Buying pre-owned electronics online can be a scary experience. Can you trust the seller? Have they fully tested the device? Do they even know how to properly test it? We specialize in selling donor devices and have many years of experience in the field. We fully stand behind each and every device we sell and offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. Each storage device that comes to us is given a full read/write test to find any bad areas. This is done using ddrescue on linux. If there is even one bad sector, we do not list the drive as being in good working condition.
Drives that do not meet this rigorous test undergo further tests to see if they are suitable as donor devices. As many drives have only a handful of bad sectors but fully functional heads and PCB boards, we test the heads individually. If they are functioning well, they will be listed here as BSGH (bad sectors, good heads).
We do NOT guarantee any particular SMART status for drives, instead using ability to read & write the full disk surface as a better test of functionality. Re-allocated sectors are normal for healthy, used drives and indicate a bad sector has been replaced with a working one. Several large studies including one commissioned by Google have shown that SMART is not a reliable indicator of drive health.
Drives which do not meet these tests are sent to the scrap pile, we don’t have time for malfunctioning drives and you don’t either!