I’ve been getting rid of my physical media too. I still have my UHD movies but I don’t even watch them…
There's likely nothing wrong with it
I have ssd’s still in daily use that are like 12 years old. The only hdd’s I use are externals for my data backup though.
Should be fine imho. Going a year without power shouldn’t be an issue or else tons of people would have issues worldwide
I personally don't trust used and would rather just pay more and buy new, but then again I value my data (and also have backups).
Once as a teenager I think I had a drive die and I lost my data, but ever since then I've always made sure to have a backup of my data. Ironically, I haven't had a drive die since then lol. For example, I've got ssds from over a decade ago still running daily with no issues.
I would just buy off the shelf
18tb were recently this price and I got one, but imho this is still a good deal. You could buy this, hold it until cyber Monday, and if the 18tb doesn’t go back on sale then keep it and be happy.
I like the western digital my passport drives (and easy store drives) for this
What program are you using to test the drive?
Personally I'd go for the 18TB WD. I trust WD as a brand more than Seagate these days, and I bought the 18TB last weekend and it's not that loud in my opinion. Plus I was able to drive down to bestbuy and pick up the WD without having to worry about how it would be shipped (safely or not) to me.
Has anyone ever heard of something bad coming from techs at a hard drive company that went through the contents of a returned drive and then took malicious actions? If they fix a drive and decide to resell it, do they zero out or reformat the drive? (Assuming you deleted the data from the drive and deleted the partition but didn’t do the whole “spend hours zeroing out the drive”)
Is the roommate going to pay for the drive she killed? I’m just curious what happened next.
I returned the 14TB I bought last weekend and bought this one today instead. I'd recommend doing the same!