UPDATE: I did hear back from them! They did issue me a return label and will take the two drives and replace them! So that's good. Hopefully the replacements are better!
Hi all,
After seeing a lot of buzz lately about recertified drives from places like ServerPartDeals and GoHardDrive I decided to give GoHardDrive a shot (mostly just because they had the type of drive and size I wanted in stock and ServerPartDeals didn't at the moment). I read a lot on reddit about both beforehand, and while I do see some negativity about goHardDrive, it seemed like most people who had actually shopped with them in the past were very satisfied, and even when they had issues, their support/warranty took good care of them.
So my drives arrived on Friday the 3rd. I got 2 Seagate Enterprise 12TB drives. I open them up and look them over. They had a couple of cosmetic scratches but overall very good. Connectors didn't show any real visible wear.
I put them into my unRAID server. Now, I got in a hurry and I should have definitely run the extended SMART tests on them very first thing but I didn't. That's on me. But anyway, I put the first one into the parity spot and let unRAID start rebuilding the parity onto it. This took about a day and no errors in the process. Seems good so far.
The second one I had planned to put into the array. So I add it to the array and unRAID starts its clearing process of zeroing the entire thing. By the end of zeroing, I had 2 UDMA CRC errors (which could be unrelated, my understanding is that these are more an issue with a bad cable or connector) and 8 reallocated sectors, 8 pending sector, and 8 offline uncorrectable sectors. Not a good sign less than 48 hours in. So I run the extended SMART test at this point and run it on the other one too, in the parity slot. The test finished on the array drive without finding any new issues on top of the ones already listed, but that's concerning enough. The parity disk though ended up with 32 reallocated sectors at the end of the test.
Now, I will grant you, I should have run the SMART tests first thing. But luckily, I hadn't loaded any data onto the array drive yet so nothing to be lost there. And the parity drive can also be removed and I can go back to my old one in the meantime while I get this sorted out. So no data lost thankfully. The drives aren't outright failed either. But to be getting reallocated sectors almost immediately after installing doesn't bode well. I have drives in this server that are 7 years old without a single reallocated sector or any other SMART errors either for that matter.
I know others on here have had good luck with their RMA/Warranty service taking good care of them. Seems like most people have been given a shipping label and everything. I followed the info on their website though and filled out the RMA form and just got an RMA document to print and put in the package. Also, I filled out the RMA when only one of them was getting errors (should have waited, I know). So now I need to probably send both back, and my RMA only accounts for one. I tried to reach out to the RMA email address, but have not heard back yet (admittedly I emailed on a Sunday and its only Monday morning, but some people here seemed to even get a response back on a Sunday!).
I'm a bit gunshy now about trying more drives from them. Seems like most have had overwhelmingly good results with them, but it seems odd that I'd get TWO duds in my first order. I don't think I did anything to them to cause issues...like I said I have other drives in the same server over 7 years old without any problems.
