Would You Buy a Refurbished Thunderbolt Hard Drive?

[AndrewMRiv]

Would You Buy a Refurbished Thunderbolt Hard Drive or would you find it too risky? I have found a Lacie d2 3tb online for a great price but am a bit skeptical since it is Refurbished.

 

[Pakaku]

I hope you're not expecting to just plug it in like you would a normal USB drive... waste of bandwidth.

Otherwise eh, if you get another for backups, I'd say it might not be too bad of a deal.

 

[phoenixsan]

I suppose.....

it boils down to two issues for me:

1-Type of warranty in the refurbished disk

2-How big the discount is......

I know for sure that if I find a similar item, said, with no hassle devolution and a 25% off regular price, I would jump in that bandwagon......

 

[ThomasJL]

If the data is irreplaceable, I would never buy a refurbished hard drive.

 

[barkmonster]

If it's barely more than the cost of a 3Tb bare drive, I'd go for it. If it takes a 3Tb, it'll take a 4Tb later on and you can use the disk in the enclosure for other purposes later on otherwise you might as well buy a USB 3.0 drive of the same capacity or even a bare enclosure and choose your own fast, 7200rpm HDD to go with it.

Thunderbolt has zero benefit over USB 3.0/eSATA with a single HDD.

If it has dual Thunderbolt ports, it could be useful with an older Mac that has Thunderbolt and only USB 2.0 but that's simply because of the higher Mb/s offered over USB 2.0. You don't need this drive for bandwidth increases, all your Macs have USB 3.0, but it would leave a USB 3.0 port free for use with other devices.

Also, a lot of the Thunderbolt drives only use 5400rpm HDDs internally. Completely defeating the point of using Thunderbolt in the first place.

 

[Silencio]

I've found brand new LaCie drives unreliable enough. I shudder to think about trusting my data to a refurbished LaCie drive.

 

[zorinlynx]

If I got a really good deal, sure. The Thunderbolt enclosure on its own is very useful and you can put a different/bigger new drive into it.

 

[themumu]

If the data is irreplaceable, I would never buy a refurbished hard drive.

If the data is irreplaceable, you should never have only one copy of it. A new hard disk can fail just as unexpectedly and completely as a refurbished one, you should not trust any single storage unit if your data is truly important.

 

[gnasher729]

Would You Buy a Refurbished Thunderbolt Hard Drive or would you find it too risky? I have found a Lacie d2 3tb online for a great price but am a bit skeptical since it is Refurbished.

I wouldn't buy a Thunderbolt hard drive in the first place.

USB 3 hard drives are tons cheaper, and since USB 3 is three times faster than your hard drive anyway, Thunderbolt doesn't get you any advantages.

 

[djarum69]

I bought a WD MyBook Thunderbolt Duo directly from WD rectified for 33% off. That's not much more than the naked disks, and as good as a comperable USB 3 RAID. I always buy Apple's reconditioned stuff an have never had a problem. I'm sure this one will work out just fine.

 

[AndrewMRiv]

Thank you for responses. I will likely get a USB 3.0 external for now, save up money, get a Raid External Thunderbolt drive, and then switch the USB External into a time machine backup.

 

[iamgalactic]

I've found brand new LaCie drives unreliable enough. I shudder to think about trusting my data to a refurbished LaCie drive.

I have a LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt refurb that i've been running for 12 months with no problems.

My second 2Big bought without drives from ebay also has no problems.

I shudder to think about trusting my data to any drive. Which is why I have a good backup regime.

(also, I have 2 usb2 and 1 usb1 LaCie drives from new that I've had no problems with and completely reliable)

 

[curmudgeon32]

If the data is irreplaceable, I would never buy a refurbished hard drive.

I would never have anything irreplacable on ANY one hard drive that isn't backed up somehow.