I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.
I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.
In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?
That’s the exact opposite of my experience, if we’re talking anecdotal evidence. I’ve had 3x WD Red drives die within the warranty period,so thankfully I wasn’t out of pocket, but I now avoid them. Never had a Seagate go bad, but my goto is now Toshiba.