It's interesting reading this. Here we switched from WD over to Seagate for couple of years since they totally redeemed themselves. Planing to switch from 4* 8TB WD Reds to 8* 20TB Seagates next month and can't wait to build the system
I've had great luck with factory recertified seagate drives from ServerPartDeals, i wouldn't touch a seller refurbished drive with a 10 foot pole though, they are very different things.
"Refurbished" has lost pretty much all meaning these days. It could just mean they wiped off some grime, it could mean they fixed a board fault. You can't know. I've had ebay sellers pass off used things as refurbed just because "it could have been refurbed at some point" which is just lunacy. Stay away from refurb kit in general unless you don't have a choice in my opinion.
I bought a Seagate Enterprise Capacity v7 ST12000NM0127 from Amazon (Amazon Renewed with 1 year warranty).
I only use it as my parity drive so I don't expect it to hold any data. If it survives a year I might try a second one.
It's not that I don't trust in renewed/refurbed/recert hardware, I don't trust Seagate.
Not with Seagates, but I've recently bought two refurbished 12TB drives to use in a Raid1.
I figured since they're in a RAID and there's gonna be a backup, I can take the risk.