this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Yes, tip number 1: never buy an used HDD
Tip number 2: check smart if there are relocated sectors return it
Tip number 3: run badblocks on the drive, (-w mode) and if there are no errors then check smart again, if there are errors or relocated sectors return the drive
Good luck!
Yes, tip number 1: never buy an used HDD
That's not a good tip.
It's the best tip, buying an used HDD is asking for trouble
What kind of HDD? for what purpose? For what budget?
"Don't buy used" is a dumb tip because it means nothing and addresses nothing.
I use a WD Enterprise HDD from 2012. I bought it used. It passes all tests with flying colours, zero issues so far... it keeps a mirror of my backup. It's not my main backup, it's a copy of a copy. Guess what? I paid an extremely low price for it as a student on a budget, yet it was already proven useful many times both for the backups but also to keep my torrents seeding for longer, and it if does indeed fail... no biggie, not even my backup is compromised.
There are excellent refurbished HDDs too. Either way, "don't buy used" is the kind of blanket statement somebody cosplaying as a infosec home lab data specialist comments on Lemmy, but means absolutely nothing and offers no useful advice.
I've never cosplayed as an "infosec home lab data specialist", but I've had many bad personal experiences with used harddrives, drives that were working perfectly fine but failed after few months from several sources.
And that anecdote somehow means "never buy used drives, no matter what variables are at play"
i have many hgst renewed drives, just use HD Sentinel its fine
Incorrect again.
Your tip 1 isn't good for all situations. I have a 4 drive RAID 10 setup I have zero issues putting a used drive in after I test and inspect. Used doesn't mean trash, it's all situational.
Also, backup backup backup.
And "used" could be used wrong here, I typically use serverpartdeals and get 20TB+ drive sizes, refurbished. They come with a 5 year warranty and will get them replaced if there are issues.
Well, that's good to know, I've always avoided those drives and tend to pay extra for smaller drives so I can get them new.
Yes, tip number 1: never buy an used HDD
Why shouldn't one? Because SSDs are more reliable or what?
Because there's a rather high likelihood that the HDD has been mistreated and will fail soon, it's a gamble. Or at least I've had bad experiences with used hard drives personally.
If you the seller has warranty and you don't mind the hassle of shipping back and possibly paying for the return shipping and pray that everything goes smoothly and you actually get the money back or a working replacement then it can be a good option, I personally rather not go through all that stress.
if it's a traditional/old style with a spinning magnetic disc, listen for clicking sounds as it reads, if you hear clicks it's probably about to die, don't put anything valuable on it.
I bought a used external HDD for the interfaces - esata, usb3, FireWire 800. Lets me move data at max speed between my iBook, MacBook, pc...
...turns out it was stolen. :(
I don't buy used HDDs, or brake pads, or helmets, or climbing rope, or...
Condoms
You can install Linux on it. And occasionally backup all personal files
Infamous advice after purchasing questions
Tip: keep refreshing the tracking page every 60 seconds. This makes the parcel travel even faster.
Make sure you use a red theme (maybe with flames) for your browser.
No it's like bittorrent downloads, if you look at it it goes slower!
For me it goes faster for some reason when I look at it but gets slower when I look away
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Little known fact: refreshing the tracking page not only tells the company that you are invested in your package's arrival time, this telling them to prioritize it, it also pumps electrons into the cardboard so that it is attracted to the fastest moving delivery vehicle.
(Just kidding, neither of these things are true.)
What kind of HDD did you get?
I'm trying to decide between a PATA IDE drive for authenticity or getting a new controller board for my PS2 to use a SATA drive I already have laying around. It'd certainly be easier to use the sata drive but like... Authenticity tho
Emulator and save the PS2 for all posterity?
Naur lol.
The PS2 is already slightly modded, got it at a retro shop.
Since the seals are broken, and work has already been done I have no qualms about modding it further.
Also I don't have an emulator that can output to a CRT sooooo...
I just need freeHDloader and OPL on it because the motors in the optical drive are beginning to burn out.
theatrically turn away from the tracking page and make it feel like you don't care, it can smell your fear, the same way a printer does, and it'll then arrive a day after you need it the most
Don't look at it.
Boot into a linux live usb
Run dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<driveid>
I probably didn't get that perfect, but, close enough. Look it up on the internet or check the man page idk
When it comes to old drives, looking is half the fun.
What is this where did my OS go?
I love dd. Hate using USB programs to burn iso they are all different and weird but man dd is great.
I don't mind dd when I'm not in a hurry, but I usually prefer to just use the built in KDE disk utility. I'm pretty sure its based on Parted and DD under the hood.
When it finally arrives you should run some tests to ensure the drive is not bad. This repo is a decent resource: https://github.com/Spearfoot/disk-burnin-and-testing
If it's a spinning disk hard drive then do a low level format i.e. do a security write zeros on the whole disk (be sure to delete all partitions first). This will try to write a zero to every single sector, and any bad sectors will be removed from use.
I don't think you need to delete the partitions separately, since it's just a table at the very beginning of which parts of the disk belong to which partition?
So if you dd zeroes over everything, the first thing that gets deleted is the partitioning table
I might be wrong here, or maybe it doesn't apply to every situation, but that's how I've understood it to work
Also a tip for OP: don't write zeroes over it, but random data (dd if=/dev/urandom ...). It's a bit more secure as it makes it harder to see the size and location of the encrypted data on the disk
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Recover the data on it. Burn it with fire. Cry because you saw what it was.
Ask yourself why there is a school report on an animation studio on the "new" laptop your "stepmothers" mother bought and used towards the end as she lost her senses thinking people were spying on her trying to hide everything from "the them" deleting what ever she thought was spying on her.
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Any tips?
yeah, wipe that shit, especially an MBR if present.
... or, if you're evil, run photorec /s
don't order used SSD.
Meditate until you reach the realization that, hdd is useless, all material stuff is useless and you have reached nirvana.
But I was downloading nirvana on my used hdd.
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