What are your options for buying used hard drives cheaply?
In the United Kingdom, there are a lot of places to buy used hard drive’s but most people will want to choose from these two options;
For people looking for over 2TB of storage, Western Digital sells a range of recertified hard drives. These hard drives are probably your best bet as they have a 6 months warranty and are sold through the official website. With that out of the way, there are a few reasons why you might not want to buy through them such as;
You are getting a drive that is already placed in a USB case and if you try to take the drive out of that shell, you might lose your warranty.
Some of the products offered by western digital; such as the passport line of drives don’t come with a standard SATA board on them, instead they come with a USB broad that makes that drive useless to most people if it gets damaged and as we all know the USB ports themselves can often be a massive weakness.
If you are looking for a smaller amount of storage or are on a tighter budget, then you might want to consider buying a used hard drive from an eBay seller. Buying from eBay sellers can be a fantastic way to a few quid on a used hard drive but doing so does come with its’ own risks which we will go over in the next section.
What should you be looking for when buying a used hard drive on eBay?
Pretty much anyone can sell pretty much anything on eBay, and as such, you should take some extra precautions. Hard drives are really sensitive which means that any kind of mishandling will lead to sectors being damaged, this can lead to the drive failing far sooner than expected. This means that the next section of this article is super important as it could save you from losing important data or even worse being completely scammed. With that out of the way, we will be going so simple tips you can use when buying used hard drives on eBay;
Check if the seller you are thinking of buying from has good a lot of good feedback, as especially if you are the type of person who does not know how to do advanced checks on a hard drive as some sellers really are just idiots that don’t really know what they are selling in any meaningful way.
You need to check the description of the hard drive carefully as I have noticed that a lot of sellers are annoyingly listing faulty hard drives under the used section rather than the “spares or repair” section which makes finding good deals much harder, which to be honest is probably an attempt to get a faulty hard drive to show up in more people’s searches.
Check if the seller is offering returns as even though the seller is responsible for postage for returning faulty items within 30 days, I have found sellers who claim “no returns allowed” will try to be dicks and find any way of not paying for return postage which even though the seller will lose in trying the whole situation will still be annoying.
What to do once the hard drive has arrived in the post?
Some people might think that by getting a used hard drive from an eBay seller with good feedback that there is nothing to worry about but that is not the case as most people don’t know how to check a used hard properly and will end up leaving positive feedback if they can successfully move some files or install a program on that hard drive. In this section of the article, we will go over what you really should be doing when you receive a used hard from an eBay seller. As such, here are some tips of things you need to do before using the used hard drive for general use; 1. Check the physical condition of the drive, aka check there are no dents as any dents might indicate that the hard drive has been mishandled. 2. Check for smart errors with crystal disk info. One of the most important things you should check is if the hard drive has any reallocated sectors as they often indicate that the hard drive is starting to fail. 3. Use a tool like HD Tune to check the whole hard drive for bad sectors as sectors may go bad in an area of the hard drive has not checked since that sector went bad.
Why must you make sure that all previous data has been properly removed? , and the best ways of going about it
As eBay has a lot of sellers that are not very experienced when it comes to hard drives, this often leads to personal information being left on the drive. In reality, having some personal information being left on a hard is the least of your worries as if some criminal was using the drive for their illegal activity’s, traces of that activity could be left on the drive including but not limited to; child porn, terrorist material or stolen credit card details, etc. This is because a lot of sellers think that performing a quick format is enough to get rid of any data. What this means for you for you is that if this type of content is found on the drive you could end up being accused of those crimes.
In order to avoid this situation, you will need to understand how to wipe the hard drive you bought correctly. You can go about this in multiple ways but for most people, solutions like boot and nuke are extremely inconvenient as that piece of software requires that you have a spare computer that you don’t have to use for up to a day. Software to wipe and format a hard drive: In deciding what software to use for wiping a used hard drive you bought from an eBay seller, you will need to decide how much time you are willing to wait and how hard you want to make any attempts to recover the data. In this section of the article, we will be going over multiple methods of wiping a used hard from an eBay seller, listed for the quickest and worst to the slowest and best.
Windows Quick Format (Never use this): The Windows quick format is built right into Windows, it is accessible from the “computer” folder, by right clicking on the hard drive you want to format, clicking format and selecting quick format. The problem with a quick format is that it only removes the index of files rather than the contents themselves, this means the files on that hard drive are easily recoverable with minimal effort and some free software.
HDD Low-Level Format Tool: This piece of software erases data by filling the hard drive with zeroes, is a pretty fast method of removing data as it is as fast as your hard drive which is a lot faster than some other method that requires multiple passes with random data. This method of data removal should make your data impossible by most free software, the problem is that due to the software only filling the hard drive with zero’s it may be possible by advanced techniques to recover residue data left on the drive, a bit like with VHS tapes.
Eraser: This is a very powerful program for erasing data from a used drive, Eraser has some really good 3-pass overwrite options which should make your data nearly impossible to recover. The problem I have had with Eraser is that it would crash when I tried to use it on a USB hard drive, which if it affects other people could make it annoying to use.
DIY solution: If you have any issues with Eraser than maybe you could do what I did and try using h2testw to fill the hard drive with some data after you have quick formatted a hard drive. After doing all of that, you can just zero out the hard drive. This is a bit of a bodge but it should get the job done.
Final thoughts on buying a used hard drive from an eBay seller:
Buying a used hard drive can be a very good way of saving yourself some money, but doing so is a massive as you don’t know what life that hard drive really has had and a lot of sellers on eBay are just terrible. I would not recommend that most people buy a used hard drive but if you know fully understand the instructions in this article and follow them correctly then it should be fine to do so most of the time.