Amazon Renewed Hard Drives - Should you buy?

In depth testing and analysis of Amazon Renewed/Refurbished HGST Ultrastar DC520 12Tb disks. What do you really get for your money when you buy these, what condition are the disks in and how much can you trust their reliability?

I look at the condition, all the SMART stats, I run surface scans and full performance tests, and then I look at a large sample of public reliability data on these disks to assess how safe they are. I also show you to verify the drives, and when you should just return them.

Amazon Affiliate Links to the drives shown in the this video
HGST 12Tb Renewed Drive : https://amzn.to/48bhYam
Seagate Exos 12Tb Renewed : https://amzn.to/3AcwdPG

Smartmontools Site: https://www.smartmontools.org/
WD Patent for Measuring Helium Leakage : https://patents.google.com/patent/US7...

Fuller analysis on AFR data for a variety of 10TB+ disks from WD/HGST, Seagate and Toshiba:    • Failure Rate Analysis - Best 10Tb+ ha...  

You can also support me if you would like to at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sometechguy - its hugely appreciated.

Link to BackBlaze data source: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-stora...

0:00 Intro
1:20 Physical Inspection
2:15 Check the SMART statistics and tools to use
4:15 Surface scanning to look for bad sectors
4:45 In-depth performance testing
6:28 Analyzing Failure Rate data for Ultrastar DC520 drive models
10:26 Aggregate Data for DC520
11:18 Comparing these to Seagate 12Tb Models AFR data
12:40 Aggregated AFR data for Seagate 12Tb X12, X14 and X16 drives
12:55 Conclusion
13:17 Amazon Renewed Terms and Warranty, and optional Protection
14:30 Summing up