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Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

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Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#61
You can read out the FARM logs of Seagate hard drives using

    smartctl -l farm /dev/sd
They're supposed to be "more trustworthy" than the regular SMART stats.

(My two "new" 16TB Exos drives had 0 hours (regular) and ~18k hours (farm) - DOM 04JUN2021 and 07JUN2021. Also, zfs refused to format the drive: 'already formatted as ddf_raid_member'.)

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#62
post #43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"messed up"?

My bet would be on someone in a warehouse mislabelling a pallet or something. Actual malice is a possibility, but it does seem odd to blow up an entire distribution business for some 16 TB HDDs, when HDDs aren't supply constrained at the moment. There were all sorts of shenanigans going on in 2020-21 when supply chains were disrupted (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-... ).

>> It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#63
post #4
post #2

> 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?

> 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…

Toshiba (and Seagate) were mislabeling SMR drives at a premium too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is listing used devices as new "not necessarily bad"?

It's fraud.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's bad if they're lying about it.

I will say I bought two HDDs from Amazon just in November, and they were new. I just validated that as well. I purchased directly from Seagate on Amazon.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#66

Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at…

> WD make special SKUs for security camera use

The workload for a security camera or a DVR is going to be pretty different from a lot of NAS devices or desktop/server use. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is fine for things like a security camera, where you're just going to be writing long files and probably just overwrite eventually. SMR is really bad if you need lots of random sparse file modifications.

I do agree they're probably overboard on SKUs but having an obvious SMR SKU versus non-SMR is pretty important in my book. The fact they mixed in SMR into some regular drives and muddied the waters on which tech is going into which SKU really turned me off WD; I don't think I'll ever buy another one of their hard drives again.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#67
post #3
post #2

> 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?

> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? WDs image was IIRC already not the best when the WD Red SMR thing blew up. I recall feeling smug but forget the background. I think they have a strong claim on title of most scandalous HDD maker.

It really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#68

Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at…

> WD make special SKUs for security camera use The workload for a security camera or a DVR is going to be pretty different from a lot of NAS devices or desktop/server use. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is fine for things like a security camera, where you're just going to be writing long files and probably just overwrite eventually. SMR is really bad if you need lots of random sparse file modifications. I do agree…

Yes

PSA to anyone reading: do not use Purple drives for anything non-DVR/NVR related

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#70

Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at…

> WD make special SKUs for security camera use The workload for a security camera or a DVR is going to be pretty different from a lot of NAS devices or desktop/server use. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is fine for things like a security camera, where you're just going to be writing long files and probably just overwrite eventually. SMR is really bad if you need lots of random sparse file modifications. I do agree…

The odd thing is that SMR may actually improve performance for many mainstream workloads because it turns random access writes to sequential writes. Similar techniques are used in software for write-heavy workloads (e.g. cache helps with reads more than writes, only helps with writes if they are battery backed and it can help a lot of if writes are sequentialized)

This is why WD figured they could get away with it, but it's a shame what it does if you're rebuilding your ZFS array (if they'd actually talked to customers they might have find a lot of people who buy big drives are ZFS heads!)

Myself I had a security camera set up to monitor my "cat room" last summer when I was trying to gentle a feral cat, I am thinking of pointing it at the driveway and monitoring it with ZoneMinder. ZoneMinder wants its own volume to write to, I am thinking of putting in a spare Intel SSD (superior, though review sites never told you) for that purpose, it's not like I need to store terabytes worth of video from it.

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