Shopping for new HDD on eBay is a hard thing..

[Keatah]

..because the sellers often say new(other) for the condition of the drive. This usually means a recycled disk from a previously used system. One which had its S.M.A.R.T. Errors reset and bad sectors remapped to the G-list.

 

They'll even tell you the disk is new. Well, yes, it *is* new. New to them. Newly refurbed from a shady shop in China. And sometimes the sellers are so idiotic they are fooled too.

 

I'm all for using an saving old vintage stuff in the context of collector and hobby computers and stuff. But when I buy a replacement disk for a production machine I expect it to be new.

 

I'll ask a seller if it's brand new straight from the original factory unopened. Most skirt around the issue and if you press them they say they'll check or say it's just unopened. They'll never say yes to "factory original, new, unopened, unused" all together.

 

Just a word of warning if your buying bare drives from fleabay.

[Osgeld]

I might buy some vintage hard drives from ebay, I might buy some screwball SSD types off ebay, had great luck with kingspec when I needed a 44 pin laptop SSD, or a 1.8 inch SSD for my netbook with a PATA ribbon cable

 

but yea, if a hard drive can die at 3 am and earn me a phone call, its from a dealer, and its always enterprise grade, the extra 20-40 bucks those cost is well worth not having to worry about it spinning 24/7 after the first year or 2

 

heh same goes for the wifes computer

Edited January 27, 2016 by Osgeld

[7800fan]

If it is not new, you could open SNAD claim stating listed and sold as new, was not new. You can use SMART tool to find power-on hour.

 

For things like the hard drives, try to stick with sellers in the same country. That way under eBay buyer protection, seller will have to pay for return label. If they do not provide one after a week, call eBay and let them know seller is refusing to send the return label as required under buyer protection, eBay generally will close in your favor and you can keep POS drive. International seller can't be forced to send return label because generally they can't get to your country's post office and get correct mailing label made and paid for.

 

Generally I avoid international sale on anything that can be expensive and are at risk of being a problem.

 

Leave the neg feedback for last. Seller can't get the feedback removed when the claim is closed in buyer's favor.

[Keatah]

Good points. But you can't always rely on smart data. I replaced a cheap-o drive in an even cheaper laptop and found the smart POH counter was reset to 0 along with some other paramaters. When I did a performance test I found a lot of head stepping out of sequence instead of a smooth continuous progression from track 0 to track 418,000. The head was jumping out of line to get to the G-List spare sectors. There were 1,792 remaps. And these are remaps that the disk did during regular usage. BTW: G-List errors are grown defects that happen in the field during normal usage or usage in demanding conditions like a lappy bouncing or battery dying. A few here and there are alright, normal, expected, and the disk handles them automatically. When you get over a 1,000 somethings funky going on. Or it was used improperly in a defective computer perhaps.

 

Ultimately the drive was stable overall but would slow down in certain areas while it read the replacement sectors. Long story short, smart doesn't always tell the true story because it can be reset to whatever you want it to be.

 

I didn't care, and the customer didn't care and didn't want to bother either, so I didn't file an ebay claim.

 

What's SNAD? Sold Not As Described?

[7800fan]

What's SNAD? Sold Not As Described?

 

Significantly not as described, you're close.

 

A scratch on the plastic shell of an used game cart that wasn't described by the seller is not significant. This is usually expected of normal wear on game cart. A cart whose label reads Air Raid but the board inside plays Combat instead would be significant and warrant claims.

 

Selling used part as new can also be filed as SNAD because the seller was dishonest.

[Keatah]

With this hard drive situation - I believe the seller avoids major negative action by ebay against them because they the seller claims it's "new from the factory". When in reality it's new from the refurb factory. Here, factory and refurb factory are meant to mean the same thing. In actuality one is the OEM manufacturer, and the other is a fly-by-night guy with a PC-3000 pulling disks from scrapped computers and "fixing" them.

 

The seller claims innocence but typically will refund without hassle. Most of the times they damn well know they bought from a supplier that does that.

 

The only place you can trust a refurbed hard disk from is the OEM mfg like WD or Samsung or Seagate. Otherwise you're getting a disk that should've stayed scrapped and dead and not resurrected.