I would absolutely not use refurbs personally. As part of the refurb process they wipe the SMART data which means you have zero power-on hours listed, zero errors, rewrite-count, etc - absolutely no idea what their previous life was.
If you’ve got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.
If you’re really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.
Refurbished drives sound scary. Any data to point towards that not being a problem?
I would absolutely not use refurbs personally. As part of the refurb process they wipe the SMART data which means you have zero power-on hours listed, zero errors, rewrite-count, etc - absolutely no idea what their previous life was.
If you’ve got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.
If you’re really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.