What's your experience with Used HDDs? Let us know below!

The only time you want to hear those HDD noises is on Floopytron's songs.

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.

New SSD, used HDD Games aren't sensitive 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.

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..

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)

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

Pro tip: make sure to turn off the quick scan option in HD tune cuz the results from the quick scan is not accurate.

8 years ago I got 3 2TB drives at 50 aud each. They're all still spinning to this day

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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 £100 shipped in a segmented hard drive shipping box all in sealed anti static bags. Cheap and very cheerful. Before that 5x WD gold for £40

You are definitely my favorite tech KZfaqr .....feels like all the others just try and show off there expensive PC's that they get for free lol

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This video shows some really good information. Good job man.

Thanks for the tips Mr Yes, greetings from Mexico!

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).

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

When I built my first gaming PC I bought a used hard drive which was a 1tb western digital blue for £25 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.

The Tech Yes City Rebrand is 🔥

Something I’d 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like more the practical test lmao. Nice video and excellent info as always!!!

Great video. I love the Tech City music.

if i have two hdd that dont look perfekt, i just put them into RAID 1 would be a waste otherwise (in my opinion)

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.

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.

Have 6x2TB Hitachi HDDS. Bought them refurbished 8 years ago. They're still going strong.

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.

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.

1:54 YES extracting that Price for Performance :)

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.

I have abused some drives in the past and they didn't show any bad sectors but did fail down the line.

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

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 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.

I am a HUGE fan of that rope lamp. It is truly rugged!

I rarely go with used hard disks because I don't trust them as much as new, although on the rare occasion I do, I will: > Ensure the warranty seals are in good shape > the top cover is not dented or misshapen in any way > Check the logic board on the back to ensure it's not damaged or missing screws and with regards to the disk's health... > listen to the disk. If there is any grinding noises or the bearings in the spindle make a lot of noise, don't bother with the disk. That spindle can and very easily sieze if the bearings are worn. even if the disk has low power on hours and the surface scan passes. > I will check the drive's SMART data and verify that the following is at minimum above threshold: - Ultra DMA CRC error rate - High fly writes (especially on 2.5" disks) - Pending Sector count - Uncorrectable sector count - Power on hours count - power on count / stop-start count - spin-up time I will also perform a read/write benchmark to make sure the disk is still reading and writing data to itself at full speed. Disks tend to degrade over time but this will worsen if the disk has bad sectors. If you're unsure of the health of a disk that you're looking to buy... ask to see the disk and run a SMART analysis and surface scan on 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)

I've had good luck with used drives, especially from a recycling center.

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.

can u do a review of that china ssd "X-Star" that you show in this video? is that any good?

I just use white label drives. Instead of paying for a used drive and not know what you are getting, white labels are brand new drives by major manufacturers without a manufacturer warranty. Used drives usually are out if warranty anyway, might as well spend money on the new drive and sellers will usually give you a 1 year warranty

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.

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.

Some of the things I have learned about HDD over the past 20+ years. - Keep the temps under 40C. The new fangled boxes with little to no air movement are death to spinners. - Try to minimize spin up and down as this adds to both wear and tear and heat build up. I have seen reports of 10+ years of constant use. - Good power supply. Clean and abundant pereferred. - Good cables. No corrosion and properly constructed, like there are no bad cables, right? - If possible a real UPS with power regulation, this will help your whole build. - Long term storage should be accessed as little as possible, rewriting a movie file is unnecessary. Large archives and back ups should be over written as little as possible. Multiple copies in multiple locations on different drives. - Good quality drives will last longer but will cost more. Enterprise class used drives may well have in excess of 20,000 hours on them but due to the likelihood of few spin ups have much life left in them and are generally made with higher quality components. FWIW I keep all my drives under constant fan cooling and currently have 2 Toshiba DT01ACA200 1TB drive with at least 31,000 hours each running just fine at 33C and a WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 3TB with over 35,000 hours running at 30C. I also have a Seagate ST2000DM001-ER164 2TB running over 20,000 hours at 36C which strikes me as a bit warm. I guess time to adjust the fan.

I always check the smart status using hddscan but I will definitely try your method.

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.

My brother got his 2TB WD red in a good condition for 20 Euros which should be around 22 USD

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).

thanks for sharing the software!

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 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

Bad sectors can be just crc errors due to power losses. First you need to confirm the sector is actually bad by zeroing out the drive (full format) and seeing if the bad sector remains after. If its gone its just gone, it was a half written sector which had a bad crc and wasnt actually damaged

Thank you so much for the info! Love your content so much😁👌 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 KZfaq videos.

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 purchase my used hard drives from a local computer store. He installs SSD’s, wipes the old hard drives, and puts them up for sale at 10 bucks per drive. Minimum 250 gb up to 1 Tb. All 10 bucks.

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.

dat test bench need some loving.

Don’t 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 don’t 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 it’s free as well.

I had a 2.5" external that was clicking recently and holy crap did it actually last for some time after that and I was even able to copy off all the data from it. I actually used it for a few months like that before I finally retired it and it was still operating last I had it plugged in. It just slowly kept adding bad sectors but there must have been enough spares because it never came across any that it couldn't recover. The drive was totally full too. Usually by the time they start clicking they are completely toast. Used drives can be a good bargain if they aren't brand new and known to be working. Most drive failures happen either really early in their lifespan or pretty much at the end. The mean time between failures for most physical drives is in the order of years these days. I have quite a few that are over 10 years old and are still totally fine despite being used on a daily basis. Interestingly, I have a bunch of external lacies and they all started failing right around the same time.

0:30 - That drive doesn't just "Look Terrible", but more like "I've been opened up in a sawmill by someone who forgot to re-screw all-but-one screw!"...

Well of course those two drives dont work. They are seagates.

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.

Another thing worth considering is that 2.5" laptop hard drives work perfectly fine in a desktop, and are much more resistant to shocks from being shaken, dropped, etc.

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

Better yet, get a bunch of hard drives, stick them in a NAS with RAID10/RAIDz2, create a pool for files and another for block storage, add an iSCSI drive and Windows will think it’s local and you can have a pool of fast storage and run an NVMe locally.

HDD drives will still worth it to store loads of data. But another thing that you didn't mentioned is that these type of drives, specially the most old ones, they will suffer a data loss over a very long period of time by demagnetizing the information of the plates. So until the SSDs will catch up in price to HDDs, these type of drives will keep being produced.

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

I use a program called SpeedFan. It shows all the temperatures and there's a S.M.A.R.T. tab that shows all the status values of your hard drives. If a used hard drive looks healthy, and sounds healthy, and shows no errors, then I'd have no worries about storing important data on it. In fact, I would put more trust in a used hard drive that is "TRIED AND TRUE" than new hard drive that has yet to prove itself.

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 always scan for bad sectors, regardless of used or new. I bought used PCs but usually the drives are fine.

Im using one right now - best decision ever 😁

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

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 bought a 500gb seagate hdd before and used it only for 2 weeks then suddenly died with 100% health and has no bad sectors.I've had wd blue 1tb and still up to this day works fine (sold the rig to a friend btw). P.s I've had 3 seagate hdd's and all of them failed (one being bnew) so choose WD 😂😂😂

THANKS DUDE.

Here in my country, used HDD is sold about 60% of the new price. But most sellers provide 1 year guarantee and 100% HD sentinel rating.

I lost 2TB of data thanks to 2 1TB external HDs from Walmart. My mom bought them both an I lost everything on them. Never again. Bought 1 WD from Walmart a long time ago still works. Bought 3 hard drives off of OfferUp. 1 Seagate HD and 2 WD 500gb hard drives. They still work to this day.

New channel logo ayee 😛

Thank you so much!

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.

Many businesses and smart people TAKE A HAMMER to their drives when they liquidate their older PCs. So if you see dents(even small dents) it's likely purposeful data security to destroy the drive. I see it almost every time I goto my local recycling center. (Weekly)

i picked up an old Seagate 3tb hdd for £35 with a 2 year warranty and a new PNY 480gb ssd for £18 with the discount i got, i feel lucky i got all that storage for the price it would have cost me for a 480gb ssd. as charlie sheen once said... "WINNING"

Never had a problem with 3.5 drives. I had a 2.5 fail under warranty in a toshiba laptop once. Really not supprised. Was replaced with a Hitachi which is workimg 10 years later so thumbs up to Hitachi at this point

I have 70% satisfied experiences with used hard drive so far. I have bought a lot of used hard drives, only 2-3 drives are failed. But for some people I know, he bought some used hard drives too but almost all the hard drives he got are failed in just a month after he bought.

Used drives are only worth it if they come from Taiwanese scrapyards.