Drive Arrival Census: Hours on Recertified and Used Drives

A recertified or used hard drive costs less than a new one, and the first thing its buyer does is read how many hours it has run. The answer gets posted in forum threads one drive at a time. This seller, that model, so many hours.

In January 2025 heise online reported a second number. A reader had bought two Seagate drives as new. Their SMART values looked unremarkable, and their FARM logs held 10,000 and 15,000 hours. Seagate confirmed to heise that SMART values can be reset, and Tom’s Hardware reported in March 2025 that sellers had since found ways to alter the FARM values as well.

So a buyer has two hour counts on some drives, one on others, and no record of what either usually says for a given seller. That record is missing. A search in September 2026 turned up no dataset that collects arrival readings by seller and by what the listing called the drive, with the raw hour counts beside them.

This page opens that census. One row is one drive on the day it arrived. The data, the field definitions, the validator and the report form live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/techfuelhq-census (CC BY 4.0).

For what drives cost this month, see the HDD price index and the account of the 2026 drive supply squeeze.

How results are reported

For each seller and listing condition the census gives the number of drives, the median SMART hours at arrival, how many arrived dead or failed a first test, and how many had reallocated sectors. FARM figures need more rows. Where five or more drives in a group carry a FARM log, the census gives the median FARM hours and how many drives showed FARM more than 24 hours above SMART.

I publish no verdict on a seller. A recertified drive with thousands of hours in its FARM log may be exactly what its listing described, so the census reports the numbers beside the words on the listing and leaves the reading to the buyer.

What one row records

A row is one drive as it arrived. Of its 28 fields, you fill in 6, the reading fills in 19, 1 is worked out from the row and the maintainer sets 2.

Listing conditions

Record the condition as the listing stated it on the day you bought, in the listing’s own category.

How to take the reading

Read the drive before it holds anything, with smartmontools 7.4 or later.

1. Connect the drive directly, by SATA or SAS. heise notes that a FARM query through a USB adapter may not work.
2. Run smartctl -x on the drive and keep everything it prints.
3. On a Seagate drive, run smartctl -l farm as well.
4. Paste both into the builder below.

smartctl -x /dev/sdX
smartctl -l farm /dev/sdX

Replace /dev/sdX with your drive. Both commands only read. Adding -j prints the same data as JSON, and the builder reads that too.

The output holds the drive’s serial number. The builder reads past it, the report has no place to put it, and a paste in which it would land in the report is refused. Paste one drive at a time. The builder is tested against output that other owners published, which is listed with the test data in the repository.

Reading the hours

Send a report

Sending needs a GitHub account, because the report is filed as an issue. No account? Copy the report and email it to contact@techfuelhq.com.

What has been published

Current count: 0 reports. No group has rows yet, so nothing is published.

A seller and listing condition publish at five drives. Below that the group is listed as collecting, with its count and no figures.

Limits of this data

• Reports come from people who chose to send them. A buyer who found a surprise is more likely to report than one who found what the listing promised.
• Hour counts can be altered. The census records what the drive reported and cannot say what is true.
• A seller’s stock changes. Rows carry the month of purchase, and a figure from last year says little about a pallet that arrived last week.
• A drive that worked on arrival can fail in its first month. The census records the day of arrival and nothing after it.

Use the data

The dataset is one file. submissions.csv holds one row per drive, in the field order above, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute it as “TechFuelHQ open census” with a link to this page.

If the drive is going into a machine you already own, building a NAS from an old PC covers the rest of the build. The coil whine census is the sibling dataset that started this series.

Change log

• 0.1.0 (2026-09-29): fields, the smartctl and FARM reader, validator and intake form. The census opened with 0 rows.