Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 28822
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2025/07/09 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/9     

2003/6/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28822 Activity:very high
6/23    What exactly is a refurbished hard drive?  I've been running
        my replacement Seagate refurb drive for a few weeks and
        ActiveSMART already thinks its going to fail in a 2 weeks.
        Do they just low-level format all the defective drives and
        reship them out?
        \_ Please tell me this is a troll.
        \_ well, it's a chance you took, and be a man and live with it.
           \_ well, if it is true, this is class action lawsuit material.
              \_ So you scored in the bottom quartile on the LSATs huh?
           \_ chance he took?  many hard drive manufacturers replace returned
              drives with refurbished ones.  It's as if consumers generally
              get to choose what kind of replacements they get.  anyhow, it's
              still under warranty, right?
              \_ Yea.  But remember you loose $$ for shipping the defective
                                        \_ "lose"
                 drive back everytime and warranty time while doing the
                 swap.  (It also wastes your valuable time and effort.)
                 So if I have to swap a drive a few times during its 3 year
                 warranty, the effective cost is incredibly higher than
                 the original purchase price.  This is wrong.
                 The consumer shouldn't haveta pay for the manufacturer's
                 defects when a product is still under warranty.
                 \_ I personally had better luck with my IBM SCSI harddrive.
                    I mean, for some reason SCSI harddrive gets much better
                    treatment than the IDE counter part.  Having said that,
                    if I have choice, i really don't want to go through that
                    again.  A defective Harddrive is a pain in the butt.
                    \_ Yeah, and you pay for it.  At least it use to be true
                       that each and every SCSI drive is tested, while IDE
                       drives are only batch tested.
        \_ This is a case of getting what you paid for.  Don't ever buy
           refurb drives.  Period.  --Motd Storage Guru
           \_ Hrm.  I've had very good luck with all my refurb
              drives.  I haven't lost any.  Then again, I'm talking
              about 1995 SCSI drives that work even after they start
              to lose their bearings.  But yeah, I wouldn't touch a
              refurb IDE drive.
              \_ Do you use the refurbs as temp space or for real data? -MSG
                 \_ I don't use them any more, because of space limitations,
                    however, I used them for years as my only storage, without
                    backups.  Drives *used* to be reliable, even if refurb.
           \_ I second this. My failure rate on refurbed drives is probably
              10X what it is on new ones.
           \_ I never buy refurb drives.  I buy retail drives that fail
              in a few months and get refurb drives in exchange.  Perhaps
              the guru could enlighten us on the best storage strategy in
              his/her opinion.
              \_ Depends on how much cash you've got and how important your
                 data is.  For home use, a simple IDE mirror is probably a
                 good choice.  For work I do raid3,4,5, mirrors, or 3,4,5
                 plus mirror for some stuff.  Which of 3,4,5 I use and whether
                 or not it gets mirrored as well depends on what data goes on
                 it.  Nothing is refurb.  Things like the database goes on
                 fiber channel with stripe and mirror.  Customer owned data
                 is raid4 or raid5 on IDE.  Only a little bit of scsi here and
                 there.  I figure if I'm going to shell out scsi level prices
                 I might as well get fiber channel and be done with it. -MSG
2025/07/09 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/9     

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