Hitachi Ultrastar A7K3000 2TB HUA723020ALA641 (0F12470) 2TB 64MB Cache 7200RPM SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Enterprise 3.5in Hard Drive (Renewed)

Some commenters have rightly questioned the wisdom of running a refurbished drive without clear history as a storage device for a live computer. I personally would not do that other than in a RAID system. I bought one of these refurbished Untrastar 2 TB drives to use as a third backup set. My other two backups are also 2 TB Ultrastars for which I gladly paid close to $200 each a couple of years ago. I believe that having multiple redundant "air gapped" backups is especially important with the recent rise in "ransomware" attacks that hit every storage device attached to a computer. I was hesitant to buy this drive based on the principle that it looked too good to be true. But I risked less than $50, and I am not disappointed in any way. This drive will sit in my safe most of the time, coming out about once per week to touch up the backup set with my latest files. My five-star rating is provisional because I have spun up this drive only once. I initialized and formatted it on my Windows 10 machine, and ran a complete backup of the three volumes (all SSD) in the box. The OS has reported no errors on the drive. It runs very quiet, and write performance over a USB 3 to SATA adapter was as I expected. Should the drive start giving me problems over the next two, three, or several years I may revise the score downward. For now I have no reason to give it less than a top score. Three backup sets provides me significantly more peace of mind than two did.

2 & 4 TB models of this HGST Ultrastar 7k3000 drive are very reliable as-per Back-Blaze stats on drive reliability. These drives have on average a 0.6%~1.4% failure rate annually, where competing drives from Seagate have up to a 24~36% annual failure rate. Recent higher-capacity Seagate drives are faring a little better though I've already sworn them off. Western Digital generally always is less than 10% and around 4~6% nominally. Toshiba is usually around what Western Digital is in reliability for hard drives. Western Digital owns Hitachi and has formed the HGST corp. now. Thankfully, HGST quality is still stellar, and thank goodness. If you value your data, buy HGST. Other hard drive prices are meaningless. HGST is the Toyota of HDD's. Good speed and once it spun up the 1st time and ran it's internet checks and calibrations it didn't make any funny noises, and it's a fairly quiet drive (I have rubber washers as it's mounting, and I can't hear it with the case-door closed on a fairly quiet tower, a silent machine you'd still hear it though). Good drive, just happy to have one that worked. I had previously bought a 7k2000 2tb drive that was DOA from another vendor last year. This 7k3000 is great though. It's not the newest model, so if you want faster, they make 4000 and even newer series out there to look at. Naturally, larger drives with more platters will be quicker due to simultaneous reads/writes speed improvement. Drive had 0 hours on it when installed. This is great, a new drive if so; or the SMART data tables were cleaned prior to shipment (which is proper for a re-certified drive). Either way, I don't mind; supposedly has a year of warranty on it, that's fine too. It just needs to work and hold data when I need it to. Not used as a system or OS drive, just for backups to be unhooked when not in use. I hope some of this is helpful!

I've been using it as a secondary storage drive since a few months now and it works great, storage is as advertised. Read/write speed is pretty good. It's loud, and clunky sounding, that might be because of the way they refurbished it. To those saying the counter reports 0 hours of use, that counter was reset. Let me be clear, this IS a heavily used hard drive. You must back up your data, don't rely solely on this for any extended period of time, the recovery will be costly. You get what you pay for, that's why it's so cheap. The price is right. Back it up when you can.

Fast, Quiet. lots of space. Easy to install, format, and use. Depending on the one you get from Amazon you can have between 3 months to an 1 year warranty. For being a Refurb it is in excellent shape. Packed nicely too in shock absorbent packaging. This is a pre WD Takeover drive so it is better quality.I bought a Square Trade extended warranty to have a full 3 years of protection and from the looks of the seller I should not have any problems exchanging this if drive fails. I seen a lot of great reviews of this drive. Others are complaining about sound, I hear it but it is not as bad as others make it out to be. The drive I got was fulfilled by Amazon and the seller was goHardDrive Inc. It came with a year warranty. There are other sellers out there like Worldwide Product Importers. If you go after a protection plan, DO NOT go after Asurion/Canopy, go with SquareTrade they are much better and costs about the same and their CSRs at SquareTrade aren't arrogant like Canopy is. Otherwise this HDD is worth it.

Generally, these are great industrial/commercial grade, used or refurbished drives. This is my 6th purchase from goHardDrive. This drive has had a month's service (over 700 hours) as the primary drive in a new build. It has been run under difficult conditions while playing with resizing, deleting and making partitions, multiple, full reformattings and transferring roughly 10TB of data. It is presently used in an external enclosure as backup drive. This drive was a little loud for the first 24 hours and had greater than 10000 hours use, but it is now quite quiet. The number of hours shown doesn't mean much for two reasons. First, these drives are made to go over 100,000 hours average before failure. Second, assuming the drives are refurbished, it is likely that the heads and/or platters have been replaced. The electronic records in a true refurb are basically meaningless. I expect this drive will outlast my new 1 and 2TB WD Blue HDDs.

Seller claims drive tested and no bad sectors but I ran a SMART self-test a couple hours after receiving it and the results showed 6 reallocated sectors. Then I ran a full write test format (4 patterns to every sector) under Linux and bad blocks were identified. Since then, no more errors or pending reallocated sectors so I'm hoping the drive will be okay for the long-term. I did run a second full write test (they take about 48 hours) and it completed without error. I will use this drive in a RAID 6 configuration so not too concerned about potential data loss but still don't want to throw my money away. BTW, I bought one of these drives about 8 months ago and it did not have any bad sectors and has been running great!

As described

I was a bit skeptical purchasing this drive before, as others had noted problems with refurbished items and excessive hours on the disk already when running Crystal Disk Info or other tools on their HDD, but my experience was great and I could not be happier for the price! I've had so many dead Seagate, WD, and Toshiba drives over time, but Hitachi drives seem to be pretty stellar in that regard. This drive runs great and hasn't had any faults even up against a battering of diagnostic tests and two months of frequent use. There was some minor scuffing on the drive casing from being refurbished, but it came packaged well and I've had great experiences with goHardDrive on Amazon and other sites. For the price range, I'd definitely buy another one of these over similarly priced Seagate, WD, or other drives, even if they are new.