It's "refurbed" by the seller. It also says it has approximately 35,000 hours on it. That's 4 years of continual use. I wouldn't trust that with anything.
It certainly could. That's the gamble you're taking.
I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.
I'm running Raid z2;and have considered even z3 which should be plenty of redundancy for older drives. Well that and backing up data to a separate location.
Depends on the usage. That's the gamble you take. I would maybe buy three and put two in a mirror and keep the third one as a replacement?
That's 240$ for three drives without warranty though... Nevermind I'd prefer to buy two new Toshiba X300 new for 210$ a piece and forget the headache and get the warranty.
The Toshiba x300 is a consumer drive, the drive they are offering is an enterprise grade storage drive. I have only bought enterprise or nas speed drives in the past. Consumer drives may not be built to the same standards.