anybody been buying new-old HDDs?

This just arrived from Amazon. I'd been thinking it's better to have 2 or more smaller drives to rotate, rather than one large drive. But it arrived in a box that was not sealed and the box is a little bit beat up. The HDD is Toshiba but the box bears the name of the 3rd party seller. It looks like a retail box but it's not from Toshiba. So I'm wondering if it might be used, but sold as new? Is doing that a known thing? The drive is sealed in the usual transparent plastic, but that could have been sealed by the 3rd party seller, Bipra.

Should I have reasonably expected a Toshiba box?

In retrospect, I should have figured that a small (500GB) HDD would have been made years ago. This one is dated on the label as 2015. If it's old and used, I wouldn't trust it, and just return it. But if it's made in 2015 but still new and unused, is it worth it? It only cost $17 and I will rotate it. This photo is from Amazon. Mine in hand is the same, but a little different. The plastic sealed bag is still sealed and unopened.

I intended to use it externally with a USB-to-SATA adapter, once a month for backups.

@Bob1212


When looking for a new computer part... use PCPartpicker.
It will find the lowest price from reputable retailers.

For example... here's all the 3.5", SATA 6GB/s, hard drives from 480 GB to 2 TB, sorted by price...


If it were me, I'd only look at Western Digital Black hard drives, or Western Digital external hard drives.

Like this, maybe...


The WD Black hard drives are wicked fast, have a 5 year warranty, and just don't seem to break. ^^
I have eight WD Black hard drives, 3x 1TB, 3x 2TB, one 4TB and one 8TB.... zero defects. ^^
Before that I always bought WD Velocipator drives (10,000 rpm), and they all still work.
I even have the original 36GB Raptor, and it still works. (19 years old).







External HDD example...



Some of the Seagate hard drives are acceptable as well.

Bob1212 said:

The HDD is Toshiba but the box bears the name of the 3rd party seller.

Click to expand...

It's plausible that it's unused. Only drives intended for retail sale would be in individual manufacturer's boxes. Those intended for bulk sale to OEMs for including in their PCs would have been supplied as multiple drives in a single box.

Bob1212 said:

This one is dated on the label as 2015. If it's old and used, I wouldn't trust it, and just return it. But if it's made in 2015 but still new and unused, is it worth it?...

....I intended to use it externally with a USB-to-SATA adapter, once a month for backups.

Click to expand...

There is one very simple way to determine if the drive has been used or not. Connect it to a PC (your external USB to SATA adapter will do) then read it's SMART data with something like CrystalDisk Info (I prefer the Portable Apps version)..


This will tell you amongst other things the the Power On Count and the total Power On Hours. You'd expect an unused drive to have been powered up once or twice for testing and maybe for an hour or so. If the drive has been used before then it should be obvious, like this well used example.

Me I buy most off ebay. Mostly used but I always be sure it can be returned in 30 days. Been using 3 so far are good

Bree said:

It's plausible that it's unused. Only drives intended for retail sale would be in individual manufacturer's boxes. Those intended for bulk sale to OEMs for including in their PCs would have been supplied as multiple drives in a single box.


There is one very simple way to determine if the drive has been used or not. Connect it to a PC (your external USB to SATA adapter will do) then read it's SMART data with something like CrystalDisk Info (I prefer the Portable Apps version)..

CrystalDiskInfo Portable (disk health monitoring) | PortableApps.com

CrystalDiskInfo is a HDD/SSD utility which supports S.M.A.R.T. It supports a part of external USB disks, monitoring health status and temperature, graph of S.M.A.R.T. information, control AAM/APM settings and more.

portableapps.com

This will tell you amongst other things the the Power On Count and the total Power On Hours. You'd expect an unused drive to have been powered up once or twice for testing and maybe for an hour or so. If the drive has been used before then it should be obvious, like this well used example.

View attachment 47734

Click to expand...

Here's one of my Seagate Barracudas that I ran in RAID 0 back in the day. Still going strong.