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Used Drive Buyer Check

Decide whether a second-hand drive is worth buying.

What you paste

Parsed in your browser — never uploaded

How this reads your output

The report is checked against two separate lists. Deal-breakers are attributes describing a problem happening now: pending sectors, uncorrectable sectors, and a failed self-assessment. Concerns are things worth a lower price rather than a refusal, including reallocated sectors, high hours and consumed endurance. The distinction matters because a drive that has reallocated a few sectors has survived them, while a drive with a pending sector currently cannot read something.

What the results mean

Pending sectors
The single most important attribute. Any value above zero means the drive is failing to read something right now, which is different from damage it has already worked around.
Reallocated sectors
Damage the drive has contained by swapping in spares. A small stable count on an older drive is normal; a growing count is not.
Interface CRC errors
Almost always a cable rather than the drive. Worth mentioning to the seller and worth nothing as a bargaining point.

Common problems and fixes

The seller report shows zero for everything
Ask them to run a full surface read first, then produce a new report. Bad sectors are only discovered when the drive tries to read them, so an untouched drive can show a perfect report and fail within an hour of real use. A long self-test does the same job and takes several hours.
The drive shows a few reallocated sectors
Not disqualifying on its own, and a good reason to pay less. What you cannot tell from one report is whether the count is stable or climbing. Ask for a second report a few days apart, and if it has moved at all, walk away regardless of how few sectors are involved.

Frequently asked questions

Is a used drive ever worth buying?

For bulk storage backed up elsewhere, often yes, and enterprise drives sold at the end of a lease can be excellent value. For the only copy of anything, no. The economics are simple: the price difference is small and the cost of losing data is not.

What does the self-assessment result mean?

It is the drive own summary, and it fails only when the manufacturer thresholds have already been crossed. A PASSED result means very little, since drives commonly fail while still reporting PASSED. A FAILED result is definitive and means stop using the drive.

Should I trust a seller screenshot?

Prefer the raw text output, which is harder to fabricate and shows every attribute rather than a curated view. Better still, run the report yourself before money changes hands. A seller unwilling to allow that is giving you the answer.

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