Refurbished SAS Drives in the UK: The Controller Rule and How to Test Them

Refurbished SAS drives and your controller

Start with the controller, because a low price cannot fix the wrong one. Seagate's knowledge base states the rule in two short sentences: SATA drives may be plugged into SAS controllers, and SAS drives cannot be plugged into SATA controllers. The rule runs one way, and the buyer of a SAS drive is on the wrong side of it.

Desktop machines and consumer NAS boxes are where this check matters most. Before ordering, establish which controller the drive bay runs from, and confirm a SAS drive on a SAS controller from that controller's documentation. If your machine's bays run from a SATA controller, the rule rules out a SAS drive. We name no machine as compatible here: the source is a general statement about controller types, not a list of models.

If your machine turns out to be SATA only, SATA enterprise hard drives are the drives to price instead, and SAS vs SATA sets the two interfaces side by side.

SAS specifications belong to the part number

Seagate's Exos data sheet lists SAS 12 Gb/s, dual interface ports, and 512e and 4Kn sector formats for its SAS models ST24000NM007H, ST20000NM007H, ST16000NM007H and ST12000NM007H. WD's Ultrastar DC HC590 data sheet lists SAS 12 Gb/s on its SAS variants. Those statements belong to those models. Each refurbished row needs its own part number checked against the maker's sheet, because the word SAS in a title proves none of them.

We have not found a document that covers cable or backplane connectors for these drives, so this page makes no claim on them. If a listing's title does, treat it as the seller's claim.

How to test a refurbished SAS HDD on arrival

Run these before you trust the drive with data. The first three come from the smartctl manual and the fourth from the sg3_utils manual.

• Run smartctl -a. It prints all SMART information about the disk, and for SCSI devices it is shorthand for a defined set of reports. Keep the first output as your baseline.
• Run smartctl -H. For a SCSI device the manual says: "Health status is obtained by checking the Additional Sense Code (ASC) and Additional Sense Code Qualifier (ASCQ) from Informal Exceptions (IE) log page (if supported) and/or from SCSI sense data."
• Run smartctl -l defects, or -x, which includes it: on SCSI it prints LBAs the background scan could not read, which the manual calls a defect.
• Note the grown defect list. Read it with sg_reassign --grown. The sg3_utils manual calls monitoring it a reasonable health metric, says the best lists are empty and quick growth is ominous, and gives no safe number.

This page sets no threshold of its own. Take a first reading on arrival and a later one to set against it.

Warranty and the 30-day right on a refurbished SAS drive

These are two separate things, and the first depends on who recertified the drive. Seagate says its factory recertified drives go through a step confirming they meet its factory performance standards, and that they carry a six-month warranty. Its recertified list names 15 programme part numbers with a 6-month limited warranty, but it does not state the interface. Check the listing's part number against the list, confirm SAS from the maker's sheet, and do not let the word recertified in a title settle it.

The second is statutory. Part 1 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 applies where there is an agreement between a trader and a consumer. A consumer buying from a trader has 30 days for the short-term right to reject a faulty drive, subject to the conditions in section 22, which is the reason to run the tests above promptly. A consumer is an individual acting for purposes wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession. A company is not an individual, and a sole trader buying wholly or mainly for the business is outside that definition. What renewed, refurbished and pulled each mean, and who answers for them, is the job of refurbished enterprise hard drives.

Refurbished SAS drives UK: live stock on Amazon.co.uk

The first table has 15 used 3.5-inch SAS rows, and the same filter for new matches 45 listings. The cheapest row can change whenever a listing sells.

Used here does not only mean refurbished. Our used rows take in renewed, recertified, refurbished and pulled SAS drives, so check the listing wording on each. We class a row as new if Amazon reports it new, its title has no refurbished-type wording and its part number is not on Seagate's recertified list. That does not prove a warranty. The lowest used figure per TB is £24.75/TB, inc VAT. These tables list hard drives only, so SAS SSDs are not in them. Trader versus private seller, and the data a pulled drive may still hold, sit with used server hard drives.

For comparison, the new rows below show the 10 lowest per TB, starting at £30.06/TB. Those are two price levels and can be different models, so read no saving into the gap. Both sit within the wider enterprise hard drives field.

16TB SAS refurbished: what the filter finds

Our filter currently finds 0 used 16 TB SAS drives, any form factor. A 3.5-inch one appears in the table above; a 2.5-inch one will not.