Deals.Woot

Not a bad deal, may grab two for some non-critical applications/storage.

WOOTFIVE to get 5 dollar shipping no matter what you order.

But refurbished, I will have to pass

90% of the failed drives I've seen are Maxtors.

@reverendc: That is the age old debate....for me it was Western Digital back i nthe day I had tons of problems with, you had issues with Maxtor, others Seagate....truth is....for the most part they are all fine.

seems like a good deal.

Not a good idea. Do NOT buy Refurbished hard drives if you value your data. Plus it states every drive you buy has either "1 year to 3 years left on warranty". You can buy the same size drive from newegg for $54. I'm not saying it isn't a good price for a refurb drive, but sadly hard drives are unreliable enough as it is. Don't go adding a refurb'd drive that may have problems plus has been shipped and handled by delivery monkeys least 2 extra times over buying a brand new drive.

Yeah most major brands are equally crappy. High failure rates in particular brands can probably be correlated to how high their sales were the prior year or a particular flaky model.

Refurbed drives should always be avoided. Either drives which previously had faults or old stock. When it comes to sensitive products like hard drives, both represent a risk.

It's not even worthy as a secondary drive. All my data is important, otherwise I wouldn't have it. It's a good price, but risky product.

@jjohnson5961:

Hard drives are a mechanical device (ssd not included in argument) that can only run for a fixed amount of time. Refurbished drives have already run for an UNKNOWN amount of time. Take mechanical limit (3-5 years), and subtract how long it has already been running (1-3 years on these refurbs, due to remaining warrenty), and you are left with a drive that will fail you a lot sooner than a different new drive.

Yes harddrives die when you get them new sometimes as well, but guess what the number of those cases are probably quite less than refurbs.

Your faith in "checked over 2 times" I feel is a bit inflated. I am guessing all they do is run checkdisk and ship it out if it has less than X bad sectors. They do not check platter balance, laser strength, or any of the other things that will cause a drive to crash.

Open Box/Refurbs are all scams since you will have to rebuy the product sooner than if you bought it new.

This is not a very good drive. According to the data sheet (http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/maxtor/en_us/documentation/data_sheets/maxline_pro_500_data_sheet_en.pdf) this is a 4 platter, 8 head drive. Meaning, lots of moving parts to break and lots of stress on the motor upon start-up.

It makes no sense to purchase a hard drive prone to failure for redundant storage or data that's "not important". If your data is not important, save yourself $40 and don't bother getting this drive or the unimportant data to fill it. When it comes to redundant storage, you want your backup device to be, at least, as secure as your primary storage. If your backup is less secure than your original it's not a backup.

Refurbed hard drives are different than other refurbs. Hard drives are not easily fixed, but are easily broken. Further, it's unlikely to find potential mechanical errors until they erupt.