Your opinion on recertified drives?

[swersig]

Hi,

just again i have a case where a recertified drive fails after some hours of working, this time with massive bad sector count after ca. five hours power on time. it is a wd3200bevt-60zct1, manufactured jan 2010, and already marked as recertified. on seagate drives just about 40% of the recertified drives are defective or get so after little time. i called seagate and they said that only the base would be re-used but all other components would be brand new. i think this is !%&*§" because it would simpler and more cost effective to take a new one (and relabel it?) than to rebuild a drive in case of warranty. many recertified seagates have two (!) top covers for example. or are they just soft-reengineered? perhaps BlackST has some insight in this, you mentioned you are doing refurbishing? i am getting really annoyed of these drives (not meant personally BlackST) because they only are rotting around in some shelf. you cant trust any customer to store their valueable data on it.

your thoughts are appreciated,

swersig

[drc]

For Seagate I would imagine they probably do a full selfscan and potentially switch off heads that are bad or on surfaces that are bad. Probably something similar for the others. I can't imagine it would be worth any of the manufacturers' time to actually replace internal parts to refurb.

[zebong]

i have been working with some recertified drives from all the brands, and sometimes the drive fail, but other times still working perfect.

but i have to say that i dont trusth them, so for DR i just uses new drives.

[thatdellguy]

Drives we mail in for the warranty and come back as Recertified go straight to EBay...

[networkpc3000]

For Seagate I would imagine they probably do a full selfscan and potentially switch off heads that are bad or on surfaces that are bad. Probably something similar for the others. I can't imagine it would be worth any of the manufacturers' time to actually replace internal parts to refurb.

Seagate just cut bad head (no stable or bad surface. sometime we can repair the drive as original. head still work )and runing selfscan

[swersig]

thanks for your replys.

i thought as much. this drive seems to have a weak head, probably due to a head crash. it was misplaced as a new drive in our store and i didnt notice the quite small 'recertified' mark. if i did i would never have used it. the customer wanted to have a bigger disk in his laptop and i cloned his data on it still having the original of course. so no data is lost. just some hours of work. i consider recertified drives defective. you never know its history.

thanks again,

swersig

[phishin_ca]

I always thought of recertified drives like a recertified wife. They got sent back for a reason

[jeepster]

Drives we mail in for the warranty and come back as Recertified go straight to EBay...

are they the ones marked "refurbished"? I can't believe so many for sale thus. I presume the seller scavenged it
from a junk PC, and blew the dust off it, and ran a quick diagnostic on it.

[BlackST]

It depends on WHO has recertified the drive....

P.S. the factory recert procedure is different thant what you think .

[thatdellguy]

Exactly. Period.

[BlackST]

BTW, if the drive is mechanically ok and heads are within specs, it can be recert more times before eol . I have a Samsung SP2514 recert by me 2 times always on since jan. 2006 - no problems.

[swersig]

I totally agree, BlackST.

Problematic scenario: Head(s) unstable and possibly media damage. The manufacturer tests heads and disables bad head(s) using the disk as replacement for lower capacity. What about possible contamination? For the manufacturer it would be easier and more cost effective to use disks from current production than to mechanically repair a defective drive. Seagate Support for example said they would only use the base of a defective disk and rebuild it from scratch. This is in my eyes nonsense. where would they get spare parts for a 3 year old disk? So if HDA is contaminated the disk will fail soon but not neccesarily at the manufacturer.

Of course i am only speculating. Fact is that a great percentage of the refurbished disks we get back are defective or will be after short period.

I have refurbished many drives and keep them for storage, installing test systems etc. But you only know if its stable by using it (for non critical data of course...). I think the testing of the refurbished drives comes too short at the manufacturer.

[BlackST]

What do you mean 'I have refurbished' ?

[lcoughey]

I'm not a big fan of recertified or refurbished drives. Especially when I send in a drive that is less than a few months old and don't get a new drive back.

[swersig]

Well,

one scenario is drive trips smart because of bad sectors. based on amount of bad sectors you could start by clearing g-list, full write-read-test followed by stress test. the performance chart during the tests gives you an idea whether the drive has mechanical problems (heads, media damage).

[BlackST]

This is not refurbishing, it's cosmetics.

[swersig]

Well then clarify what do you understand by refurbishing?

[BlackST]

Completely recalculate adaptives, head tuning, search and hide surface AND SERVO defects... And a lot of other things depending on conditions. This is what I do.

[swersig]

Yeah i agree if it is neccesary. i only stated a simple case. Many drives develop bad sectors due to aborted writes (from power or hardware failure for example) so these bads are only logical. i have many drives which have undergone this 'procedure' and have shown a perfect performance chart. they work for years (and still do). if a drive needs (much) more attention to get it working again i think it is not worth the time you invest (except to learn something from it or it is your job) at current disk prices. furthermore isnt the risk of re-failure bigger if you have to go to this lengths to get it working again? hard bads and servo defects for example could be a sign of media decay.

[ppumkin]

Like BlackST i do something similar- not as good as he can do it I bet and not with all drives.(because i have not been in DR since birth and I only spend few hours weekly on this stuff)
I Have been "re - certifying" drives for months now.. and its paying back my investment slowly .. slow and painful procedure. But thanks to my programming background- I make things go faster sometimes with my own software.

Basically for me.
If it makes funny noise - or is slow or loud- goes into the parts bin and I experiment on them later.or sell as donors.

As to manufacturer refurbished or repaired drives- its just physcological pressure that makes me think its more crap than before