I just tested my pair of Seagate drives. Their "Power-on Hours" are the same between SMART and FARM logs (via smartctl).
Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
51–60 of 227 posts
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the only ones laughing about that. AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite. > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? If it isn't Seagate, it's someone else. Wasn't Western Digital caught s…
Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
>Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
Source? Aside from bad models (eg. ST3000DM001), their failure rates are comparable to other vendors, hovering around the low single digit percentage points.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-...
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again. Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority…
I've had this experience with several big retailers recently. One is B&H, who sold me a "new" Focusrite 18i20 4th Gen last month which had clearly been opened, cosmetically damaged, and returned. I've also had this experience many times with Sweetwater (musical instruments retailer). There used to be a sales rep there who would participate in a particular musician's forum that I was a member of and would get us a sli…
I'm really surprised B&H has turned to this, they've been a very good retailer in my experience.
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#54> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?
there are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)
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Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#55One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality. I've seen similar things happening more frequently in different markets, not just tech. If you notice something like it, the best way to deal with it imo is ask for your money back, make it public if possible and boycott the business from then on. Customers need to penalize such behavior as much…
In this case practically all german retailers are affected.
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#56> The time used ranges from 15,000 to 36,000 hours except for two 4TB HDDs, which were both used for about 50,000 hours
20000 hours is more than 24 months. 50000 is five and half years.
Someone is probably selling drives that are being retired from datacenters.
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the "larger NAS" drives have better shock absorption, which is a hardware thing. No matter what, it's a reason why you can't get any large capacity drive at Best Buy. They'd have room for one SKU but can't afford to stock an Amazonian variety of unusual types. I feel the whole industry has gone in a bad direction. My workstation has a modern case that doesn't really have a lot of room in it for HDDs, so I add…
>No matter what, it's a reason why you can't get any large capacity drive at Best Buy. Is 24TB big enough for you? https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-24tb-external-usb-...
Internal, not external. (Sure, people are known to shuck the drive out of the reliability-killing enclosure)
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#58Article is about reports from German customers (this is clear in the orignal title, but not the current HN title), and mostly with 16TB Exos HDDs. FWIW, I just bought a bunch of Seagate HDDs (US vendor) and my warranty periods line up with the DOMs on the packaging. You can check your warranty period/status at: https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements
Thanks! I just checked an 10TB Ironwolf bought to a German seller through Amazon.fr less than two months ago: Its warranty expires in a few days... :(
From what I see, the majority of HDDs on Amazon are now used devices.
Which isn't necessarily bad... HDDs have a much longer lifespan than SSDs. I expect my used HDDs to last at least 5years in my RAID5 setup.
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
This reminds me that I haven't seen a drive report from Backblaze in a while posted here.
There's one per quarter. Last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122740
Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
#60> after a quick look at the SMART stats, everything appeared normal. Later, though, the reader did a more thorough Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) test and discovered [that it wasn't]
I had a look at how to run these FARM tests, and it seems I want smartctl 7.4 (which is too new for Debian stable but available in backports).