Seagate has teamed up with eBay for a very cool initiative - the Seagate Circularity Program. This program offers customers a direct channel to access and purchase refurbished hard drives to reduce e-waste. You're also looking at massive discounts on high-capacity storage, with 20TB drives available for around $270 and 22TB drives selling for around $310 USD.
"Tens of millions of hard drives are still being shredded yearly, and we need to reduce the use of destructive sanitization methods," said Jason Feist, Seagate's SVP, Products and Markets. "Seagate builds circularity into the drives we bring to market. The collaboration with eBay will increase the amount of data that can be stored on top quality, recertified hard drives."
Currently, the storefront lists several SATA options from Seagate's EXOS line for enterprise and a few consumer-facing Barracuda drives. These are all old-school 3.5-inch platter drives with a SATA 6Gb/second interface - perfect for a NAS setup or backup drive ready to store all your data. 22TB in a single drive for such a low price is impressive.
Overall, this is an excellent move for Seagate and eBay, as the "hard drive shredding" process to dispose of drives is unsustainable, and many rare earth materials cannot be reused. In 2023, Seagate extended the life of over 1 million hard drives through the Seagate Circularity Program, which prevented 553 metric tons of e-waste. This move to make these drives available to customers around the globe through eBay is the latest step in its endeavor to refurbish and recycle hard drives.