Storage & Hard Drives
Buy and sell storage and hard drives in Costa Rica.
A drive usually comes up for sale the day its owner outgrows it: a laptop moved to a bigger SSD, a security-camera recorder replaced, a backup disk swapped for one twice the size. New and pre-owned drives both turn up, from portable hard drives and M.2 SSDs for a laptop or a PS5 to the llave maya, as a USB flash drive is called in Costa Rica, and the microSD card in a phone or a dashcam. With storage, the label on the case tells you less than a health check of the drive inside.
Hard drives, SSDs and the llave maya:
a hard drive still stores the most for the money and suits backups and photo archives, but it has spinning platters inside and hates being knocked while it runs. An SSD has no moving parts, starts a computer in seconds and is the upgrade that makes an old laptop feel new. Both come as portable drives that plug in by USB or as internal ones for a machine from laptops or desktops. At the small end sit flash drives, the llave maya, and the SD and microSD cards in cameras, phones and dashcams. Surveillance drives such as WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk are hard drives built to record day and night inside a camera DVR, and they turn up when a house or a shop changes its system.
SATA, NVMe and the slot your computer actually has:
the connector comes before the capacity. A 2.5-inch SATA SSD drops into the bay where an old laptop’s hard drive sat. M.2 drives are small sticks in two kinds that look almost the same, SATA and the much faster NVMe, and a slot built for one may refuse the other. Length matters too: most desktops and many laptops take the long 2280 size, while handheld consoles and some thin laptops need the short 2230. If you are building a tower, the boards are under computer components. A PS5 takes an ordinary NVMe drive in its expansion slot, ideally with a heatsink fitted.
Portable drive prices against the price of a fake:
a new 1 TB portable hard drive costs around ₡50,000 to ₡75,000, and a portable SSD of the same size more than twice that. A genuine 128 GB llave maya from a known brand costs under ₡10,000, so a “2 TB” stick or microSD card offered for that kind of money is a fake. Used, a drive is priced on its health report rather than its age: a hard drive that has started reallocating sectors is worth little whatever its size, while an SSD with most of its rated life left keeps a good part of its value.
Health reports, broken USB sockets and fake capacity:
ask to see the drive in CrystalDiskInfo or the maker’s own tool before paying. On a hard drive, look at power-on hours and at reallocated and pending sectors: any count above zero means the surface is going. On an SSD, read the health percentage and the total data written. Many WD portable drives have the USB socket built into the drive’s own circuit board, so a broken socket means a dead drive rather than a cheap repair. Test any flash drive or card with H2testw or F3, which fill the whole capacity and read it back; fakes are reprogrammed to report a size they do not have and lose everything past the real one. Be wary of high-capacity enterprise drives sold as new at an odd price, since used data-centre Seagate drives have been resold with their usage logs wiped.
The old SSD from a laptop upgrade, wiped and tested:
a quick format leaves files recoverable, so give a hard drive a full format or a wipe tool, and an SSD the secure-erase option in its maker’s software. Screenshot the health report and post it beside a photo of the label. State the capacity, SATA or NVMe, the length of an M.2, and whether the original cable or enclosure comes with it. A drive pulled from a DVR should say so, because it will show a lot of hours. Someone in Santa Ana who moved a laptop to a bigger NVMe usually has the original sitting in a drawer, and the buyer who comes to collect it will want to plug it in and see that health screen, so bring a USB enclosure or a laptop.