[Refurbished] WD Ultrastar HC520 12TB SAS 3.5" 12Gb/s 7200 RPM HDD $219 Delivered @ metrocom Amazon AU

274
[Refurbished] WD Ultrastar HC520 12TB SAS 3.5" 12Gb/s 7200 RPM HDD $219 Delivered @ metrocom Amazon AUAffiliate
Go to Deal
Cashback
jbird84 on 15/10/2025 - 15:03 amazon.com.au (601 clicks)
Last edited 15/10/2025 - 15:11 by 1 other user
This post contains affiliate links. OzBargain might earn commissions when you click through and make purchases. Please see this page for more information.

Model HUH721212AL4200 sold by Amazon Renewed at a great $18.25/TB delivered. Note these are SAS drives, not SATA.

I don't have any experience buying from here but one particular thing gave me pause— the product description says 6 month warranty (yikes) but elsewhere on the page it says Amazon Renewed's warranty is 12 months.

Might be a good purchase for those of you who have more resilient setups and can throw a bit of caution to the wind.

Price History at C CamelCamelCamel.
Computing Computer Component Hard Drive HGST Serial Attached Scsi

Related Stores

Amazon AU
Amazon AU
Marketplace
metrocom
metrocom

Comments

  • kungfuman on 15/10/2025 - 15:05
    -5

    fyi these are SAS drives so you wanna plug it into a sata connection you need an adapter

    • tonyjzx on 15/10/2025 - 15:10
      +27

      it dont work that way

      you need a sas controller

      if you have a sas controller you can buy a cable that breaks it out to four sata ports ie, 4 x sata hdds

      sas is a superset of sata ie. its superior to sata

      sas is a server tech… i have yet to see any consumer motherboard with sas but sure, i'd love to see one

      sas = serial attached scsi, yeah its that old, probalby more than 20yrs at this point, i used to babysit this shit all day

      • ColonialBoy on 15/10/2025 - 15:53
        +1

        https://cwwk.net/products/12450h

        You need to look to Chinese motherboards for cheap onboard SAS.

        • ironpaw on 15/10/2025 - 16:01
          +7

          just get a LSI 2008 SAS controller board for like $50?

        • Nom on 15/10/2025 - 17:57

          @ColonialBoy there's no mention of SAS anywhere on that page - all I can see are SFP+ ports and PCIe headers.

          • qwijibo on 15/10/2025 - 18:28

            @Nom: It has two SFF-8654 (8i) connectors. If they actually support SAS, you can get a breakout cable to drive 8 SAS/SATA drives off each one - so 16 drives - using a cable like this.

            Otherwise you can adapt those same connectors to pci-e slots or m.2 slots, and plug in a regular HBA, I suppose.

        • peteru on 15/10/2025 - 22:07
          +2

          That's not SAS. Just because the connectors look like some SAS interconnects does not mean it supports the SAS protocol or signalling. In the CWWK case, it does not.

          Similarly the (CWWK / Miniroute) N7 NAS board (which I have) also uses "SAS connectors" for SATA only. Good choice, as it reduces the HDD connector footprint on the motherboard.

      • Whiplash on 15/10/2025 - 17:13
        +1

        So can't use an adapter and jam it into a consumer NAS appliance?

        • FeetOffTheTable on 15/10/2025 - 17:30
          +2

          Well what is an adapter, if not a system designed to connect incompatible technology?

    • TaurusHead on 15/10/2025 - 15:29
      -1

      In short, can they directly placed in the TerraMaster D4-320 I bought the other day or not?

      • tonyjzx on 15/10/2025 - 15:33
        +6

        without even googling that i can say 100% "NO" (also fuc no!) given terramaster make consumer grade garbage

        you're welcome

      • kehuau on 15/10/2025 - 16:38

        100% NO. I made this mistake once and had to return the SAS hard drive and pay the delivery fee.

  • stratbargain on 15/10/2025 - 15:27
    +1

    For what it's worth I've had 8 of the 6TB model running 24/7 for 5.5 years with no failures, issues, etc. Great drives.

    A compatible SAS controller can be had on ebay for $20 but will use a PCI Express slot.

    • Ozzster on 15/10/2025 - 19:24

      There are USB ones or even NVME to SAS. But there is another problem. If your drive dies, or controller dies, you cannot just read the data by finding something else. You will need exact same controller to work with that data on the drive, even if it was RAID mirror. I had Adaptec one refusing to work in mirror and to work with another controller when a drive died.

      • CLGNet on 16/10/2025 - 09:20
        +1

        You don't have to have the same controller, your Adaptec likely isn't operating in IT mode and hence the incompatibility.

        Like another poster mentioned, HW RAID is a recipe for disaster.

    • tonyjzx on 15/10/2025 - 15:35
      +2

      this is pretty much it

      like sas never really took off outside of server grade shit because it wasnt that great over sata

      EXCEPT that you can have two sas ports run 8 sata drives off it and save motherboard space

      i'm pretty sure i've got a box of random 10,000-15,000 rpm sas drives in the garage - they sound like dentists drills

      • CLGNet on 16/10/2025 - 09:26

        Not sure, it's probably still the gold standard in the enterprise space? My IOM6 disk shelves over sff-8436 still does 400MB/s sustained for bulk file transfers, can finish few TB transfer in a matter of few hours, my SATA drive arrays would take at least 3 times as longer and most likely crap out in the midst of a rsync of such migrations. (Had to do 20 TB migration not long ago)

    • fullerms on 15/10/2025 - 16:43
      -2

      These drives are good value for media files and security cam footage which is constantly writing to disc.

      Use fast SSDs for file storage and a couple of spinners for a good balance.

        • Nom on 15/10/2025 - 17:59
          +6

          Plenty of cheap SSD options ? There are zero.

          These are 12TB drives - there are no comparable consumer SSDs in this size.

          People are downvoting you because your post is nonsense 👍

  • subwars on 15/10/2025 - 15:42
    +5

    7 years old. meh, not that great

  • FuRyZ on 15/10/2025 - 15:45
    +4

    Okay price per TB, but the HC520 is a very old model now. I would wait for something better to come up. The HC550 or higher model would be worth it.

  • Dollar Dreamer on 15/10/2025 - 16:51
    +8

    WTF is wrong with everyone buying 4 - 10 year old thrashed hard drives with 10's of thousands of hours usage on them?

    • wisc on 15/10/2025 - 16:56
      +2

      yes, yes, yes, 100% yes… like fine if its just crud you can download again, but used drives is like buying used jocks, sure you can, but would you really want to?

    • fullerms on 15/10/2025 - 17:10
      +1

      They could be cold spares which someone found at the bottom of the rack :)

      There are 4TB drives for around $75, and they are great value with Amazon's 1 year warranty.
      https://amzn.asia/d/7GBjrht

      I recently bought used 800GB Enterprise SSDs off eBay. The endurance rating on those drives is 14,600 TBW, while consumer discs are rated for 600TBW.

      When I tested the discs, they had 99% of their endurance remaining. One disc had a few errors and the seller immediately sent a replacement.

      Buying used Enterprise stuff is not for the faint hearted, but well worth the risk if you know what to look for.

      • wisc on 15/10/2025 - 21:36

        What did you use to test them? I also bought a drive for proxmax, zfs arc and l2arc.

        I got it for the plp, and figured if its just for proxmox it should be easy enough to rebuild if it fails

    • Whiplash on 15/10/2025 - 17:10
      +2

      Data centre drives are made or binned to a higher grade than consumer drives. Running 24/7 is thought to be more forgiving than constand on/off on motors, plus the ones that fail early have already been trashed.

      So these survivors are usually pretty good for civilian use for a few years.

      Think a thoroughbred horse now put out to stud for its retirement.

      Just buy one spare unit extra when one goes down so you can rebuild… Then be prepared to rebuild the whole lot as that failure is the canary in the coal mine

      • fullerms on 15/10/2025 - 17:22

        And remember kids

        RAID ≠ Backup
        RAID5 is worse than RAID0 (mirroring). You get the same single disc redundancy in both, but you could lose a second disc when rebuilding a RAID5 array.
        RAID5 < RAID6

        • kehuau on 15/10/2025 - 17:28
          +2

          I believe you want to say "RAID 1(mirroring)?

        • mskeggs on 15/10/2025 - 18:38
          +2

          And the extra strain on the remaining 4 disk's rebuilding after a failure is sometimes enough to cause a second fail.
          Do not ask how I know about this from seeing it happen in production.

        • metalslaw on 15/10/2025 - 19:18
          +1

          Coming at this from a home user perspective,

          Given the size of the drives these days, I think it's crazy to build a raid 5 (or more) array, unless you really need the speed, for a 10GbE network, and you have enough money to actually have 2 offline backups of the files (with 1 of these sets offsite).

          The reason I think it's crazy, is because Raid is not a backup method. And a rebuild can not be relied upon 100%. Rebuilding even a 5 drive raid 5 12-24TB drive array will push the drives to 100% for at least a few days or more, and that's just asking for another failure, which ofc, if you don't have actual backups, could lead to total data loss.

          For a 2.5GbE home network, you only really need a single 2 drive raid 1 array to nearly saturate a 2.5GbE connection. And really, you are better off having actual offline (and offsite) backups, instead of also running this with or without 2 additional drives in a mirror (and still needing actual backups).

          The best option for most home users will always be JBOD'ing drives for data storage needs (with 2 full offline backups, of which 1 of these is offsite), and if need be, running a 2 drive raid 1 array, for doing work on across a 2.5GbE network.

          A 2 drive raid 1 array also suits being run as a steam library drive… Because you don't care that much if the data is lost, as you can just re-download the games (albeit it would take forever again). But the speed improvement across a 2.5GbE network is worth it. And you can have your complete library downloaded, and be able to play any game in your library, without having to wait to download it… And if the game needs ssd speeds, you transfer it onto your gaming pc's ssd drive, and play from there.

          Back to original topic. And for anyone still on a 1GbE home network, there is absolutely no reason to not keep it as simple as possible, and just JBOD everything. Because even single disk by itself, is enough to saturate a 1GbE network connection. Do the suggested 2 drive (1 offsite) backup I've suggested, and you should be data secure enough to cope with most disasters.

          • Ozzster on 15/10/2025 - 19:31
            +1

            @metalslaw: I got several SATA drives for $1, some of which 10k raid series of smaller sizes. Perfect use is to stripe them in RAID 0 to combine size and speed, and they perfectly replace SSD on a PC without M2. It is not noisier than just average SATA 7200. Read speed like 300 Mb/s, write about 200+ Mb/s, can't say it is way slower than SSD in reality. I tried RAID 5, it was horrible.

            • metalslaw on 15/10/2025 - 19:52

              @Ozzster: As long as you have a backup, and the array is on your own machine, yes, you can go wild with raid 0 sata drives (as long as you have 2 backups), unlees you have 0 because you don't need to worry about losing the data e.g. steam library.

              Your use case is definitely a good one.

              Over a network, it's a different story ofc.

              One reason I brought up the steam library over network using raid 1 max for a 2.5GbE network, is that this is an effective use of raid for a home user over a fairly cheap network. You can share this library between multiple machines. e.g. In my case, my everyday pc, my sim rig, and my tv pc. I thus don't have to have multiple duplicates of games across each device. I just have 1 set, that is shared. And then if I need ssd loading speeds for a specific game e.g. for when a UE5 game does dynamic loading while playing (looking at you Black Myth Wukong), I move it to the local machine's ssd, and play from there.

              Anyway, just food for thought.

          • peteru on 15/10/2025 - 22:58
            +1

            @metalslaw: Hardware RAID is a bad idea and has been for the last decade. JBOD and modern file systems all the way. I'm partial to BTRFS, it works better for me than ZFS. Parity based RAID (RAID5/6 and friends), especially at the block level is also an old technology that's past it's prime.

            I find that for the last decade BTRFS worked really well for me. I have a filesystem with 8 drives - a mix of 20TB, 22TB and 24TB WD Red Pro NAS HDDs. It used to be 14 drives, but I replaced all the 4TB and 8TB drives. Data is RAID1 (2 copies), metadata is RAID1c4 (four copies) and BTRFS is smart enough to balance it all without wasted space. All drives are attached using a mix of LSI SAS HBA and onboard SATA ports. Best case scenario I can get about 1,200MB/s reads, but that kind of performance is rare. The system has 2 x 10GbE and there is another BTRFS filesystem with multiple SSDs that go at over 2GB/s, so I could saturate the network. That's rare though. Backups go to two other systems using a combination of rsync, Proxmox backup server and BTRFS send/receive. Each method has it's pros and cons.

            I'll have to play with CEPH soon, just waiting on Amazon to deliver a bunch of SSDs for my nodes. Ceph allows you to distribute your data over many hard drives, different computers or even across sites. The redundancy and failure domains are configurable. Ceph also has support for snapshots and deduplication. Combine all that with multiple copies of the data in different locations and your file system is your backup solution too. Marry that with HA clustering and you are looking pretty good. Definitely not a consumer level turnkey solution. ;-)

            • Ozzster on 16/10/2025 - 08:01

              @peteru: Estimating that system as a few thousand dollars for drives only, of course it's not a consumer level.

  • harryozz on 15/10/2025 - 16:54
    +5

    This is a terrible deal.
    So much risk for not a great price, $5 to $10 per tb is acceptable. At $18 per tb you might as well just go buy a brand new external HDD from Amazon and shuck it

    • ameu9330 on 15/10/2025 - 18:15
      +3

      Can you link an external HDD for $18/TB

      • metalslaw on 15/10/2025 - 18:43
        +1

        Agreed. This is a decent enough deal imho, given the rising prices of $/TB, over the last 6 months, for used enterprise drives.

    • CLGNet on 16/10/2025 - 08:58

      Actually, I agree with the neg, but not for the same reason. They are extremely resilient drives and the batch of 3 I got from them all tested perfect, SMART, low level format..etc.

      My gripe would be, the batch I got about 3 months ago, the price was $179 per drive on eBay, that's not counting cashback which shaved another 12% off. 2 days after the eBay plus sale was over, they increased the price to $199. It never came down ever since.

      Heck! it is still $199 on eBay right now as it has been, for the past 3 months.

  • ippybear on 15/10/2025 - 16:59
    +6

    Hey, I love SAS drives. These are Not the old scsi interfaces types, but much newer. Yes, you Do need a SAS controller, and Yes the connectors to the controllers do type vary. Theres some good videos on YouTube explaining them. So some guys say there isn't much to be gained by using SAS drives, but there is. For starters newer SAS Hdd drives have 12gb/s transfer speed ( all mechanical sata hdd are 6gb/s )
    These faster drives need a later series controller typically a 93xx series which handles 12mb/s. 92xx type controllers only handle 6 gb/s, no matter the drives. Be careful with contrller ads, always check the speed ans specs. Secondly, yes, these drives, when cheap are used, they have come typically from data centres but have been looked after temp and environment wise. But they aren't home grade construction like most sata drives , they are enterprise grade, built for long use - built with fully supported platters - bearings at both axis points and in most cases, superior electronics, the larger ones with vibration sensors etc.. And lastly they are much cheaper for huge capacies.
    As a side note, some controllers are flashed " hba" this means the controllers dont act like a raid controller, but just as any other hdd controller, one connection to each drive, and each drive operates on its own as an independent drive.
    I have 3 older business Xeon "game" machines and one Chinese motherboard homebuilt Xeon gaming machine. I have SAS drives in all of them, and have almost zero problems.
    The smaller capacity 3.5" 1 or 2 Tb SAS drives are close to giveaway prices from some vendors .
    Oh yes, it all sounds a bit technical, but I have learnt about it all, and use them, and I'm 75.

    • fullerms on 15/10/2025 - 17:12
      +2

      You left out the helium filling which lowers the resistance on the platters :)

    • Ozzster on 15/10/2025 - 19:33
      +1

      These speeds are fake theoretical interface speeds, nothing to do with reality. There is no HDD able to deliver 12 Gb/s in reality, it is made for bunch of drives sitting altogether on the same interface.

  • id on 15/10/2025 - 17:03
    +1

    Nothing refurbished about these drives. False advertising

    • banana365 on 15/10/2025 - 17:23
      +6

      They were given a wipe over with a damp cloth to clean off the dust. What more could you want?

      • id on 15/10/2025 - 22:14
        +1

        a toothbrush scrub?

    • metalslaw on 15/10/2025 - 19:55

      To be fair, 'refurbished' for hard drives, is known to mean, 'yep, we gave it a wipe'.

      Yes, it also means 'used'. But I don't think any company selling hdd's are going to call them 'used' instead of 'refurbished'.

    • id on 15/10/2025 - 22:10
      -1

      nvm. i was in data recovery for more than a decade.. just stating the obvious. There are manufacturer official refurbished drives out there. again stating the obvious.

  • tanksinatra on 15/10/2025 - 17:46
    +6

    As others have mentioned these are SAS drives. Not SATA.
    You cannot ‘adapt’ your SATA ports to SAS.
    Consumer NAS’s will not accept SAS.

    To run these drives most users run used ex-enterprise SAS cards flashed with IT-mode firmware. These are called HBA’s. These drives are really only useful for people with roll-your-own type servers/NAS’s which can install these cards. As a result used SAS drives are worth less than SATA drives on the used market.

    I don’t think this is a good deal. I’d want to pay $5-10 per TB to consider used ex-server SAS drives.

    • trustnoone on 15/10/2025 - 19:51
      +1

      Can't comment on the deal but appreciate the info. At first I was quite interested for my current NAS but sounds like its not a good direction to go for me. So appreciate the info.

  • Ozzster on 15/10/2025 - 19:36
    +1

    If I could see SMART before purchase I could consider it as a deal. Otherwise, it may be a drive after 45k hours on duty with thousands of bads just waiting to rest in peace in landfill.

    • CLGNet on 16/10/2025 - 09:07

      The batch I got from them has 32k hours, better then the 60k hours 2nd hand 6tb drives I got from another place, and the 12tb drives are circa 2019 from memory

  • Vinodra on 16/10/2025 - 10:36
    +1

    Buying a refurbished HDD is a terrible idea, even if it really was refurbished.

    I'd wouldn't use these for anything I even remotely care about even if they were free.

    • CLGNet on 16/10/2025 - 11:05

      Enterprise drives, especially direct data centre pulls or the over commissioned ex government hobby toys are totally great, these refurbished ones made 5 to 10 years ago are probably still way more stable than those "New NAS SATA" drives on the market.

      The truth is, the more people think they are worthless, the better for users like me to find hidden bargains, like I said, they were 179 before, the 10tb ones are 159, and metrocom jacked up the price to 199 after selling them cheap. (Most 12TB SAS preowned in oz with free shipping starts around 225 bucks and most actual listings are 250 bucks or above)

      • Vinodra on 16/10/2025 - 11:54

        If the organisations originally using these no longer trust them to the point they have replaced them (presumably due to age), is that really something you want to risk your data with? I'd hope you're atleast got a layer of redundancy.

        • CLGNet on 16/10/2025 - 12:12

          The data centre pulls and over commissioned government toys purchased by government and commissioned by its contractors are being put on 2nd hand market for a reason. Not because they "No longer trust the hardware" nor entirely because of "old age"

          It's more because they are no longer fit for purpose, and the main purpose for data centres are because the ever growing demand for more storage from all levels of consumers (think about YouTube, Netflix and the ever growing demand for 4k, 8k contents, compound with recently increased NBN speeds national wide). Government? well, we all know how they play the annual budget games, they have to spend in order to get, think all those government vehicles in the auction, a lot of them are pretty mint thx to our tax payers money.

          I will take one of these (assume they are same batch from what I've got from Metrocom before) over any NEW wd REDs or Seagate Ironwolves manufactured today.

          :-)

      • id on 16/10/2025 - 17:06
        +1

        I tell you what. Metrocom are laughing all the way to the bank!
        Most 7+ year-old enterprise drives are discarded when datacentre equipment is decommissioned. Companies usually pay IT recyclers to properly sanitize or destroy the data, but many take shortcuts… often just doing a simple format.

        I’ve sourced a few drives from Metrocom and found recoverable data using basic recovery software from SATA drives. While SAS drives are typically less risky since they’re used in RAID arrays, a lot of these HDDs seem to come from overseas distributors, sold cheaply and without proper data wiping.

        im currently working in datacentres and every equipment decommissioned are tracked, i cant even get my hands on these hdd as they are contracted through 3rd party of which we require NAID AAA certificates.

        anyway.. I wouldnt spend 200+ on an older HC520 7+yr old thrashed drives. HC550.. maybe.

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join