Bargain hardware... reliable or not

Hello

i am looking for a MacBook Pro mid 2009 logic board, and came across this website called Bargain hardware while getting side tracked and started to look for hard drive enclosures (I put a topic on toms hardware) anyway they have refurbished hard drives being sold on the cheap. is this okay to buy (in future) or not okay?

I am looking to connect my macbook Pro hard drive to my gaming pc so I can access some things like my old password. Is this possible fo me to boot up my macOS hard drive and use the macOS?
 

MaddMann

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Ok, it seems there are 2 questions here. I will do my best to help you.
First, are refurbished harddrives ok. The answer to that depends on what you plan to put on them and what about them was refurbished. Generally, if I purchase refurbished HDD I purchase them 2 at a time and run them in a RAID 1 if I am trying to conserve data, or Raid 0 if I want speed and ok with with risk of failure (which is more often than not anymore due to cloud saves being a regular option)

Second, navigating mac OS files on a Windows PC (this is an assumption that your gaming PC is running windows). I have helped several friends recover their data from old mac computers using HFSExplorer. How to Geek has an excellent article for using it

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MaddMann

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Hi gaogia... i am answering you just from a consumer point of view , if you are in the unfortunate position that the refurbished drives fail your consumer rights are stronger than if the item was brand new.

New anything can fail because they have never been used but refurbished computers or components must work when resold. The key phrase to quote for a refund if they go faulty is " not fit for purpose "

MJS is completely correct in this regard, the thing to look out for though is the warranty duration, my concentration is more about the reliability of data. For refurbished items you will likely see something along the lines of a 90 day warranty, where new items can have between 1-4 year warranties. Having worked for a shitty refurb company before, I am always warry about relying on them. I worked at a little video game shop that would buy broken consoles. To quote the owner who hired me to fix all these different systems, "It only has to work for 60 days, so don't put too much effort into each system." What this ended up meaning, was that if it took me more than 20 minutes or $10 to fix, just throw it away. I generally just warned my friends away from purchasing "refubished" from that store. While many of the fixes I had to do were very simple and did entirely fix the problem, others were pretty iffy. The repairs that I was not terribly confident on were generally ones that had to do with sensors or lasers. For sensors I would generally just clean the sensor, for lasers you just turn up the power, which meant it would die again, probably within a year.

TLDR; Refurbished can be great, just don't put 100% confidence in it.
 
Hi gaogia... i am answering you just from a consumer point of view , if you are in the unfortunate position that the refurbished drives fail your consumer rights are stronger than if the item was brand new.

New anything can fail because they have never been used but refurbished computers or components must work when resold. The key phrase to quote for a refund if they go faulty is " not fit for purpose "

First, thing, calling me gaogia is actually really insulting I hope you didn't mean it that way not knowing how my username/real name means etc. more than likely a type error?

Anyway back on topic, yeah, I am looking to try and get my macbook pro running one again, its an older model, 2009 and can't buy a new logic board, I can only find refurbished ones, searching for them I found this website, I would go without than buy refurbished, I have only once brought something second hand (well 2 things, my car) which was my AV receiver, which was what I really wanted then they discontinued it when I saved all the money for it, Couldn't find one anywhere, eventually I found one, where they man in the city I live brought the same one I wanted (about 3 months before) but he got a better one for his birthday and was selling the one I wanted really cheaply. I ended up buying with the money I had saved, an Airport Extreme, and an Airport Express with more money left over.

I am autistic, and disabled where my spinal cord is compressed and my ankle is shattered (both can't be fixed) I am in a lot of pain, and take a lot of morphine daily, and it means I can't really sit at a desk and play games, which I am only playing games I know at the moment but there are so many I want to play, which is why I built my PC, I know its not the best spec, but it should be good enough for me.

I think I have enough hard drives at the moment, but where is the best place hard drives to get when or If I need more? The cloud was mentioned and how can I put my data, pics etc on the cloud as a third backup?

I am sorry for the long post, but how do I know from a good hardware component to a bad one, I am thinking Macbook pro fixes here. Would I be wiser to find someone who can fix my board or buy a "working" refurbished?
 
Feb 8, 2021
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About the refurbished Hard disk I only bought one only one time for one main reason in my case it was a Seagate HDD made by Seagate and refurbished by Seagate.

If you find one refurbished by a firm that is not the maker, I would not buy it.

For the cloud you just need to choose a provider and create an account and then you just follow the instruction to upload it.

As an example if you have a google account you can save up to 15Gb of files on google drive for free, if you need more space then you need to pay but it is not the only cloud service available.

Cheers
 
hello

the Mac drives are formatted different to windows and windows won’t read the files.

i don’t need hard drive space at the moment, may do if I split windows and Linux from same hard drive, but not in a hurry for that. i just found the site looking for my MacBook Pro logic board.

jcgames do you have picture?
 

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