Storage & Hard Drives
Buy and sell hard drives and SSDs in Guatemala.
Plenty of hard drives in Guatemala never sit inside a computer: they spin day and night in the recorder behind a home or shop camera system. Next to those WD Purple and SkyHawk surveillance disks are the SATA SSDs that bring a tired laptop back to life, M.2 NVMe drives for newer machines, portable disks from Seagate, WD and ADATA for backups, and USB sticks and memory cards. Drives change hands new and pre-owned, and what sets a used one’s worth is what you cannot see from outside: the hours it has run, the data written to it and whether it has ever been dropped.
The slot in your laptop or tower picks the drive:
a 2.5-inch SATA SSD drops into the bay where a laptop’s old hard drive sat, and it is the cheapest way to make a slow machine pleasant again, worth trying before you replace it from laptops. Newer laptops and desktops take M.2 drives instead, and there the label matters: NVMe is several times faster than SATA, but some older M.2 slots only accept the SATA kind, so check the manual before you buy. Spinning hard drives are slower and still the cheap way to keep terabytes of photos, video and backups, in the 3.5-inch size for a tower and 2.5-inch for laptops and portable cases. Most people end up with both: an SSD for Windows, a hard drive for the rest. Complete towers are in desktops and loose motherboards in computer components.
Surveillance disks that come out of camera recorders:
WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk drives are built to write video around the clock, and they are what the DVR and NVR recorders behind home and shop cameras are normally fitted with. Before buying one for your recorder, check the largest disk its bays accept, because a bigger drive may simply not be recognised; the recorders themselves are in security and surveillance. A recorder formats the disk its own way, so the footage will not open on a PC, and a drive moved to a computer has to be formatted again. A used one works as bulk storage in a desktop, but a disk that recorded nonstop has already run more hours than most home PC drives ever reach, and its price should say so.
An SSD’s speed against a portable disk’s space:
new, a 1TB SSD runs from about Q1,000 for a SATA drive to around Q1,800 for a fast NVMe one, and the same money buys a portable hard drive with two to four times the room. A used SSD is worth what its health reading says, because flash wears with the data written to it, not with age: one with most of its rated life left, and a screenshot to prove it, can ask close to the new price. A used portable hard drive without a test is a gamble, because a fall that left no mark on the case can still have damaged the heads.
Power-on hours and the wiped counter on a “new” disk:
ask for the drive’s SMART readout before you travel. On a hard drive, look at power-on hours and at reallocated and pending sectors: anything above zero there is a disk that has started to fail. On an SSD, look at the percentage of life left and the total data written. In person, listen for clicking, or for a drive that spins up, stops and starts again. Many slim portables have the USB socket soldered straight onto the drive’s own board, so wiggle the cable while it copies; a loose socket there is not a cheap fix. A big disk offered as new at a price that does not add up deserves a second look, because ex-data-centre drives with their hour counters wiped have been passed off that way. Check the serial on the maker’s website and buy those only sealed.
Before a drive with your photos or camera footage changes hands:
wipe it, because a quick format leaves files a stranger can recover. Run a full format on a hard drive, the manufacturer’s erase tool on an SSD and the recorder’s own format option on a surveillance disk. In the listing, give the capacity, interface and size exactly, add a screenshot of the health reading with the hours showing, and say whether it came out of a laptop, a NAS or a DVR. Include the case and cable with a portable. Someone coming in from Chimaltenango or Puerto Barrios wants to see it work, so bring a laptop and a USB-to-SATA adapter and let them read the drive’s health on the spot.