Hundreds of the world’s largest hard disk drive have mysteriously gone on sale online as refurbished model – should you buy them? waynewilliams@onmail.com (Wayne Williams) | usagoldmines.com

• Need massive storage? Seagate’s Exos 28TB HDD is the current king
• Recertified models are popping up cheap – but they’re not exactly fresh out the box
• Some might’ve worked hard in crypto farms before, so check before you buy!

If you’re looking for a high-capacity hard drive, Seagate’s Exos range will definitely appeal to you. The largest internal drive you can buy in retail right now is Seagate’s Exos 28TB HDD – when launched in 2024 it overtook the previous record holder, the Western Digital Gold, which maxes out at 24TB.

Seagate doesn’t disclose pricing for the Exos 28TB HDD, but we’ve noticed refurbished versions of the drive on sale for a fraction of what you might expect to pay. This isn’t the first time these cheaper CMR drives have appeared online, and the same warnings we issued about buying them before apply now.

The drives that you’ll find online at the likes of Amazon ($379.99), ServerPartDeals ($364.99), eBay in the UK (£578), as well as other third-party retailers, are all recertified models. That means they are either previously used or customer returns that have been inspected, tested, and restored to full working condition by either Seagate or an authorized third party. In other words, they aren’t brand new, but they have been verified to meet functional standards.

Linked to the Chia scandal?

In the case of Seagate’s recertified Exos 28TB, it means you’re getting a tested and refurbished enterprise-grade HDD at a significant discount, but with potentially lower warranty coverage. The drives we’ve found on sale have “Factory Recertified” printed on them, so you know what you’re getting, and (depending on where you buy from) they could come with up to a two-year warranty. That’s interesting, as Seagate does offer an official data sheet for the recertified Exos 28TB drive, which states it only offers a limited six-month warranty.

There’s no question the recertified drives available to buy are attractively priced, and they should be absolutely fine, but if reliability is your top priority, you might be better off picking up a brand-new unit.

Quite where all these recertified drives have come from is something of a mystery, but it wouldn’t surprise us if at least some – if not most – of them originated in China.

Heise.de recently reported a number of its readers had purchased Seagate drives that were supposedly new but had, in fact, been used previously – potentially for thousands of hours. Further digging suggested at least some of the drives originated from Chinese cryptocurrency mining farms that used them to mine Chia several years ago. We’re not suggesting that the recertified Exos 28TB drives have been used for crypto mining, but it’s always a possibility.

When drives are refurbished and factory-certified by Seagate, the Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) usage time is reset to zero. Heise.de reports that some readers with recertified drives discovered their purchases had been used for at least 15,000 hours, which, as Tom’s Hardware points out, suggests “that these drives were used, refurbished by Seagate, used again, and then resold as freshly refurbished models.”

If you do decide to buy one of the recertified Exos 28TB HDDs, make sure you buy from a reputable reseller, even if it means paying a little extra.

Towards the end of January 2025, Seagate added the 36TB Exos M model to its growing family of data center hard disk drives, making it the largest HDD currently available, albeit not one that you’ll be able to buy (for now). Seagate’s CEO, Dave Mosley, also revealed at the time that the company had successfully trialed platter capacities of over 6TB, meaning 60TB drives could be on the horizon.

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