I am currently expanding my Homelab setup, and want to buy a 10TB drive, for media storage. It’s a Seagate Ironwolf disk, so perfect for the job. But, it’s second hand. It was originally bought in 2019, but stopped being used after 2022. Only used for static storage, it’s been booted less than 50 times. I can get it for 1/3 of the original price.
What do you think? Are there any rules about buying used storage I should know about before buying it?
Original price doesn’t matter, you need to compare it against current new offerings. A drive like that, I’d buy for 8-10€/TB at max. because current new HDD pricing is 15€/TB at the low end.
What you also need is SMART output. Watch out for high uncorrectable errors, writes and whatever. I’d never buy a drive without having seen its SMART data.
Remember that S.M.A.R.T. can be overwritten with any data 🙃