Depends. Are we taking refurbished, or returned sales?
Refurbished is going to have to be hella cheap to consider it for a highly redundant storage of unimportant things maybe raid 10 backup storage it something.
Returned sales are mostly still as good a new and returned for various unrelated reasons. As long as I get full warranty and right to return as if it was brand new, i don’t mind.
I run used disks with tens of thousands of power on hours. Yes the risk of each disk dying is higher but only marginally and the cost is dramatically lower. To avoid data loss when they die, I have functioning backups. This system is working really well for me.
First thing to do is check SMART data to see if there are any fails. Then looking at usage hours, spin ups, pre-fails / old-age to get a general idea how worn the drive is and for how long you could make use of it depending on risk acceptance.
If there are already several clusters relocated and multiple spin up fails, I’d probably return the drive.
Apart from all the reliability stuff: I’d check the content of the drive (with a safe machine) - if it wasn’t wiped you might want to notify the previous owner, so she can change her passwords or notify customers about the leak (in compliance to local regulations) etc. - even if you don’t exploit that data, the merchants/dealers in the chain might already have.
My guess would be that it’s stored in some kind of non-volatile memory, i.e. EEPROM. Not sure if anyone ever tried that, but with the dedication of some hardware hackers that seems at least feasible. Reverse engineering / overriding the HDD’s firmware would be another approach to return fake or manipulated values.
I haven’t seen something like that in the wild so far. What I have seen are manipulated USB sticks though: advertising the wrong size (could be tested with h2testw) or worse.
I’ve bought used / refurbished (not sure which) with erased smart data. It being all zeros was a clear sign of erased / tampered info. After running badblocks some relocated sectors showed up.
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