- Need massive storage? Seagates Exos 28TB HDD is the current king
- Recertified models emerge cheap – but they are not exactly fresh out of the box
- Some may have worked hard on crypto companies before, so check before buying!
If you are looking for a high capacity hard drive, Seagates Exos series will definitely appeal to you. The biggest internal drive you can buy in retail right now is the Seagates Exos 28TB HDD – when launched in 2024, it overtook the previous record holder, the western digital gold that maximizes at 24tb.
Seagate does not reveal pricing for Exos 28TB HDD, but we have noticed renovated versions of the drive for sale for a fraction of what you might expect to pay. This is not the first time these cheaper CMR drives have appeared online, and the same warnings that we issued to buy them before they apply now.
The drives that you find online such as Amazon ($ 379.99), Server Party Deals ($ 364.99), eBay in the UK (£ 578), as well as other third -party dealers, are all recertified models. This means that they have been used either in the past or the customer’s returns that have been inspected, tested and restored to full working conditions of either Seagate or an authorized third party. In other words, they are not brand new, but they have been verified to meet functional standards.
Attached to the Chia scandal?
In the case of Seagates Recertified Exos 28TB, this means you get a tested and renovated HDD in company quality at a significant discount, but with potentially lower warranty coverage. The drives we have found on sales have “Factory Recertified” printed on them so you know what you get and (depending on where you buy from) they could come up with a two-year warranty. It’s interesting as Seagate offers an official data sheet to the recertified EXOS 28TB drive that says it only offers one limited Six months warranty.
There is no doubt that the recertified drives available to buy are attractive priced and they must be perfectly fine, but if reliability is your highest priority, you may be better at picking up a brand new device.
Completely where all these recertified drives have come from is something of a mystery, but it would not surprise us if at least some – if not most – of them derived from China.
Heise.de recently reported that a number of its readers had purchased Seagate drives that were allegedly new but which had actually been used earlier – potentially for thousands of hours. Further graves suggested at least some of the drives originated from Chinese cryptocurrency mining that used them to my chia several years ago. We do not suggest that the recertified EXOS 28TB drives have been used for crypto mining, but it is always an option.
When drives are renovated and factory certified by Seagate, the field is reset the Available Reliability Metrics (Farm) usage time to zero. Heise.de reports that some readers with recertified drives discovered that their purchases had been spent for at least 15,000 hours, which, which, who, as, as Toms Hardware Points out, suggests “that these drives were used, renovated by Seagate, used again and then resold as freshly renovated models.”
If you decide to buy one of the recertified EXOS 28TB HDDs, make sure you buy from a reputable dealer, even if it means paying a little extra.
MOT end of January 2025 SEAGATE 36TB EXOS M model added to its growing family of data center hard drive, making it the largest HDD currently available, though not one that you will be able to buy (for now). Seagate CEO Dave Mosley also revealed at the time that the company had successfully tried draft capacities over 6 TB, which means 60 TB drives could be on the horizon.
