buying recertified drives: bad idea or good idea?

[movingtarget]

Hey Guys,

Lemme first of all say I'm a first time poster but I've been readin the Tom's forums for awhile now. I've been toying with the idea of getting a pair of W.D. 74 GB Raptor hard drives to use in a raid in my current system. Specs are as follows:

AMD Opteron 146 CPU Skt 939
Gigabyte K8N Pro SLI
2 Gig OCZ Platinum DDR 400
Nvidia GEForce 6800

The board is capable of doing Raid 0, 1, and 1+0 so I'm not worried much about whether or not I can raid the drives. Newegg is currently offering recertified 74 gig raptors here. Is it a good idea or bad idea to get a recertified drive or do your recommend I get a brand new retail/oem drive instead?

Any good advice you can give me is welcome. Thanks.

 

[blue68f100]

If the recertified drives have the same warrant of NEW ones it will be OK.

 

[RyanMicah]

Warranty is certainly something to look at. But as with any hardware you have no clue what you're really getting. It's always a risk. Those raptors could've been packed into a poorly ventilated case with both the molex and sata power connectors connected on a crappy power supply. They could've been dropped, shipped via UPS 3 times...etc. Just because they "work" doesn't mean they will "keep working" But if the original manufacturer offers a warranty, then I say go for it. Just make sure you back up your data because they won't help with that if the drive fails. Furthermore, if both drives are going in a single system I'd consider getting just one raptor for your OS and another for your basic storage. For game loading times (read times) check THG's recent article concerning hard drives (I forget what it was entitled and half of it's already slipped my mind). The article and the Hard Disk Charts will outline that there are 7200rpm drives that will load a game nearly as fast a raptor, although access time and write speed are not as fast. Personally, I'd save my cash instead of buying raptors. A quarter of a second here and there to access a file or a couple more seconds to write one isn't going to make a huge difference and more than likely you'd rather have that extra $100 or 200gigs.

 

[jaguarskx]

Kinda reminds me of buying used hard drives off e-Bay...

A shot in the dark.

I don't mind getting a used HD for free, but I won't pay for one.

 

[RyanMicah]

Kinda like smoking. Sure it feels great to kill the stress caused by an addiction, or get something for cheap. But that's time off yours and the hard drives life. Smokers say "I don't want to be old and sick anyway" which is naive, because smoking just makes them old and sick SOONER, it doesn't chop off the bad years of their life. Only the good ones. Hard drives are far less of a critical decision in life. Try to find yourself a good price on a new one if you want it to last, or go ahead and use a recertified if you think that flash hard drives will make your 10K rpm drive obselete in a few years anyway. Oh, and stay away from Maxtor.

 

[movingtarget]

Yea I already know about the horrors of Maxtor. I get to pull Maxtor drives out of computers at the place I work at least once a week. I'll stick with getting a new Raptor instead if I ever get one. However I'm also going to look into other alternatives. Anyone have an idea of what the drive space is supposed to be like when they first come out with the flash drives or if Toms or someone else has an article talking about them?

 

[rdhood]

I would not purchase a recertified drive. I want to be the first one to crack the package, and then run the thing for 6 years 24/7.

 

[tcsdoc]

I've purchased and installed re-certified drives for years (at least 30) and had 2 failures.
I can't count the number of 'freshly packaged' drives I've installed and would say the failure rate is in the dozens.
Many say the re-certification process weeds out bad drives. Each drive is tested but new drives are only sampled for quality control. What makes the difference is who is doing the re-certification.

Get the drive and make backups. Can't go wrong for the price and DVD+RW's are cheap...

Watch for end of year price slashing on hard drives.... Dumping old technology for the new will yield you massive savings.

 

[nevesis]

my experience with re-certified drives is one of bad sectors, and crashes I would avoid them like the plague, but thats just me!

 

[RyanMicah]

I've purchased and installed re-certified drives for years (at least 30) and had 2 failures.
I can't count the number of 'freshly packaged' drives I've installed and would say the failure rate is in the dozens.
Many say the re-certification process weeds out bad drives. Each drive is tested but new drives are only sampled for quality control. What makes the difference is who is doing the re-certification.

Get the drive and make backups. Can't go wrong for the price and DVD+RW's are cheap...

Watch for end of year price slashing on hard drives.... Dumping old technology for the new will yield you massive savings.

Sounds to me like a good thought. I mean, some drives do fail early on or not at all.

Yea I already know about the horrors of Maxtor. I get to pull Maxtor drives out of computers at the place I work at least once a week. I'll stick with getting a new Raptor instead if I ever get one. However I'm also going to look into other alternatives. Anyone have an idea of what the drive space is supposed to be like when they first come out with the flash drives or if Toms or someone else has an article talking about them?

I know Samsung is making one that is 30gb, but I think it's a laptop drive. Still, I'd buy it if not just for my OS if it's @ decent price. There was at least one article here on Tom's I read, and a forum post elsewhere. Do a search on "flash hard drives" or something on google.

 

[pawn3d]

you only have to ask yourself one question: Does "warranty" mean they will cover your data recovery bill?

 

[assasin32]

you only have to ask yourself one question: Does "warranty" mean they will cover your data recovery bill?

And you have to ask yourself this, does a poster from a 2006 thread still need advice?