From: Steve Brooks <steveb at mcs.st-and.ac.uk> > I ordered three new "Enterprise hard drives" this month from a well > known > UK online retailer. The drives arrived as new in their anti-static > packaging. Before using one of the drives in a mission critical hardware > raid I checked the SMART attributes and was amazed at what I saw; see a > few of the attributes listed below There's also the grey area of the "like new", refurbished (by the manufacturer, or even the vendor), etc... especially on ebay. When I did some server support for a big name, I learned that all the (very expensive) repair parts they sold to clients whose equipment was out of warranty were all refurbished parts (from other clients). JD