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>4. ... the no trouble found rate for RMA'd hardware is typically quite high - to the point there is likely to be nothing wrong with a product that has been returned under warranty.

Long ago, my friend worked for a Dell contractor (Unisys maybe) doing field service calls. His car would be full of swapped hardware, most of which would be thrown out. However, the hard drives had to be physically returned to his office. He gave me a bunch of stuff like a stack of eight working P4 motherboards, RAM, fans, CPU coolers, DVD drives, and so on. It all worked fine so I can totally see the disks making their way back into the supply chain via some shady contractor or recycler.

> I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS.

Same. I bought a bunch of 10TB HGST drives for my home NAS. They were $79 ($95 now) vs $325 new. I ran badblocks for 24H on each and found one dodgy one, which the seller swapped out.

Last year I was buying new old stock 6TB Ultrastar SAS drives from B&H for $90 ea. They were a few years old with 0 hours. None of the drives showed any indication of use, ex: no witness marks. They're in a hotswap NAS.

For personal use, its really hard to see how this would go wrong. You get an (arguably) much better drive in the Ultrastar, and even if the resellers (typically 2 year) warranty doesn't pan out, the drives are cheap enough compared to new you can replace one or two in a typical RAID-6 array out of pocket and still come out ahead.

I also received recertified (sold as such and with proper labels and warranty) WD drives and more concerning:

4 fake WD drives that had failed SMART long self test with surface read anomalies and looked very banged up and used (scratches, stripped mounting holes). The SMART attributes had been reflashed to look brand new and the drives cleaned with isopropyl alcohol or something similar and relabeled with not too bad looking fake labels using OEM or old serial numbers. The antistatic bags were also not genuine WD. The disks contained a test pattern unlike brand new WD disk which usually only have 00s.

This is not a new thing. I think I bought them off Amazon marketplace in 2023. Returns for full refund were not an issue however once I sent photos and SMART errors.

> for my NAS

What are you using for an OS? It seems like our NAS OS options are fewer than they were a decade ago - especially if you want ZFS.

For the 2 NAS I recently set up, one is running TrueNAS Core (last freeBSD) and the other is just minimal FreeBSD.

Arch Linux. It’s an easy default for me, although I’ll probably build the next iteration on FreeBSD with ZFS. I don’t have much faith that btrfs or bcachefs will catch up to ZFS in the next few years.

I'm pretty dang happy with ZFS. It needs some extra RAM but gives a lot in return.