Purchased 5 renewed drives from amazon, 10 months in 3 have had to be replaced because of escalating bad sectors, all three were outside of the refurbish guarantee… one by only a week. Save your money and go with the new drives.

I’m running several used (“renewed”) enterprise SAS HDDs and enterprise SATA SSDs. They’ve been solid so far.

The HDDs came with about 30k hours each which is not bad at all, and the SSDs only had around 100 TB written out of the total 6.2 PB rating.

I’m not sure I would do used with standard consumer HDDs, they typically don’t last as long and are likely abused a lot more in a desktop PC vs a datacenter server.

As always have proper backups in place, all drives fail eventually no matter where you buy them.

I’ve been using renewed (refurbished) 8TB drives off of Ebay - SAS 8TB for $50-60 each. Not a single failure in over a year on the dozen or so drives I’m running right now. I’m running unRAID with a combination of unRAID’s native array drives (for media and “disposable” stuff) in a dual parity config, and ZFS (with snapshots replicated to a live backup on a secondary server) for important personal stuff (and backed-up off-site a few times a year).

Even if something were to perish, I have enough spares to just chuck one in and let it resilver without worrying at all. I’m content with this as a homelabber and when I’m not supplying critical service for a business, etc.