Would this hard drive upgrade work?

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I have been using the Toshiba 2TB MQ03ABB200 for 34 months and it's still going strong. They are still available at several locations online. Cheapest being ebay for a new drive at $76. The MQ04ABD200 mentioned above looks very similar (600,000 hr MTBF, 3 year warranty) and is very widely available for $80.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Spinpoint-2-5-Inch-Internal-ST2000LM003/dp/B00MPWYLHO

Only 4 left though.

 

I bought a WD20NPVZ off amazon in july 2019. It was rated A condition and fully tested but has already failed (it died first week in Sept 2019).

 

You should never buy a used or refurbished hard drive. All they do is get it back, run basic tests on it, then ship it right back out to the next sucker/customer. There are certain kinds of failures that require extensive testing to diagnose, and nobody can be bothered to do those tests. They just ship the drive back out until it fails really badly then handle it as a warranty return because it's cheaper to do it that way.

 

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Ouch. Sorry to hear that.

 

Was curious if anybody else heard of Disctech.com? They are selling new WD20NPVZ drive $152. Otherwise Weaknees sells 2TB for for $200. Don’t know drive model number weaknees sells?

 

The one I just got from Weakness was a 2TB Seagate Skyhawk ST2000LV000.

 

Thanks--it's always been tempting (but I've resisted--the most I've done is to purchase an open-box, never used, new drive from an eBay individual with a good track record--and then, I tested it for weeks before the eBay purchase guarantee period ended).

 

Thanks, any word/postings if they are SMR or PMR?
Found some Seagate document about that drive which says “SMR with PMR heads/media”? Using both terms about this drive, therefore which is it?

 

The document I found says it's a PMR drive.
https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/skyhawk/en-us/docs/100813751e.pdf

"SMR with PMR heads/media" would be an SMR drive, since all drives currently have their heads perpendicular to the media. PMR is a bad term to describe the older drives because it's too general, but it's what stuck.

 

Yeah same document I read, page 6 says “SMR with PMR heads/media“, that’s why not clear which version this drive is and leads me to believe it is SMR.

 

You're right. Whoever wrote that datasheet should be fired.

 

Yes, the advice to never buy a used or refurb drive is a good one. Anything marked "refurbished" is absolutely guaranteed to have already been found with problems (or why was it "refurbished"?).

And think about it - there is NOTHING that can be done to really "refurbish" a drive - they are not taking it apart and repairing anything. If they do anything at all, it can only be to run software to read the drive surface to find and re-map bad areas. Virtually all drives have some bad sectors, even brand new from the factory. A drive has a limited amount of space reserved for re-mapping a bad sector to a new good spot on the surface of the disk, and those initial bad sectors are re-mapped that way, so the entire drive works fine. During it's life, some additional sectors may develop problems, and they are re-mapped the same way, allowing the drive to continue working.

Now when a drive actually starts going bad, many sectors often begin crapping out, one after another, and each one is re-mapped until all that reserved space is taken up. At this point, the drive is officially "dead". This can happen in a matter of hours, or over a period of months. The point is, if a drive has already been returned because of problems, you already have two strikes against you if you expect it to live a long and healthy life!