How good of an idea is it to reuse existing HDDs for new PCs as a cost savings measure in light of currently elevated drive cost
The hard drive shortage is obviously an expensive issue for companies with planned hardware upgrades. Assuming you are not going to drop the coin for a SSD, you face a 200+% increase in HDD cost. We had been looking at replacing the PCs in one department, and it's been put off to the point that waiting another 6+ months is not a good option. I found one PC supplier, Puget Systems, that will allow us to send in the hard drives that we already have and install them as primary drives in new PCs. I'm a little conflicted on this, it will take some time and effort to pull out all those HDDs and send them in, but it will still result in significant cost reduction over paying the currently elevated cost for hard drives. Do you think it is worth reusing our existing hard drives?
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As long as the drives are in good condition and are installed properly, sure. Why not? If you've done the math and it's a significant cost savings then it makes sense. You can always replace them with new drives later on if their costs go down to an attractive price.
Seems to me that you are being quite resourceful. You are making the most out of what you already have and that's a smart thing to do. Kudos to you.
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Reusing your current HDDs seems like a good example of "think globally, act locally" in dealing with the consequences of events half way around the world. I think that it is good business and a great idea for Puget Systems to change their policies to allow this in light of the global shortage of HDDs. If the budget is tight, that huge increase in disk cost could really have an impact on the number of machines a business can/will upgrade, and allowing reuse is a great way to attract customers while providing a real benefit to them. In the long term, it may require more work from IT to replace the recycled drives with new drive if desired or necessary, but it seems like a reasonable trade-off. I suppose there will be a slightly higher rate of hard drive failures from the re-used drives, after all, nothing lasts forever. I would go for it though, if I needed to replace multiple PCs in the very near future and couldn't wait for the months it will take for supply to come back up to meet demand.