How to avoid buying refurbished SSDs

There is no absolutely reliable way to determine whether an SSD is refurbished or not, but there are still some ways to help verify and determine the condition of the drive that users can refer to.

SSDs show signs of price increase as people look to buy them from third parties

Checking the packaging is the simplest way because it is quite difficult to fake the original seal, especially when the seals from big brands are disposable, after opening it is almost impossible to restore. Meanwhile, many small brands use transparent labels, which are basically invisible. At this time, users should check to see if it is intact or not.

The surface of the SSD mainly depends on the contact points that we often call "gold fingers". Generally, SSDs are tested before leaving the factory, but they will not leave obvious marks on the surface of the gold fingers, if there are obvious wear marks on it, it is probably a "used SSD".

Then comes the installation process. Users can use CrystalDiskInfo to see the SSD capacity, here they need to compare it with the nominal capacity. The capacity of most NVMe protocol solid state drives will be slightly larger than the nominal capacity. For example, 512 GB can be recognized as 512.1 GB, if the capacity is too small, users need to be careful because this may be a state of capacity reduction due to blocking bad blocks, so this SSD has also undergone a long-term use.

CrystalDiskInfo is a useful utility for testing SSDs.

Next is CrystalDiskInfo, focusing on the number of power-ups, power-up time, write capacity and read capacity in the upper right corner. Normally, new SSDs will have a single-digit power-up number, but the time is not more than 1 hour, the read-write capacity is not more than 1 hour, all are 0. It should be noted that SMART messages are read from the SSD by the software, and can be reset to 0 during the renewal process, so this data is only used for troubleshooting and not as a criterion for evaluating new disks.

In fact, for most users, it is a good choice to wait for the annual shopping festival instead of buying SSDs through unofficial channels. However, the price of memory chips will increase in the future, and SSDs may not be as good as they used to be.

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