I have about twenty enterprise grade drives: a mix of 16TB / 18TB / 20TB drives. Four of these drives were purchased new, all other ones are recertified. I do not see any difference in performance, but of course the recertified drives were in use before they got recertified.
My use-case: I use eight drives with a hardware RAID controller (RAID 6), all the other drives are offline drives, data off-loaded from PC (two copies each).
My question is, I can see 20TB EXOS refurbished drives are about $20 cheaper than brand new Toshiba 18TB enterprise drives. Is Toshiba good? I mean, enterprise drives do have a certain performance / reliability to maintain, right? For $20 more and 2TB less, are Toshiba brand new drives a good purchase than buying recertified Seagate / WD?