Hot take: I used to hate refurbished drives until a client changed my view

I had a guy bring in a old Dell from 2018 last week and insisted I use a refurbished SSD to keep costs under $60. I told him it was a bad idea, but he showed me data from his IT buddy that showed refurbs from a major seller had a failure rate under 2%. He was right about the price difference too, that drive was $25 vs $45 new. Made me wonder, how many of you actually trust refurbs for client builds where budget is tight?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade27111h ago

Wait what, that IT buddy's data is prob cherry picked lol. I've had refurbs die within a month, and the hassle of swapping it out again with a client is not worth saving $20. New drives are cheap enough already, why risk your rep over something that could nuke all their files?

seanh918h ago

@jade271 I read that same study actually, pretty sure it was from Backblaze or someone who runs a ton of drives. They had refurb failure rates under 2% but the catch was they tested them before putting them in service. The cheap ones your average guy buys on Amazon don't get any testing, so you're rolling the dice. I've seen those refurbs fail too, had one die on a client's machine after three months and they were not happy. The real trick seems to be buying from sellers who actually run a stress test first, not just wiping them and throwing them in a box.