I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.
I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.
In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?
I was worried of the same thing, but my purchase of several hundred CAD did not have any duties applied. Of course every country and even purchase can be different.
I just bought a drive from them last month (from Canada) and just received a $60 duty bill. The time before that I got nothing. YMMV