71–80 of 227 posts
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>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)
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…
Or the only difference of those specialized SKUs is a single parameter in the firmware making a different tradeoff for, lets say, random seek vs. sustained sequential reads/writes. A different cache strategy. Or whatever. Being able to charge $100 more for that is very worthwhile.
Why should one care if they're still under warranty?
Furthermore, for the customer, "the food might cost more than the freezer." Meaning, the work of changing the drive, restoring from backup, ect, ect, might cost more than the drive. Thus, it's "worth it" to expect a new drive.
"The food might cost more than the freezer." IE, a few years ago I bought a chest freezer for $150, and put $500 worth of food in the freezer. If the freezer died prematurely, I'm out more than the value of the freezer due to lost food. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer will ship me a new freezer for free.
Edit 2: I have a NAS in my basement, with drives paired in RAID. If a drive dies under warranty, will it be replaced with an identical drive? If the replacement is "equal or better," I'll have to pay to replace the other drive, because RAID drives should be identical. Likewise, replacing the drive is "time" to me: The time to contact the company, the time to open up the NAS, the time to wait for the new drive to be restored, the time to replace the other drive...
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Internal, not external. (Sure, people are known to shuck the drive out of the reliability-killing enclosure)
How does the enclosure kill reliability?
> 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.
One 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…
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…
Dealing with the cost of returns is a major part of a modern retailer, and Amazon has got to be through the roof with the numbers they receive.
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> 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…
> Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising WD switched their (larger; over 4TB iirc) WD Red drives from CMR to SMR without changing the model number at all, this is why I switched to buying Seagate. The SMR problem became particularly apparent when NAS users (like myself) switched out a failed drive with one of the same model in their ZFS pools, and res…
My NAS is mostly read-only and I’m very keen to do this. My understanding is that since SSDs are still readable when they fail, you don’t need the same degree of RAID parity to avoid data loss.
> 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.
I would suspect CHIA miners. CHIA miners have long been known to reset SMART parameters for resale:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436558
As that (absurd) project
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> 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, b…
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'.)
Wasn't particularly concerned about mine, but thought it'd be fun to poke at.