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 ?
Like others, I’ve had good experiences with eBay- just look for reputable sellers (good reviews, not a brand new seller, etc). Most of what I bought was fine, but the ones that were dead on arrival I was able to get replaced within their warranty window. Just be sure to test what you get as soon as it arrives.