Here’s the cheapest large capacity hard drive ahead of Amazon Prime Day — 12TB MDD HGST HDD costs less than $90 and has a 5-year warranty

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Buying a refurbished HDD is good for your pocket and the environment

MDD Ultrastar HC520
(Image credit: Future)

I am willing to give refurbished hard disk drives a go ahead of Amazon Prime Day. There, I said it - and fortunately Amazon is selling a 12TB MDD-labelled HC520 refurbished enterprise hard disk drive for just under $89.99, down from $95.88, a saving of more than 72% compared to a new model.

As I found in my investigation earlier this year, MDD is a white label brand owned by Goharddrive - sources stocks of what looks like new but EOL (end of line) hard disk drives as well as refurbished stock.

It is an ex-HGST (now Western Digital) Ultrastar He12 SATA hard drive and carries a full five-year warranty to give prospective buyers total piece of mind.

With a rotational speed of 7200RPM, 256MB cache and designed to run 24/7/365, this is a capable workhorse built for hyperscalers (think Google and Microsoft), data centers and enterprise workloads but will find itself at home in a NAS or an external hard drive.

As for any storage device, I strongly recommend getting the 3-year data recovery plan from Amazon ($14.99) and, if you have space and budget, why not get two of these drives set up in RAID-1 for optimal redundancy with an offsite cloud backup. 

Note that you only get a bare drive only without screws, cables or other accessories; you will need to format the drive in order for it to be detected by the operating system.

Today’s best value for money hard disk drives

MDD HC520 12TB HDD with 5-yr warranty: $95.88 $89.99 at Amazon

MDD HC520 12TB HDD with 5-yr warranty: was $95.88 now $89.99 at Amazon
Yes, it is a refurbished hard disk drive, but it's also quite the bargain thanks to a 5-year warranty, a rock bottom price, a lot of cache and built to withstand heavy workloads.

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Desire Athow
Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.