte HDD if you're screen recording after every kill, jokes aside what game do you play where you capture every kill
8 years ago I got 3 2TB drives at 50 aud each. They're all still spinning to this day
dealing with an old failing disk taught me a whole lot about how to use computers and how to optimize my process, cause less wear to components etc... had a "clicking" disk that made a lot of noise on Windows, on Linux the thing is silent and still running... learned how to put my temporary files inside a RAMdisk (specially browser directory), learned how to use symlinks to store files that are written to constantly in another partition but make the system still think that it resides inside the same partition, etc etc... you say 8 years there, I don't doubt that number... SSD's just can't compare, all of the sudden you lose everything (seeing people installing whole OS's inside SSDs just make my stomach turn by the way... well, the market depends on some dumb people burning money I guess...)
@@FeelingShred ok I was with you until the ssd point, that's just totally incorrect. Sure maybe mlc nand when it was first released was unreliable as fuck, but new nand is waaaaaay better than rust in terms of reliability. At my place of work we had 5-10 hard drive failures per year. With the ssds, it's closer to 1-2.
As for where you install the OS, why would you care if it was destroyed? There's no critical data in the OS? As long as you aren't an idiot and repath your documents/downloads etc to a redundant system (either raid or cloud storage) it shouldn't matter if the OS drive goes kaput because you don't store user data on it.
So no I completely disagree with your characterisation of ssd's here.
@@FeelingShred *knock on wood* none of the SSDs that I have ever bought over the past 10+ years has ever failed. To give you an idea of how much usage they get as a boot drive, my current boot drive which is just over a year old is sitting on 17TB of data written. The only one that I have that is a bit worrying is a Seagate 2TB SSD that is already at 90% life remaining after 5.36TB data written but it has been sitting at that value for the past 6 months or so despite being in use so it is possible that HWiNFO64 is reading the SMART values incorrectly.
@@FeelingShred Only on cheap SSD, old SLC x25-E have a life span beyond your own. I still have some that work to this day, write life barely touched in s.m.a.r.t. even though they have written fully over many times over.
But yes spinning drive prices have been stagnant forever. Drives used or new, you need at least a pair regardless, so either way you trust nothing.
Sometimes when HHD doesn't work I dismount the PCB and clean all the contacts and put it back again and it works. Sometimes, not always.
I've sold bad drives myself, without any ill intent. I did reimburse those drives, but yeah. I'm a techy person, but even techy people don't always know much about bad drives. It's very easy to buy or sell bad drives.
I bought a stack of used 10x2tb external seagate drives for $8 each (guy at flea market) and shucked them/tested. They contained personal information from a beauty supply company which included SSN's, Accounting information and personal emails... Wiped those immediately. They were apparently backup drives.
Pretty common when buying used drive/hardware. Pal of mine even went snooping with Recuva.
Thank you, finally i found someone who actually showed what a bad drive sounds like, i was worried that my hard drive years ago and it never made a sound like that
This video shows some really good information. Good job man.
I got a 8 TB enterprise HDD off ebay for $60. No issues with it and hardly any power-on hours...so I would say yes, they are worth it :)
At least if you find a good seller anyways+being able to return is always nice if something goes bad
What seller sold you that hard drive?
Another great tip for you or PC builders. Use something like Seagate Seatools. It's free and has a lot of the features of HD Tune. You can even run the built in self test on the drives from a bootable USB or inside windows. My favorite tool to asses HDD and SSD health is Hard Disk Sentinel (not free, but absolutely a great tool).
You are definitely my favorite tech CZcamsr .....feels like all the others just try and show off there expensive PC's that they get for free lol
More important than power on time is power cycle count. I never spin down or turn off my HDDS, if i can help it. I have many 12+ year old (spin time) drives still humming along.
Exactly, also every time the computer hibernates or is suspended, the disk has to stop/start again. These days I just leave my laptop turned on 24/7, only reboot when strictly necessary. Computers were not made to be powered off.
well, i guess thats one win for SSD
The Tech Yes City Rebrand is đ„
I once got a cheapo used drive off eBay. It was shockingly high hours, but it ran just fine with no issues. Still have it in my secondary computer.
Thanks for the tips Mr Yes, greetings from Mexico!
Good tips! Being mechanical devices wherein small misalignments can be disastrous it's definitely important to take a second good look at one. I'd like to add one thing: If you think something is wrong with only the PCB on the underside of the drive, don't bother trying to replace it. There's certain information on it regarding the physical properties of the platter in the drive. The chance that even a 100% identical model drive's PCB will work (without problems) is very slim
That would be usually the EEPROM, but knowing WD cheaped out on some drives a little bit too much, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to swap in a board, only to find out they have to transplant the MCU chip because there's no EEPROM.
Maybe I'm wrong but Seagates are far more lenient in this case - not 100% sure though.
When I built my first gaming PC I bought a used hard drive which was a 1tb western digital blue for ÂŁ25 and I have built 3 more PC's since and still using that hard drive as a secondary drive to this day so a good purchase made in my opinion.
still rocking a 2.5" WD Blue here too...
One thing I've found to be helpful with used drives is to squint really hard at the picture to find a manufacturing date. Worked out great for my mint 256GB NVMe drive that was only 5 month old.
Ahhh the classic sound of clicking. 100% agree that hdd is useless...
HD Tune is a great free tool, have use it for years, and It's a great tool to pick a good 2nd hand HDD.
I have had great experience with used HDDs here in the UK recently. I like to buy in bulk, 10x 1Tb Seagate ST1000DM003 all from 2016 for ÂŁ100 shipped in a segmented hard drive shipping box all in sealed anti static bags. Cheap and very cheerful. Before that 5x WD gold for ÂŁ40
What do you need 10 hard drives for?
@@IosifStalinsendsyoutoGulag I also build and sell PC's
@@bencarter96 Oh...so pre-built PCs often have used parts?
@@IosifStalinsendsyoutoGulag probably not pre built PC's from a shop, for me building PC's is a hobby so I just try to get people the best price for performance which often involves used parts. I just test everything well and give warranty, can't argue with lower price for the same performance
Something Iâd found a couple of times with old motherboards and new SSDs is that the SATA cable May be the problem, specially if the cable is not brand new. The system may not see the SSD but changing the SATA cable fixes the problem. Since the first time I experience this problem I always buy new SATA cables and I also try to use the shortest cable posible. Updating the firmware on the SSD also helps. Thanks for the great content!
Great video. I love the Tech City music.
Another piece of advice concerning a dying Hard Drive is try not to change the Data on it at all until you back it up. I have 3 Hard Drives that are on their last legs that all still work because I disconnected them when I noticed the problem & backed up what I needed from them. They all still work & I still occasionally pull Data off of them but have not added to or erased any files on it. They will probly work like that for a long time, good enough for a secondary backup for whatever is on it.
I was once out for a walk and found a PC in a thornbush, It was rusty and had been rained on for quite a while.
The drive I pulled out of it was a Hitachi DeskStar 160GB, the PCB was rusted and the solder connections around all the SMDs were corroded.
But it still worked, and probably still does work, three years later as it sits in my hard drive drawer.
Oh man, I almost forgot about the "Deathstar" and the click of death. Before IBM sold it to Hitachi, it was infamous for reliability issues.
Hi, I'm new to your channel, like your calm style to presentation, your voice is easy to listen to. You certainly know your stuff, so just sub's, cheers mate.
Before giving up on a bad HDD take a look under their PCB because they can develop rust (usually looks like some kind of black gunk) where the PCB touches the HDD head pins and motor pins.
Removing the PCB and cleaning the contacts with rust cleaner/a eraser/isopropyl alcohol can bring them back to life and put them back into service for many years.
I have 2 ~8 years old 2Tb Seagates drives that the Bios was having a really hard time trying to detect them and when it did they where giving a lot of R/W errors or disconnecting. After a cleaning the PCBs they are now working like new for about a year.
The only thing is that the first driver that started showing problems I didn't knew about it and I tried many softwares in hopes of fixing it. Using the driver when it was giving errors while using repair softwares left a mark on the S.M.A.R.T. If you check this HDD on the HD Tune Pro it will say that the drive Failed and must be replaced but in reality the drive is fine.
One has 1263 days of power on and is the one with the S.M.A.R.T. failed. It was my main OS for many years but I have a SSD now. Even being fine i'm only using it to store games and movies because of how long it has being in duty.
And the other have 114 days of power on and started showing the same problem around 12~16 months after the main but I already knew what do to so the S.M.A.R.T. is clean.
Both where brought and installed in the same year (~2012) with 2~3 months of difference. The difference of time probably is due power saving that turn the disk off if its not in use.
Pro Tip: Download Crystal Disk Info, set it to "Start with Windows" and "Show in the Tray". It will warn you as soon as something unusual happens with your drive or if its about to fail. Helped me out a few times now.
HDD Sentinel is another such product which also supports dedicated hard drive RAID controllers. Not sure if crystal mark does that or not.
@@pixels303at-odysee9 idk either, but great tip too
Agreed, I installed it to run all the time just a few weeks ago on my systems and notify me by email on issues. Just two weeks later, it notified me of one drive that got a bad sector...then a couple days later it got another bad sector. The early notification made it possible to swap the drive and easily transfer the data without having to pull it from backups. I do backup everything, but it's faster to just clone the data from a working drive. After the data was transferred, I stress tested that drive and a ton of new bad sectors to appeared.
@@Zeric1 Glad it Helped you :)
Another stress test is to attempt to read the entire contents of the drive. Bad sectors do not surface until a failure happens, and a failure is unknown until that sector is used. Another trick to make your drives last longer is to mirror them, format them with ones and then zeros, and then copy data back. Thus refreshes the strength of the data and even makes the drive speedier.
I like more the practical test lmao. Nice video and excellent info as always!!!
I am a HUGE fan of that rope lamp. It is truly rugged!
Have 6x2TB Hitachi HDDS. Bought them refurbished 8 years ago. They're still going strong.
Buying used hard drives is great option! I set up mine in ZFS pool with 2 or 3 drive fault tolerancy. After few months of 24/7 running only one broke, which I replaced with no data loss
thanks for sharing the software!
1:54 YES extracting that Price for Performance :)
I always check the smart status using hddscan but I will definitely try your method.
Important tip. If you have time to unscrew the motherboard of the hdd, 2.5/3/5 doesn't matter, IF there are pads that make contact to the hdd itself, sme may have a plug/socket system but most have pads, then check to see IF they have dulled and become almost brown, this can and does prevent the hdd from showing up in the bios, reading incorrect space etc. If so then all is NOT lost, just get a soft eraser and rub over the pads being carteful NOT to knock off any companonents as some around thyose pads can be very small. The reason? that brown tarnish can prevent proper power going into the hdd itself and read/write line etc from being read properly. This is because of signals being transfer are actually electrical. The less the conductivity, the less chance of reading or powering etc. Give them a rub and they should shine up. You can try IPA but tbh, that most likely will not work as effectively. Do the eraser and try again as you may find that this was the cause all along.
I have had this issue and even provenj to a fiend on a hdd that had NOT spun for 10 years or more, after doing this in front of him, it spun up for the first time in that 10 year period. Nothing wrong with it. So, give it a go, even if your own hdds fail, try taking a look, normally a Torx screwdriver is needed but other than a philips (cross head). the pads? usually around 2 rows f about 10+ on each. Just pads nothing soldered on to them, no solder on them, just straight pads.
About 90% of my drives are 2nd hand, all purchesed though cex with a warrenty, I just use them as cold storage and check the data every 6 months or so, all various sizes and makes from 500gb to 3tb. Its a cheap backup method for me.
yeah these things can be useful for storing non-critical data, like games, emulator ISOs, movies etc... just keep writes to a minimum and things should be okay... been using one like this for 3 years, there's other guy that says 8 years, I don't doubt him at all... Linux helps a lot with old drives too, less random writes on disk
@@FeelingShred You sound confused....writes dont affect durability with old fashined spinning HDs...Actually, writting is required to make sure your data stays intact overtime... For this sole reason, there are apps that their only use is actually rewriting all the sectors of a hard drive with the very same data they contain, to make sure the data is safe and magnetism strong... Leaving a hard disk in a shelf for a decade is a good way to lose some data here and there...
@@Trikipum what you're talking about is bit flips which can happen and are accelerated by heat, generally HDDs are less prone to bit flips than ssd's.
However writes do effect lifespan, anytime a HDD is doing something that being idly spinning with a parked head it's doing wear on the bearing, everytime that write head moves up and down the platter it's one more chance of a head crash or something
I've had good luck with used drives, especially from a recycling center.
Speedfan (which is free) has a truly excellent HD analysis feature, that reports all the smartdrive parameters and health and can also do an even more in-depth analysis. I really recommend it for assessing whether a drive is worth using or not.
I had a friend who swore he could fix his old ipods with the hdd's when they made that clicking sound, by violently slamming it on the floor.
Well i guess they didn't make a click sound after that anymore.
Lmao
Sometimes the bearings start to go and whacking it can get them going. Less so with modern HDDs where the thing will just jam up and your screwed.
I once had some WD Raptors in raid 0 back in the day and every time i started the PC i had to " encourage " the platters to spin up with the rubber end of a screwdriver , once they warmed up they where fine.
In fact , pro tip, if you want to replace the drive in your PC or server just as its about to go out of warranty.
Step one, go get your rubber mallet ( you do have a rubber mallet right ?)
Fire up some massive disk to disk copy on your drive to get it spinning nice and fast.
Take rubber mallet and go to hell on the side of the drive !
after about 10 or so good hits you should hopefully get a head crash.
Return the drive for replacement, the rubber mallet wont leave any marks!
On the side can be helpful if the heads are stuck, but 'flat' and you damage heads or platers. A method I had to try on an OLD drive (Quantum Fireball) was stick it in the freezer for a day. Gave me ~15mins to back up files, 2nd time it died for good.
@@andljoy Or, don't be a swindling a$$hole. Every time someone pull these kinds of stunts, it raises the scrutiny and suspicion level for everyone else with a honest claim. At warranty intake, all they do is check drives. You don't think they can tell the difference between impact damage and wear/fabrication failure? If a drive has failed, is grinding, clicking or completely dead and it's in for warranty replacement claim, they pop it open. Because people do this sh1t and it's definitely not covered by warranty.
I have abused some drives in the past and they didn't show any bad sectors but did fail down the line.
can u do a review of that china ssd "X-Star" that you show in this video? is that any good?
I'm interested too. I know they are mostly sold to the local Chinese market and they contain SK hynix memory chips which are a very good brand. But as for the quality of the board and controller that X-Star makes, who knows. I know it's only a small company with a small factory.
@@brendanfarthing they are dram less ssd. with some times bad controller
Thank you so much for the info! Love your content so muchđđ it's worth noting I used to buy SEAGATE it took me 4 harddrive to realize the company has bad quality control... all 4 were brand new and all of them died on me within 1 year. Since then I've only bought Western Digital and I kid you not all 10 of them are perfect functional and fine. I need big hard drives for storing my 8k CZcams videos.
I work with surveillance systems for a living and all of them have hard drives. The Seagate 3 year failure rate is over 50% and the Western Digital 3 year failure rate is less than 5%. I will only ever buy WD until Seagate fixes their issues.
@@iamsoldats wow I didn't know this before wasting money lol
Is 59 ausy for a brand new hdd had only a few minutes on the hdd because the seller tested it, 7200rpm 1tb, boot noise thats it, then no noise completely silent, good deal? I think so but im not sure.
I noticed that on some drives,when using hdtune quick scan option,it won't find bad sectors on the drive,but using the normal slower error scan will find bad sectors.
if i have two hdd that dont look perfekt, i just put them into RAID 1
would be a waste otherwise (in my opinion)
they make great candidates for software raid. I use storage spaces and its been super robust for me and has survived a few drive failures now. Speeds are slow, but for a lot of things that doesn't matter so much. If you use ReFS it will periodically check your files for bitrot too and fix any that it finds along they way. And bitrot can be a problem. Especially when moving around terabytes of data.
or a DIY nas - rock64 openmediavault with ZFS or Btrfs
Wtf is perfekt....lol
I got this 2tb refurb. Sounds like a jet engine spinning up, and shakes the case during any kind of activity. But it works great.
I had a drive like that once, it was an enterprise drive, I loved that sound it made when it spun up but I could've done without the extra idle noise, so I'll be sticking to consumer drives from now on.
my dads PC has a 6TB toshiba HDD, it is VERY loud, loudest HDD i've ever heard, but it does work fine
Thank God i dont have any problem with my hdd-s (i have a 13, an 8, a 6 and a 3 years old drives) and i dont had any problem with them. Of course i backup regularly on my newer external hdd-s.
I have a portable HDD from college (Graduated in 2012) that I used to throw in my back pack and not think twice. That case is scratched to hell but the thing is still kicking (though I have noticed some slowing in recent times).
i got a few old ones i just use them as backup drives.. just dump all my stuff on them then unplug it and put in the draw until i need it
Thank you so much!
I tend to put together a few PC's once every couple of months and then I sell them off...it's just a hobby for me and it scratches that itch of wanting to build something. I've got to say I do enjoy these videos about what to be careful of when buying.
To keep costs down, as a main storage drive I'll usually go on eBay and buy either a 500gb ($15) or 1tb ($30) generic, unbranded hard drive that's listed as new. I'm not sure if these drives are truly new or not, but they usually work pretty well, and the only one I got that didn't work (it would just show up in Windows as having 0.0mb available and I couldn't find a fix for it) the seller replaced pretty quickly. I'm glad to know about this health check program... I'll be using it going forward.
And a selling note to the TechYesCitizens who are curious... Yes, people still buy PC's with hard drives in them. Other tech reviewers act like hard drives just shouldn't be used at all anymore, but that's not true. People don't care that it's got hard drive storage, at least when buying low end systems. Just throw a cheap SSD in there as a boot drive for better quality of life while browsing the desktop and they won't mind longer load times for their games. And some people, myself included in some cases, are only playing eSports games or maybe older games that load quickly enough even on a hard drive.
Oh...or they could be someone that only plays GTA V (I've met plenty of people like this actually, including my wife). While the load times are pretty bad in that game, swapping from a hard drive to an SSD makes no difference. It's one of the only games I know of that actually changes load times based on how good your CPU is. Moral of the story is know your customer and what hardware they actually need.
We test all the hard drives we re-sell. We commonly use "Disk Health" in Parted Magic, or CrystalDisk Info. HD Tune is good, but CrystalDisk Info can get SMART info over a USB-to-SATA/IDE adapter where HD Tune can't. If we are suspicious of a drive that checks out in SMART we'll run it through a scan in HDD Regen, takes a while but it worth the peace of mind.
I have all types of drives in my current rig. An Intel Optane 905P 480GB U.2-NVMe SSD, two WD Blue 3D Nand SATA SSDs of 2TB and 4TB, and a WD VelociRaptor 10000 rpm HDD of 1TB.
A couple of my hard drives are more than ten years old and came secondhand. I use them for backup of files.
The Skyhawk is still under warranty. If you aren't able to get it repaired in oz(you should be able to however), bring it to Taiwan where we can repair it and make another video.
Who is "we"
I got several Seagate drives sent in for repair, and replacements failed and were sent in for replacement, where those replacements also failed... So on so forth.. Seven times across 11 drives before I gave up and threw them all in the garbage in favor of buying WDC. In ten times that time, I only had two WDC drives fail, and only one on warranty. It says a lot about their quality. The cost of shipping the drives to Seagate, added up, and losing my data numerous times nearly ended up with me smashing all my computers with a sledge hammer. So frustrating losing irreplaceable family photos, videos and countless hours of work on the computer. I always recommend using RAID with crappy drives like Seagate.
@@HoloScope I took Bryan to do tech repairs in May when he was in Taiwan. I was in the video.
@@pixels303at-odysee9 That sounds awful! I would certainly be unhappy with that too if that happened.
My PC are still running with one 500GB hard drive in addition to the main 120GB windows partition. It is old enough that it still run on SATA II standard. Just make sure you get a warrant, and then try to fill it all out as soon as you install it. If it crashed, return it.
I have bought refurbished HDDs that have worked great and some that have had problems. I would recommend running a full capacity test on the drive using a tool like badblocks. I have a dedicated linux install on a flash drive (not a bootable live iso, an install using the flash drive as the boot device) specifically for this purpose. If you are going to be processing a lot of drives I recommend using a tool like BHT that allows running badblocks on multiple drives simultaneously, and creating a dedicated rig for running it. As a added bonus running badblocks will overwrite the entire drive and leave it blanked as all zeros when complete, so you reduce the concern of sensitive data being recoverable from the drive. It is not as good as running dban, but is an improvement over nothing while you are inspecting the drive.
My 500gb hdd from 2010 still working today no clicks or whining noise. I just use it to store my old music and installers
I got my 1tb drive for 18 bucks shipped and it has been great. A little loud but one-day when I can build my own pc (when prices calm down) I will go ssd for my boot drive to quiet things down. I only have the 18 dollars and traded 5 year old tv into my pc. Plays fallout 4, mafia 3, and much more. Love it.
I've got a couple 1TB hard drives manufactured circa 2010ish from Goodwill and a thrift store in a redundant Windows Storage Spaces array for the past few years, and haven't had any problems yet. One of them even came with a few hundred bad blocks- and nothing more has failed yet.
Really, that's something you might want to look into- Windows storage Spaces. It can do all sorts of software RAID, and more. However it might involve a crash course in Powershell to do some of the more advanced stuff (IE: SSD+HDD tiering)
my local thrift store wants 20$ for an 80gb drive... that's IDE and untested.....
I have 2 old 2TB barracuda drives that have almost 70k hours on them, they are used on a media server and still have no errors. I run error tests on them every month. My longest running SSD is a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB with 45k hours and 73 TBW to date, still runs like new.
A meter?
I had an external 2.5" hdd with a very odd cable, 20cm and it really wanted to bend back into it's original shape. One time the cable dragged the hdd off the table edge and it slammed against the steel table leg (hdd is dead since then)...
dat test bench need some loving.
Used drives are only worth it if they come from Taiwanese scrapyards.
@LIGHTING wondering the same thing.... maybe his translation services are traded for prior notice to new video releases? inside info
@LIGHTING Lmfao I'm usually at work in the middle of the day when he releases. It's usually about 2PM for me in Taiwan which is a bit after I get back from eating lunch. I hit the bell icon and enabled notifications on the CZcams app so that my phone beeps when he uploads. I also have an unlimited internet plan that I pay C$12/m for so when I am on the road on the weekends hangin out with my friends and get the notification, I can still watch the video, leave a like and post a comment. The earlier you are, the more people see your comment and are more likely to press like, pushing it to the top. Leaving a comment helps the video do better and gets recommended to more people. I try to think of something witty because I like making people laugh or amusing people. I like to leave comments on Greg's videos too, Gear Seekers as well but they post in the middle of the North American day so by that time I'm already passed out. I genuinely love the vids and I take a break to watch each new one fully every day. I love the parts hunts, I love being in the parts hunt. I love tech, I love buildin and tinkering with computers and as such, built myself into a position to work in the tech industry. And I want the videos to do well so...I leave a comment in the comments section down below. I watch them even if they're sponsored by Intel cause it helps Bryan command a higher price for those sponsorships, which in turn go back into buying parts for parts hunts and the stuff we like.
@@MarcoGPUtuber I wish internet was cheap where I live in the USA. We get ripped off routinely.
@@NotSoCrazyNinja You and me both. It's even worse in Canada.
@@MarcoGPUtuber Laughs in Indian
What's the difference between connecting them with usb and with sata on the mb? Are they read in a different mode? When it comes to be checked with hd tune.
If you can see the manufacture date, power on hours and #of power ons (hdd), or TBW (ssd), and the drive is within normal use range, then sure no problem. Actually my whole Nas has manufacturer referb and open box drives. Haven't had a single issue. Just get DOA replacement guarantee and stay away from scetchy looking listings
Found a $18 WD 1TB 7200RPM on eBay new itâs $50. Really considering this buy.
have you ever tried out those huge sas drives with an adapter? i was going to , but never gotten around to it. they were really cheap online
hey ro,
got some old pentium 4 dual core cpu at 2.4ghz and a few fx 8350`s--was wondering if you had some use for them as i`m doing more recent builds now
THANKS DUDE.
Rule 1 avoid Seagate hard drives (see Louis Rossman vid if you have any doubts about this).
Rule 2 avoid drives made in 2nd half of 2011 from Thailand due to the floods, there's lots of failures.
You recommend Seagate or WD?
Where are you sourcing your SSDâs from?
One thing about old or used HD is if they was within the 5 years from date of manufacturer its usually covered by the warranty. I had a lot of drive in the past that they replaced the drive without receipt that WD, seagate, ibm etc. all they ask was the date it was made. That covers retail or oem HD in most cases.
My brother got his 2TB WD red in a good condition for 20 Euros which should be around 22 USD
I got rid of all of my HDDs except one as a backup drive. SSD only system. Less noise, more reliable. I had a bunch of HDDs fail on me and only one SSD.
It's like a gamble... Sometime you got really good used hdd, sometime got really bad used hdd. I always use HDSentinel Pro cz the UI is really good for beginner
That's a lot of used hardware, I'm afraid. Just be familiar with return policies. I use what mostly, so unless the thing I bought is like $15 I'll go ahead and exchange it or refund it.
my pc is 100% used, with 3/7ths of the parts being over a decade old, and one is two decades old!
I bought a 500 gig hard drive on newegg that was supposed to be new but was obviously used as hell. Love how the seller took a blue Sharpe in a failed attempt to hide the wear on the label. The metal cover had so many deep nicks and scratches I'm surprised it actually worked but the s.m.a.r.t data showed it had 24 hours or so of runtime on it. Then down the line I bought a 3TB drive from Microcenter that was refurbished because it was about the same as a new 1TB drive from the same line. Good working drive but it's got 2 separate partitions on it that I can't get to merge to get it to use all 3TB on one partition. I'm wondering if maybe the drive was formatted with dual operating systems on it and the refurb screwed it up or something. Also years ago I had a hard drive go belly up the moment it started that clicking noise in a laptop
I bought a New seagate drive similar to your model, but with 8TB capacity. It too won't even run when plugged in my pc. But gyess what: i applied a piece of tape on a 3.3V pin on the sata power connector, and once plugged again, it now works miraculously !
So be careful especially if you have an older power supply, this issue can happen to you.
I only buy used HGST/Hitachi Ultrastar, 80⏠for 4Tb and they are perfect for backup.
You should do a video on board replacements for HDDs.
Fun fact: about 10 years ago I were playing around with my PC, when hard drive platter literally got stuck, making really scary bang it made that many times within a week, freezing the system until drive spun again. It was my bigger hard drive with main system and all, long story short I was forced to use small drive and Ubuntu for over half year before I had an opportunity to buy new drive and transfer data, after that time I didn't feel like coming back to windows as Ubuntu seem better to me.
Interesting thing is: HDD after spending half year on shelf somehow fixed itself, it haver had platter stuck on me. And were using it for long time for less valuable data.
Same thing here, was practically "forced" to go to Linux over a failing disk, been using the same disk for over 3 years (I keep writes to a minimum, but I can read from it just fine) First thing I noticed while using Linux was how silent the whole computer was xDDD Never look back...
I'm 9 minutes in and didn't see the below mentioned... Sometimes the drives stay in reset mode as long as they get power on the 3.3v pins in the sata connector. It's a relatively new SATA stand-by/staggered turn on feature. Covering the 3.3v contacts with some tape or a sheet of paper will get the drive started (or use a molex->sata adapter cable for testing).
If there's no vibrations (motor not working), it could be just a fuse tripped by the power connector, or a safety diode that's not conducting. A multimeter can check those (use continuity on fuses, diode on diodes). Sometimes, the power input jack contacts have solder cracks so the drive doesn't get 5v or 12v at all and resoldering the power connector gets them working.
Oooh, he's rocking a Taichi! Fml those r beautiful...Lucky!
for seagate 2 tb drive try low level formatting using hirens boot cd. It should be ok after low level formatting.
scratched up labels and covers are not the only indicator and/or means noting as some drive bays have very close tolerances in the space and the metal edges can scrape over the label or top cover and scratch it up.
hard drives can be very sensitive to even where if the top cover or or certain screws are removed especially the ones under the warranty void stickers will hold the head stack and because of how precise hard drives are if the screw is removed it will cause the head stack to shift and cause it to never work again.
that is why recovery houses has a special head stack alignment software tool that they can re align the head stack when doing data recovery.
from other videos i have seen it is mostly the western digital drives that are sensitive to shifting head stacks.
next hard drives are very sensitive to dust and can only be serviced safely in a clean room so that is why recovery houses are very clean
I got some 2008 and 2009 WD Raptors that still check out. Paid 5$ cad each. great deall. 300gb raptors. 10k rpm drives.
i'm just lucky that these days i just go online and buy used drives for cheap and get them delivered for next to nothing. i don't even have to leave the house and i'm usually guaranteed to get drives that are 100% health and 100% performance.
500gb to 1 tb is what you find inside sky HD & sky Q boxes, its also an ideal way of getting a HD without paying thru the nose for one, you only need to format them
Donât normally post, but you can easily get 2tb hdd new for around $60-70 in us. Usually seagate barracudas 7200rpm on Newegg or microcenter. So I think 1tb drive donât really make sense new as you mentioned, vs a 500gb SSD for about $60.
Also crystal disk info will do a similar job, to the program you mentioned, but also work on SSD and itâs free as well.
Great tips. Do you have a tech video about how to install internal hardrive? Im always afraid that is why i only buy external.
I bought a few 10 year old hard drives for my plex server which runs 24/7, checked them adn they each have around 25k hours on them, hopefully they wont die on me soon, but I haven't had any bad sectors or anything wrong happen with them yet!