this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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As mentioned by another user, all drives fail, it's a matter of when, not if. Which is why you should always use RAID arrangement with at least one redundant drive and/or have full backups.
Ultimately, it's a money game. If you save 30% on a recertified drive and it has 20% less total life than a new one, you're winning.
Here's where I got some.
https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives
I looked around a bit, and either search engines suck nowadays (possibly true regardless) or there are no independent studies comparing certified and new drives.
All you get mostly opinion pieces or promises by resellers that actually, their products are good. Clearly no conflict of interest there. /s
The best I could find was this, but that's not amazing either.
What I do is look at backblaze's drive stats for their new drives, find a model that has a good amount of data and low failure rate, then get a recertified one and hope their recertification process is good and I don't get a lemon.
And usually by the time they break they have been obsolete anyways, at least for 24/7 use in a NAS where storage density and energy efficiency are a big concern. So you would have replaced most of them long before they break, even with recertified drives