I found a local shop which sells refurbished and recertified HDDs for a really good price. Some are refurbished, some are recertified, it’s not both at the same time.
Do you have any experience with them? The shop gives a standard one year warranty with them.
Depends on any number of factors. A lot of datacenters will wait for 30-40k hours and drive swap because this is the nexus point at which they will begin to fail.
If you need hard drives for critical data applications, buy new. If you’re just looking for storage, and don’t care if they die within 10k hours because you have appropriate redundancy, then buy refurbished–but to make it worth it you still need to get a pretty great deal. Saving $70 on a refurbished drive simply isn’t worth it.