question hdd buy in aliexpress

[adryman]

I bought a 2.5" HDD on Aliexpress and it is inside an enclosure case. I know it is used, but most of the 2.5" HDDs sold on Aliexpress are used but show 2 hours of use and good health on crystaldiskinfo. What do they do?

Do these Aliexpress sellers also modify, remove or disable important functions within the firmware such as power management or other features, or do they use firmware from another HDD model?

 

[barry]

I bought a 2.5" HDD on Aliexpress and it is inside an enclosure case. I know it is used, but most of the 2.5" HDDs sold on Aliexpress are used but show 2 hours of use and good health on crystaldiskinfo. What do they do?

Do these Aliexpress sellers also modify, remove or disable important functions within the firmware such as power management or other features, or do they use firmware from another HDD model?

why don’t you ask the people you bought it from? There’s no telling what’s been done to a used component.

 

[BradtheRad]

I picture 50-pound boxes full of used 2.5" spinning hard drives (extracted from aging laptop computers) arriving in trucks at Aliexpress. They're motivated to maximize profit by performing minimal diagnosis and refurbishing on old computer parts. As solid-state hd's become popular, the day of rotating platters fades. If you yourself purchase them cheap then it might succeed to maintain a stack of 2.5" spinning hd's in operation. However I don't see that they're made to last.

With each step smaller in size over the years (8" to 5.25" to 3.5" to 2.5"), reliability of platter hd's also declined. I've had a couple 2.5" hd's go bad merely sitting in a drawer. The computer industry advanced such that old (read obsolete) equipment is a glut on the market. Someday it will be 'vintage' equipment but that's another story!