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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

#81

Post by egorfine »

londons_explore wrote: post #35
PaulHoule wrote: post #30

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…

> make special SKUs If your company is set up for it, special SKU's can be really cheap. Some can be software-only changes that even get applied after the product gets into the hands of the users. eg. during the setup process, the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer and figures out which features to enable. There might even be more SKU combinations t…

> the hardware phones home

ah, nothing like Windows-only hardware that is being purchased for Linux usage.

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

#83

Post by jonatron »

angry_moose wrote: post #80
wumms wrote: post #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'.)

Seems to require smartmontools 7.4 (August 2023) which at least Debian isn't including yet (7.3). Wasn't particularly concerned about mine, but thought it'd be fun to poke at.

There's a backport https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/source/smartm...

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

#84

Post by PaulHoule »

bombcar wrote: post #74
jasonjayr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the enclosure kill reliability?

External drives are often designed for a shorter duty cycle and don't dissipate heat as well as they could.

I'm mostly concerned about the power cord getting unplugged if, say, somebody is vacuuming around the area. On top of the usual "whole machine gets turned off" failure mode that happens maybe 10-20x a year in my neighborhood because of power loss there is a "machine is turned on but HDD is powered off" case.

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

#85

Post by linker3000 »

tjoff wrote: post #39
PaulHoule wrote: post #30

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.

2014-2017 I worked for HGST, just as it was being assimilated by WD.

There were definite hardware differences between drive categories back then, and as well as the firmware adjustments, there would be things such as additional accelerometers to detect and help protect against shock (eg: portable drives), higher quality bearings and head/head mechanism differences.

But, or course, that was then and I can't speak for now.

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

#86

Post by IAmGraydon »

tartoran wrote: post #53
IAmGraydon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've spent 5 figures with them over the last few years, and they've always been good to me too. I'm writing this off as a one-time mistake, but I really hope it doesn't become a trend.

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

#87

Post by buildbot »

tartoran wrote: post #53
IAmGraydon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’ve been sorta good, but rumors if things like this have been persistent for a decade. Photographers would get a few copies of a lens, and then return copies ones that were not up spec. B&H would allegedly just relist those as new, not open box. Many manufacturers don’t seal their boxes…

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

#88

Post by monkpit »

PaulHoule wrote: post #84
bombcar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

External drives are often designed for a shorter duty cycle and don't dissipate heat as well as they could.

I'm mostly concerned about the power cord getting unplugged if, say, somebody is vacuuming around the area. On top of the usual "whole machine gets turned off" failure mode that happens maybe 10-20x a year in my neighborhood because of power loss there is a "machine is turned on but HDD is powered off" case.

Wouldn’t a NAS have the same problem, and wouldn’t a battery backup solve it? Genuinely curious

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

#89

Post by toast0 »

jmakov wrote: post #69

Why should one care if they're still under warranty?

For one thing, these drives aren't retail drives, and aren't covered by the retail warranty. Which is unexpected when you bought it in a retail environment. OEM drive warranty starts when originally sold, not whenever you purchased it, labeled as new.

For another, drive warranties don't cover data extraction or downtime, and while pushing the drive 4 years ahead on the bathtub curve is possibly nice for avoiding early failures, it also means you're more likely to suffer from old age failures. It might not even help that much on avoiding early failures, because shipment probably brings its own set of possible failures.

I'm only aware of one open data set of drive failures, from Backblaze, but it shows the bathtub curve pretty well, after a small number of early failures, most drive models settle down for quite some time, and then start to trend up in failures again.

I'd like my 5 years of warrantied use to be the first 5 years of the drive's lifetime. If it doesn't fail in the first couple months, there's a pretty good chance it won't fail during the warranty period, regardless of brand; even if some brands do have a meaningfully higher failure rate than others.

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

#90

Post by throwaway48476 »

vel0city wrote: post #66
PaulHoule wrote: post #30

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…

DMSMR is TERRIBLE for a DVR workload. It writes first to a CMR cache and then flushes to SMR when the drive isn't busy. With a DVR the drive is never not going to be busy. Further the pitiful write speed of SMR is likely not enough for a modern high resolution security camera installation.
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