OK so 5 years is kinda game changer.
Around here, I have only ever seen 1 year (or none at all).

For refurbished drives, the SMART values are reset to “new”.

Would you be satisfied if all your refurb drives live only for the duration of this warranty?

I wouldn’t. Especially as a private buyer (or a small business) I would expect that most of them must live much longer than that.

But after knowing all what is really going on with this refurb business, you have to expect to actually use the warranty, that is, see drives actually fail within the warranty period and then request replacements by warranty claims. Not as an exception, but for a good part of all that you have bought “refurbished”.

fairly cheap refurb hard drive seller

Rant:

As a private person, you should avoid refurbished hard drives like the pest!

Imagine buying a used car where the mileage counter has been reset to zero and the vehicle identification number has been tampered with, so that you cannot find out it’s history. You see that it looks shiny and you know that it has been checked (well, somewhat), but you don’t know that checklist. You even know that nobody knows that checklist.

Seriously, you can only assume the worst about this used hard drive’s real condition (years of usage, highest temperature, number of bad sectors…), and also about this reseller.

Refurbished hard drives can only be bought by data centers (or other mass users), where their failure rate is calculated by statistics, but not by 5 or 20 failed drives.

ISO standardized abbreviations are mandatory for country-domains.

Even Trump cannot change “.us” into “.tr” :-) (but please don’t tell him anyway)