Direct from Seagate wouldn’t be bad, check their store first to see if you can cut out Amazon.

I was talking about random reseller stores. “Manufacturer refurbished” for things you can’t see is almost always a good idea. The manufacturer has their brand name on the line and usually go over common fail points and replace if it looks worn.

Stores/Amazon doing “renewed” means they tried to cover up superficial damage and is completely different. It might look ok on the outside and be complete junk on the inside.

Think of “renewed” as “open box returns” except it might have taken the last user 5 years to return. It’s a much worse gamble.

Depends.

If it’s “buy from Amazon” then you can return it with no issue if shits bad.

If Amazon is just the middleman, than the seller could be scamming and will either fight returns or just close up shop. I wouldn’t buy any used electronic over $200 from a middle man because of that, so this is kind of on the line.

But modern HDDs hold up a lot better than they used to. I tend to “ship of Theseus” PC builds and I’ve got some HDDs probably 15 years old that are still going strong.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard anyone say a HDD failed. Just people remembering what it was like 25 years ago. We don’t think of innovation with old tech like HDDs, but there’s been a lot of improvements to the parts that used to fail regularly.

Exos x18 are enterprise drives that came out last than 5 years ago, I can’t imagine they were replaced because they’re all bad, just companies upgrading to newer tech. So should be fine and last you well over a decade.