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I noticed that Newegg is selling a manufacturer refurbished 240GB Corsair Neutron GTX SSD for about $80 less than a new one. If I'm looking at the latest results from TR's SSD endurance experiment correctly, it looks like it should last for as many reads and writes as me or any previous owners have thrown at it. The downside is that it only comes with a 30-day warranty but in all my dealings with computers I've only actually dealt with one SSD that actually failed while installed (not because it was handled improperly) as opposed to... lots and lots of mechanical hard drives.

This seems like a pretty sweet deal to me but I haven't bought any refurbished components off of Newegg before, so any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated before I do something stupid! Thanks.

I would bet it's just a returned drive that some guy didn't want and is being resold.

You could buy a NEW 240GB Kingston V300 for $130.....Just saying (if price/GB is what you're looking for)

Hmm, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of a refurbished SSD, but again you're going to make almost daily backups, right?

No offense to Kingston as I like the company, but I think it's time to let the problem-plagued SF-2281 drives retire to history, I like the idea of using a SF-2281 even less than a refurbed Corsair Neutron.

Philldoe wrote:

I would bet it's just a returned drive that some guy didn't want and is being resold.

If so Newegg usually resells them itself as "Open Box" listings, so this was definitely a manufacturer refurb. Maybe it was something basic like a user bricked it trying to update the frimware and Corsair unbricked it, who knows.

Thanks for the responses!

Kougar wrote:

Hmm, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of a refurbished SSD, but again you're going to make almost daily backups, right?

No offense to Kingston as I like the company, but I think it's time to let the problem-plagued SF-2281 drives retire to history, I like the idea of using a SF-2281 even less than a refurbed Corsair Neutron.

I would only use this for my OS/programs and keep all my data on my existing 640GB WD Black which I back up to an external hard drive. And yeah, I'm no expert but I haven't heard the greatest things about SandForce controllers.

Here we go again....Sandforce controllers had problems until October 2012 when it was fixed for the most part. You'll notice that bad user reviews/complaints have DRASTICALLY diminished since then.

Side note: Sandforce should be prime to be releasing a new controller sometime soon I'd guess.

I rolled the dice on the refurbed OCZ Vertex IIs*, myself. I started off with a 240gb drive, and have since bought a 120gb and a 360gb - all three are working surprisingly well, and reliably. I have OSX and Win7 booting off one drive, my iTunes library on another, and my iPhoto library on the third. I do have a Time Machine disk doing backups of all three, though.

So those three refurbs of that model seem to work okay, as far as I can tell. That said, the vertex 2's use the older SF1200 controller, if I remember, which didn't have as many problems.

*They're a good fit for my 2009 mac pro, which can't mount 2.5" drives without fiddling with adapters, and has SATA II ports anyway.

I have the 'non' GTX version of that drive and it is a great drive.
You will have the manufacturer's warranty if something goes wrong anyways, so you can just do the RMA thru Corsair.
BUY IT!!!

Refurbished at $149 for 240GB? That seems expensive when you can get new 240-256GB ones on sale for less.

Unless you're looking to buy ASAP, wait for a sale on a Seagate 600. There were some very good deals on them during the holiday sales, but I've seen them new for around this refurb price a few times since then I think.

DPete27 wrote:

Here we go again....Sandforce controllers had problems until October 2012 when it was fixed for the most part. You'll notice that bad user reviews/complaints have DRASTICALLY diminished since then.

Side note: Sandforce should be prime to be releasing a new controller sometime soon I'd guess.

Part of the issue is the hardware, there's a reason Intel modified the hardware design and why Intel's SF-2281 drives never suffered from the dropout / controller incompatibility issues. Even with the latest firmware I still have SF-2281 drives that will randomly vanish when used on Marvell ports on X58 and P67 motherboards. That issue was never ever fixed and still persists today. Windows won't tell you when it's host drive vanishes off the system (except for the normal hardware-removed soundbyte) so a lot of the time people blame the OS or something else when it occurs. When the C drive vanishes Windows 7 waits several minutes before it gives up and BSoDs on the user.

I am definitely looking forward to LSI's third-generation SandForce drive. Mushkin already announced products with it so it's launch isn't that far off.