I don’t think they really do sales. Might occasionally see 10-20.00 off a drive now and again but they’re generally selling at below everyone else’s margins. I’m quite pleased with my used drives from them, and it’s nice to have a warranty behind a refurbished/recertified harddrive. I have 6x12TB recertified Seagate exos drives in my server from them. I bought them 2 at a time a few weeks apart as to avoid potential failure of multiple drives from the same pull/batch. I built my unraid plex server about 8 months ago and have had no problems. Putting them through seagates testing suite(long and short) when I first bought them returned no bad sectors or errors and the couple of times I’ve run parity tests everything’s been good. I would highly recommend them. That being said despite the quality of the company you should still take normal steps to protect yourself when buying used drives(and new ones) and don’t buy more than acouple at a time to spread out the batches they come from and also keep a couple for hot/cold storage(as well as the standard procedure of also having cold and offsite backups of your critical data.)
Smart data is able to be cleared/reset. When you buy a used drive from reputable companies like serverpartdeals they’ll almost always show up with less than 100 power on hours as they’ve had them recertified by the manufacturer and after doing so reset smart. I don’t think you can do it natively via sata and need to use something like an rs232 to usb adapter with another physical interface. I could be wrong about exactly how it’s done/the hardware needed, but it can be reset.