HGST Ultrastar He8 HUH728080ALE601 8TB 7200RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5inch Enterprise Mechanical Hard Disk (Renewed)

I bought a small file server that did not come with any hard drives. After that arrived I started investigating what hard drives to buy. What a challenging process that was. I've always been a fan of Western Digital, so I really wanted to stay with that name. But, due to pricing for the amount of storage I wanted I was considering various options. If I found the right drive it would either be too expensive or out of stock.So, I did some research and discovered that these are refurbished Western Digital drives at a very nicely reduced price! You would think as the computer nerd that I am I would have known that already, but I did not.It still made me a bit nervous to try out refurbished drives for this scenario without having any prior experience with these before. But, I thought I would give it a try. So far, I'm glad that I did!I learned that the capacities larger than this model use an adapter. I could not purchase those because the enclosure I was going to put them in was not designed with that additional adapter in mind. I doubt they would fit, which would have been a real bummer. So, if you're shopping these drives, do keep that in mind. I am unclear on why they are using these adapters on higher capacity refurbished drives. But, these do not have them! They went right in my enclosure with no problem and all four that I purchased have been running fine since I received them approximately a month ago at time of writing.I have a ton of data on them already, but I have it all backed up as well. I want to keep running them a bit longer to see that I can trust them. But, I'd do that with any new drives I installed for long-term storage of important information.In short, I have nothing bad to report. I have 32tb of storage now, and that is what I was hoping for.

Purchased through the seller GoHardDrive.I did a fair amount of research on the risks involved with used Hard drives and weighed it against my immediate need for a large amount of storage in a short amount of time with a limited budget. These were purchased to go into my Synology DS1522+ which I am utilizing the SHR1 Synology Raid configuration. I plan to replace these 8TB drives one at a time with new 10 or 12 TB drives as my finances allow, and going with the SHR raid configuration from Synology, means that I will see benefits from the drives being swapped out, after changing out 2 of the drives currently in there. Additionally, these being used drives, I would probably not ever recommend to anyone to get used hard drives unless you plan to use them in some kind of raid configuration with redundancy. Depending on the drives you get and how much time they have been used already (more on that later), you're either in a moderately low risk zone or potentially high risk zone, related to the reverse bell curve that hard drive failure tends to follow (higher risk early in the lifespan, lower risk in the middle of its lifespan, and higher risk again at the end of its lifespan). That being said, if you are buying used hard drives and don't have some form of redundancy in having wiggle room for a *single* failure, you're rolling the dice with much less favorable odds than having the redundancy. In short: I would not buy used hard drives, if they are going to be used as single pools independent of each other.I purchased 5 of these HGST Ultrastar He8 drives which are CMR drives. I read many great reviews on these and opted for them because they are enterprise drives which are expected to last a very long time under a very demanding workload. I would not have even considered this purchase if I wasn't running it in some kind of RAID configuration (see above), AND if they weren't coming from GoHardDrive. If it so happens that one of my drives do fail, GoHardDrive will replace the drive for 5 years. My purpose of this storage pool is to produce yes, but we have a 2nd machine at a different location with it's own storage pool that operations can continue. So I would simply run the smart test, get the info I need from it, then power off the NAS while I wait for a replacement. There are some people who appear to have had bad experiences with GoHardDrive's customer service but overwhelmingly the reviews are positive, and without knowing the demeanor of the customer, or other context surrounding the situation, I went with the majority opinion that GoHardDrive's customer service is nothing short of responsive and accountable to their commitment.Now onto the actual review:I received my 5 drives 2 days faster than the original expected delivery date, and upon plugging in the drives, I was greeted with a LOT of noise. I knew enterprise level drives were noisy, but this sounded like a jet taking off in my office. So, I was pretty skeptical at first, but I was also not surprised. Many customers had also gotten drives which were not functioning properly, so I honestly expected maybe 3 out of the 5 of these drives to work out the gate (but I honestly only needed 2 to get the ball rolling), and was confident any issues would be made right. Upon analyzing the available storage pools, I was greeted with 3 functioning (at the time) hard drives. The other two were: 1) not displaying as connected, and 2) in a critical state. I tried to swap bays with the one that was not displaying to make sure it wasn't my NAS and that one still wouldn't appear. It was making connection becasue when it was connected it was definitely sprinting in it's spin speed but sounded like it was constantly tripping it's way down the track. So, I thought, 3 out of 5, not too bad. I began installing my DSM 7.1 software and when it was finished, I noticed that one of the 3 good drives, didn't install DSM on it. I then ran quick smart tests on the three drives, and found that one of the 3, was having some kind of disconnection issue, where it would be connected, then disconnect, and reconnect. It did this a few times, and then went into a critical status. I again tried to reseat the drive into it's tray, switched slots on the nas, and no improvement. This drive triggered itself too many times where it's not deemed critical and cannot even run a smart test on it. The quick smart tests on the 2 other drives came back clean, ran an extended smart test (which took about 20 hours), and concluded that 2 out of my 5 drives I had purchased were good to go.So now with 2 drives functioning, I was ready to test GoHardDrives overwhelmingly positive (but not perfect) customer service experience. I acquired the logs I could for the 3 drives that were not functioning properly, one of which couldn't even be recognized so I had no information to pass over on that one. I sent a polite email to their customer service that was listed on a sheet provided with my drives, along with screenshots of the logs, and described the issues I had faced with the 3 drives. In less than 24 hours I had received a response, with an RMA number and a label to be printed for USPS. It was not a QR scannable label, so I couldn't just show it to USPS to have them print a label. I had to go to my library to print the label, re-packaged the drives they provided with the same bubble wrap and box the 5 had come in, and sent it off the next day. They received the package in about 3 days according to my tracking number, and within 24 hours of them receiving the RMA, they informed me that 3 replacement drives were being sent and would be here by Friday.I received the drives on Wednesday evening (early again), plugged them in, with an initial healthy status on all of them. I am not holding my breath. Again I was expecting at least one of these drives to not pass the quick or extended smart tests. However, low and behold, the extended smart tests just completed and passed with mostly flying colors (not without a slight concern that I'll mention next), and they are now merging into my currently existing SHR1 storage pool and volume, to get me a total of 32TB of storage with 8TB for parity information.The only concern or annoyance I suppose, which I am not totally surprised about, is the age that is on these drives. On their listing they advertise that the drives have been used for "about 3 years". Below are the hours listed from the SMART tests and their conversion into years.33106 hours = 3.78 years32829 hours = 3.75 years22289 hours = 2.54 years17983 hours = 2.05 years42011 hours = 4.80 years-----------------------------Total hours = 148,218 hoursAverage hours = 29,643.6 hoursAverage years = 3.38 yearsSo, were they "honest" or "accurate" in their advertised "about 3 years"? It's definitely up for debate. Per drive, it seems like an inaccurate estimation. As an average across the 5 drives that I received? They don't seem too far off base. Would I have much preferred all of these drives to be with less variance in their run time? Absolutely. Is it a deal breaker for me personally? No, not really, but it will affect my rating of the seller. Only one of these drives, kind of concerns me in it's run time, being not too far off of 5 years run time, but as I mentioned above in my long term plan, I plan to replace that drive sooner than later, even if it means before being able to acquire a 2nd drive to actually expand the storage size.----------------------------------------------------All in all, were my expectations met given my assumed outcome after reading many reviews and researching these particular drives, as well as the seller? Mostly.+Seller related expectations+-Initial Purchase: I believed having 3 out of 5 working as intended was a reasonable expectation. However, only 2 out of 5 did.-Customer Service: Expectations were met exactly where I believed they would. Response was received from GoHardDrive customer service in less than 24 hours, and I was shipping my RMA in less than 48. With the replacement drives back in my possession in just under a weeks time.-Replacement Purchase: A bit unhappy that one of the drives is nearing 5 years run time, I would have been fine with them all ranging between 2.5-4 years run time, but having one in particular that (not necessarily) proves to be a higher risk than the others is a little unsettling. Especially since the drives are advertised as "about 3 years" in life span. Their wording should be adjusted to say something like "our drives *average* about 3 years in life span" which would be more honest phrasing.+HGST Ultrastar He8 related expectations+-Not much to say here, if they work, they work great.-Speed tests I have run on them all check out and have no gripes with the hardware itself other than the condition they were received as mentioned in the seller related review.-They are a little noisy, but not as much as I was expecting (especially in comparison to the sound of a jet taking off I experienced on the failing/failed drives I received initially lol), but you should totally expect some noticeable noise with any enterprise level drive.---------------------------------------------------------------------End of the day, would I purchase used from GoHardDrive again? If I needed a storage solution fast and on the cheap, with an already existing backup, and parity built into my set up? Absolutely. The risk associated with used HDDs is in my opinion, not at the fault of GoHardDrive, and this risk should be calculated carefully based on your particular needs. Do I think GoHardDrive should adjust their phrasing of the current runtime on their drives? Yeah totally. But all in all, GoHardDrive's reputation (again, for the most part) matched the experience that I had with them, which was a swift and appropriate response from their customer service, that got me operating in a very reasonable amount of time.I am giving a 4/5 stars for two reasons:1) Only 2 out of 5 of my originally shipped drives were functioning.2) The lifespan on one of the drives is too far off the variance I expected for "about 3 years".I know this was a wall of text, but buying a used HDD is less about the drive itself, and more about the provider of the drive/drives. GoHardDrive is one of the most reputable in the online space for used drives for good reason, if you can handle the risks associated with used HDD's.Good luck!

I received my hard drive quickly, prior to the expected date. The hard drive was well packaged, and had a slip of paper confirming the 5yr warranty. It also contained another insert that explains common installation procedures along with faq's in case you run into trouble.I ran into the problem of my pc inly showing 2tb rather than 8tb due to me not knowing that my older out-dated motherboard only supports legacy mbr for the operating system drive, so i had to have a drive smaller than 2tb to use for my operating system and then just use this 8tb drive as a storage device secondary hard drive. The secondary hard drive can be formatted to gpt, which then shows the full 8tb. It's only the operating system that has to be mbr and smaller than 2tb, and this is only the case if you have an outdated motherboard like i do.Once I got my above problem sorted out, I then ran crystaldiskinfo which told me the drive tested good in all aspects, and that the drive usage was only 2yrs, 262 days, so a bit under the stated 3 year period. I was pleasantly surprised since a lot of the reviews stated they received a bit over 3 years.Im currently moving 4tb of data with teracopy and that completed with no errors and is now in the process of verifying.My advice to everyone with an older computer is to verify if your motherboard supports gpt or legacy mbr only, that way you know whether or not this drive can be your operating system hard drive or not, and that will save you a few hours of time trying to figure it out during installation. But you can buy with confidence from goHardDrive and I definitely recommend and would buy again from this seller.Be sure to select the correct seller for this drive because originally i ended up with a different seller on this listing and was waiting 2 weeks with the expected ship date keep changing every 3 days, even though it said shipper was amazon. At that point, i cancelled and selected goHardDrive, and I'm glad I did!!