What’s the catch? This is the best deal I can find on the internet by a fair margin. This seller has an amazon store page as well and seems to have a good reputation on both. The seller claims its a new HDD from a reputable brand and offers a 5 year sellers warranty.
34k customers and a 100% positive approval rating? Not one person in all those customers was even neutral about their purchase? Super fishy. That seems not possible. I'm guessing this is a total scam just from that.
Edit: after scrolling this sellers feedback it all looks legit. That's just so rare to have 100% with that many reviews.
Definitely check the SMART status for uptime when you receive them. Make sure you can return it before you buy it as well
I bought four of those drives from SPD to put in my NAS. After testing and burn in, one of them started failing tests. SPD had me send the failing drive in and they sent me a new one. Otherwise these have been great so far.
Editing this 10 days later, having two more drives fail SMART tests after a sudden sharp increase in offline uncorrectable sectors. I'm trying to go through the RMA process now. I can no longer recommend this unless you're okay playing the RMA game until you get reliable drives. Backblaze tested the exact Seagate drives I'm using and only had a 0.60% annual failure rate. The fact that I'm seeing 3 out of 4 drives I've bought showing signs of failure makes me think something is wrong with the ones they're selling.
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread