- Do you need mass storage? Exos 28TB HDD of Seagate is the current king
- Recertified models are appearing cheap, but they are not exactly just out of the box
- Some could have worked hard in cryptograms before, so verify before buying!
If you are looking for a high capacity hard drive, the Seagate exas rank will definitely attract you. The largest internal impulse you can buy in retail trade at this time is the HDD Exos 28TB of Seagate: when it was launched in 2024 it surpassed the head of the previous registration, the Odtle Digital Gold, which reaches the maximum of 24TB.
Seagate does not reveal the prices for the 28TB HDD, but we have noticed restored versions of the unit for sale for a fraction of what you can expect to pay. This is not the first time that these cheaper CMR units appear online, and the same warnings that we issue about buying them before applying now.
The units that you will find online at Amazon ($ 379.99), Serverpartdeals ($ 364.99), eBay in the United Kingdom (£ 578), as well as other external retailers, are rectified models. That means that they are previously used or the returns of customers who have been inspected, tested and restored to the complete working condition by Seagate or an authorized third party. In other words, they are not new, but they have been verified to meet functional standards.
Linked to the Chia scandal?
In the case of the Exos 28TB Recertified from Seagate, it means that it is obtaining a proven and restored business degree HDD with a significant discount, but with a potentially lower guarantee coverage. The units that we have found for sale have “rectified factory” printed on them, so that you know what you are obtaining and (depending on where they buy) could come with a guarantee of up to two years. That is interesting, since Seagate offers an official data sheet for the Resertified Unit of Exos 28TB, which establishes that it only offers one limited Six months guarantee.
There is no doubt that the rectified units available to buy have an attractive price, and they should be absolutely well, but if reliability is their highest priority, it is better to collect a new unit.
Where all these rectified units have come from is a kind of mystery, but it would not surprise us if at least some, if not most, originated in China.
Heise.de recently reported that several of their readers had bought Seagate units that were supposedly new but, in fact, they had previously used, potentially for thousands of hours. A greater excavation suggested at least some of the native units of the mining farm of Chinese cryptocurrencies that used them to extract chia several years ago. We are not suggesting that the 28TB exos units have been used for cryptographic mining, but it is always a possibility.
When Seagate is renewed and certified the factory, the time of use of reliability metrics accessible to the field (farm) is restored to zero. Heise. Informs that some readers with rectified units discovered that their purchases had been used for at least 15,000 hours, which, as Tom hardware He points out, suggests “that these units were used, they were renewed by Seagate, they are used again and then they were revealed as newly restored models.”
If you decide to buy one of the HDD rectified 28TB, be sure to buy a good reputation for a good reputation, even if that means paying a little more.
Towards the end of January 2025, Seagate added model 36TB exos M to its growing family of hard disk units of the data center, which makes it the largest HDD currently available currently, although not one that can buy (for now) . The CEO of Seagate, Dave Mosley, also revealed at that time that the company had successfully tried skills of more than 6TB dishes, which means that 60 TB units could be on the horizon.
