SSD refurbished drive - what caveats

I see prices for refurbished SSD drives that are starting to look
reasonable but am not quite convinced to buy one.

What pros and cons do you all see about buying a refurbished SSD? Are
there vendors who have a good reputation for this type of equipment? I
usually only go for new stuff on the theory of not buying someone
else's lemon,

My current thinking is to use it as the boot disk for a Win 8 Pro
64-bit O/S, but I also play a game which uses my hard drive quite a bit
(or so it seems to me) and putting the game on an SSD may be worthwhile
if the life of the drive does not get reduced drastically.

TIA,

John

On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 17:42:57 +0000 (UTC), "Yes"
wrote:

I see prices for refurbished SSD drives that are starting to look
reasonable but am not quite convinced to buy one.

What pros and cons do you all see about buying a refurbished SSD? Are
there vendors who have a good reputation for this type of equipment? I
usually only go for new stuff on the theory of not buying someone
else's lemon,

My current thinking is to use it as the boot disk for a Win 8 Pro
64-bit O/S, but I also play a game which uses my hard drive quite a bit
(or so it seems to me) and putting the game on an SSD may be worthwhile
if the life of the drive does not get reduced drastically.

TIA,

John

Dunno. If it's got a new NAND stick, the controller should be OK.
With SMART, get an idea of the write cycles it's already been thru.

On 20/09/2013 1:42 PM, Yes wrote:
I see prices for refurbished SSD drives that are starting to look
reasonable but am not quite convinced to buy one.

What pros and cons do you all see about buying a refurbished SSD? Are
there vendors who have a good reputation for this type of equipment? I
usually only go for new stuff on the theory of not buying someone
else's lemon,

My current thinking is to use it as the boot disk for a Win 8 Pro
64-bit O/S, but I also play a game which uses my hard drive quite a bit
(or so it seems to me) and putting the game on an SSD may be worthwhile
if the life of the drive does not get reduced drastically.

A lot of refurbishment just entails a test of integrity at the factory,
and it is then just repackaged and shipped back out. This may be
sufficient, since a lot of drives are just returned to a store where it
was bought, and the store just ships it back to the distributor or
manufacturer. There may be nothing actually wrong with the drive, but
the buyer just "felt" there was a problem.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 20/09/2013 1:42 PM, Yes wrote:
I see prices for refurbished SSD drives that are starting to look
reasonable but am not quite convinced to buy one.

What pros and cons do you all see about buying a refurbished SSD? Are
there vendors who have a good reputation for this type of equipment? I
usually only go for new stuff on the theory of not buying someone
else's lemon,

My current thinking is to use it as the boot disk for a Win 8 Pro
64-bit O/S, but I also play a game which uses my hard drive quite a bit
(or so it seems to me) and putting the game on an SSD may be worthwhile
if the life of the drive does not get reduced drastically.

A lot of refurbishment just entails a test of integrity at the factory,
and it is then just repackaged and shipped back out. This may be
sufficient, since a lot of drives are just returned to a store where it
was bought, and the store just ships it back to the distributor or
manufacturer. There may be nothing actually wrong with the drive, but
the buyer just "felt" there was a problem.

Yousuf Khan


In the case of SSD drives bricked by firmware bugs,
a refurbished drive may get a new version of firmware
before being shipped. Such a drive (firmware bug), is
less likely to have all the wear life of the flash used up.

There is nothing that says they cannot reset the wear counters.
So the SMART statistics on a refurb, do not offer a guarantee
of "odometer honesty". At the factory, the device is completely
open to tampering. You have no way of knowing how many of the
3000 writes per location, have been used up.

Paul

On 22/09/2013 12:50 PM, Paul wrote:
In the case of SSD drives bricked by firmware bugs,
a refurbished drive may get a new version of firmware
before being shipped. Such a drive (firmware bug), is
less likely to have all the wear life of the flash used up.

There is nothing that says they cannot reset the wear counters.
So the SMART statistics on a refurb, do not offer a guarantee
of "odometer honesty". At the factory, the device is completely
open to tampering. You have no way of knowing how many of the
3000 writes per location, have been used up.

The larger the drive, the less of those 3000 write cycles will have been
used up, it may still be near the 3000 limit. For example on my 120GB
laptop SSD, I've already accumulated 1.78TB of writes! But that works
out to an average of only 15 writes so far! Which is only 0.5% life used
up so far. The SMART software still shows 100% life left.

Yousuf Khan

On 21/09/2013 1:42 AM, Yes wrote:
I see prices for refurbished SSD drives that are starting to look
reasonable but am not quite convinced to buy one.

--
@~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real!
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and farces be with you!
/( _ )\ (Fedora 19 i686) Linux 3.11.2-201.fc19.i686
^ ^ 19:18:02 up 2 days 16:01 0 users load average: 0.00 0.01 0.05
�借貸! ��騙! ��交! �打交! �打劫! �自殺! 請考慮綜� (CSSA):
http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa

On 21/09/2013 1:42 AM, Yes wrote:
I see prices for refurbished SSD drives that are starting to look
reasonable but am not quite convinced to buy one.
What pros and cons do you all see about buying a refurbished SSD? Are

Make sure that the memory chips are all new! All SSD cells have a
maximum number of write cycles.

--
@~@ Remain silent. Nothing from soldiers and magicians is real!
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and farces be with you!
/( _ )\ (Fedora 19 i686) Linux 3.11.2-201.fc19.i686
^ ^ 19:18:02 up 2 days 16:01 0 users load average: 0.00 0.01 0.05
�借貸! ��騙! ��交! �打交! �打劫! �自殺! 請考慮綜� (CSSA):
http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_...sub_addressesa

On Saturday, September 21, 2013 1:42:57 AM UTC+8, Yes wrote:

I would not touch it.
So many pricks describing stuff as "refurbished" when it is just used.
It is like buying a car engine from the wreckers when you
don't know how many kilometres it has done.