Complete gambling. Unless price was less than 30% of a new one. These days HDD price drop down very fast. About 3 years ago i was paying aprox 50euros per TB, now it went down to about 22 euros. NAS ware hdds a bit more expensive, but … some of them got upto 60 month warranty. So, all is about the price 
I know this analogy isnt on this topic, But its kinda like buying a used car it could appear as nothing is wrong with it but if it has an owner they beat it up, Unless your tore the engine down to the heads and removed the cam shaft, You would never know what it was hiding under everything.
What do you use to get your SMART reports? It will help OP too.
smartctl from smartmontools.
Of course you do know that, he even stated that said WDC Red 3TB have 35k hours on them. I have hard drives as old as 11 years still running fine (have been powered up at least half of that time).
Getting a replacement drive while in warranty is neat but doesn’t help your node and all its lost data. For that reason, I’d recommend using as-cheap-as-possible drives for storj.
I didn’t see he stated he had the drives just asking if we would buy a hard drive with 35k hours, to me that doesn’t mean anything. A used hard drive with 1000 hours could fail you don’t know the EOL for a drive as it’s not 100% that it’s going to last. 35k hours is a lot of time. You also don’t know the environment it was in for 35k hours it could be hard hours or idle hours you don’t really know.
And -as I stated before- a newly bought drive can fail as well.
Also one would assume these drives (as he was offered to buy more than one) have been in a controlled, small-NAS environment (since they’re not Red Pros) and them being offered for such a high price mean these most likely aren’t garbage. They’re just old.
They also aren’t covered under warranty so if they die it’s a node lost and a total loss of a drive.
I personally don’t care about losing a drive since I only use expendable drives and again, i stronly advise against buying expensive new hard drives for storj purposes.
I mean your 100% right no one should be buying expensive hards for storj.
A new drive dead is still a node lost. Just because you’ve got a warranty to replace the drive doesn’t mean your node is saved.
But overall I agree, I don’t get the metrics of buying hardware for this. The only reason I’m doing this is I have an existing zpool with more than enough free space (since I “had” to replace some 45k+ hour old 3TB drives with newer 8TB drives) and no bandwidth metering. Buying any hardware for a node is a gamble on whether or not you will make that money back before you have a critical failure.
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If you can get a drive for 75% off then sure. Most used hard drives I’ve seen are only about 20-30% off the manufacturer price which is not worth the additional risk of losing the purchase price of the drive. In either case (failed new vs failed used) you lose your node data anyway. I’ll take the option that doesn’t also cost me a drive.
It comes down to price really. I bought them new since buying refurbished here almost made no difference and having new drives puts them under warranty so if it fails you can RMA it giving you a couple of years to earn back the investment. Looking for a brighter payout in the long term it is ofc a gamble and only do it with disposable income. Besides that, I use my server for other stuff like backups some other crypto projects so it has it uses as well as other sources of income.
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I buy both new and reconditioned drives depending on the use case. Since my backups have improved vastly over the last few years i generally don’t worry too much about an individual failing drive and my storj node is on hardware raid1 anyway.