Refurb
I would buy a refurbished hard drive as soon as I’d buy a refurbished heart valve. I understand people have financial constraints, but what a wacky thing to risk stability over.
After the great XPocalypse rebuilds, I’m finding systems building be interesting mainly only on its periphery: cable management, small form factors, noise reduction, etc. The basics are too easy now, with most of the key hardware sitting on the motherboard and cables refined significantly, especially comparing ribbon cables to SATA cables.