Hi,

I sell drives on eBay; I currently buy job lots of used drives from various sources, run secure erase on them, test them and resell them, but I'd like to get into refurbishing drives. I understand that:

I will have to buy dedicated hardware.
I may have to buy knowledge (I see this as an investment).
Getting good at the refurbishing process will take some time.

I've been playing with a large number of Seagates through terminal. I've broken an embarrassing number of drives and fixed a couple, but obviously not every drive gives you terminal access and whilst I'm enjoying playing around with drives, from a business point of view, it just doesn't make sense breaking drives when afaik software exists that will simplify the process somewhat.
Based on some reading I think the best root would be for me to buy the SD Doctors along with the manuals that are for sale from a user on this forum; I then plan to spend a few months practicing on some drives that I don't intend to sell until I feel confident enough in the refurbishing process that I'm happy to sell the drives that I've operated on.
Again based on my reading, the SD Doctor applications should allow me to depop heads on some drives, perform defect transfer and run selfscan on the drives that the software supports. Is this correct?

Can anyone give me any hints on what I need to be doing? Like I say, I don't mind buying things if they will be beneficial to me; I just want to get some feedback from some professionals before I commit to spending a fairly large amount of money.
Are the SD doctor products along with some manuals a good product to buy in this situation? I'm not expecting to be spoon-fed, but if I could get some guidance on what I need to do to start refurbishing drives that would be great.

Cheers.

You know what to do and have a good plan (get tools and buy know how).
Forget SD Seagate tool for many families, there are still critical bugs unsolved, and for some brands they don't help. Not a matter of manuals.
And yes, you have to organize your activity as some tasks are time consuming.
For testing and erasing (logical only, LBA), buy Atola - if you want complete diagnose and FW control, I see no alternative to PC3000 UDMA.

Thank you. Looking at UDMA it seems like I can only process 2 drives at a time. I was hoping for something that would let me use SATA ports that are on the mobo though - my machines at the moment all have 8 ports. if I can only do 2 drives at a time with UDMA, based on prices for used drives and the $$$$$ price of UDMA I'm not sure if it would be a good investment? It looks like it's a great tool for dr, but obviously you can all make your money back much quicker because of the value of data.
Do other refurbishment techniques take less time than selfscan then? From my reading I'm finding that selfscan is sort of a last resort when other techniques don't work? If I need to selfscan drives, I don't think it will be profitable if I can only do 2 at a time.

Just thinking allowed a bit here; your advice is definitely appreciated.

I have setup my own HW and SW to process many drives at a time , UDMA is for FW rework only. Another option for you would be outsourcing the drives that need deeper fix depending on 'numbers' , or all the job then leave sorting, checking and refurb to another 'entity' .
Remember that many drives can show where the problem is only after many tests then you have to find the way and judge MANUALLY ... and restart . Each case is different.

If you want refurb without selfscan, wrong idea. Heads go weaker, dust accumulates, surface and magnetic material deteriorates, parameters need to be adjusted, it would be cheating your customers. And you don't need PC3K for running selfscan.

Thank you for your advice BlackST; it looks like I have some thinking to do then. Still helpfull even though it perhaps wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear so thanks.

@SAjunky: is that true for drives other than Seagate though? Using publicly available info? Or if not public, info that would be available at a cost?

Cheers.

Only Seagate and old Maxtors have built-in factory tests. For all others I understand special firmware needs to be loaded to the memory. I am not aware of any publicly available special firmware versions or tools. And since 7200.11 there is no selfscan on Seagate too.