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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

#111

Post by quesera »

JAlexoid wrote: post #58
nbernard wrote: post #17

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.

You should not be downvoted. I think people are misunderstanding your comment.

But I am confused about another part.

Why would you prefer (clearly marked) "refurbished" HDDs for 20% less than new, if you expect them to last 5 years? If a new HDD would last 6+ years, you're better off buying new, right?

I guess I can see electing to buy into the lower part of the bathtub curve, but I have a difficult time trusting that "refurb" doesn't reset your timeline on the curve (e.g. by replacing the PCB outside the platter box).

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

#112

Post by Hamuko »

Cerium wrote: post #19
Hamuko wrote: post #7

I've recently been browsing Amazon.de listings for a new HDD and I'm pretty sure I saw someone complain about their supposedly new Seagate EXOS already having hours on it. I also saw listings for SATA drives where the reviews were complaining about receiving SAS drives and complaints about bare HDDs being shipped rattling around in large cardboard boxes. I think the only conclusion I reached was that I should buy my…

Why buy any drives from Amazon? I always buy from a specialty dealer. Where I am that's usually B&H.

Amazon has usually always been the cheapest option, especially compared to a specialty dealer. Costs add up when you're buying many drives.

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

#113

Post by hamandcheese »

bityard wrote: post #109
rycomb wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

So I'm going to do something I don't normally do and defend Amazon only a little bit... What likely happened was that somebody had an old and broken Rode mic and decided to scam Amazon. They purchased a new one, put the old one in the new packaging, and sent it in as a return with "ordered by mistake" or some other reason that doesn't indicate a broken or faulty item. Amazon warehouse employees certainly don't (and n…

There is a large spectrum of options between the extremes of "destroy all returns" and "resell returns as new without any checks".

For example: only sell returns as "open box". For some items, I'd be happy to chance an open box, for other items, not so much.

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

#114

Post by PaulHoule »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #72
tjoff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC the main difference for WD was how it reacts to errors. Consumer drives will spend minutes to retry rw operations. Surveillance drives will mostly ignore errors as it's more important to have some footage than none. And NAS drives will immediately report the errors.

See http://danluu.com/filesystem-errors/ you are damned if you do and damned if you don't

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

#115

Post by voytec »

gpvos wrote: post #107
efitz wrote: post #94

This is specifically illegal in the US[1] (and probably everywhere). If this were in the US then it would be prudent for the buyer to contact the FTC[2] and their local state AG. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/20.1 [2] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

Which is why the article calls it fraud in the first line of the text.

Not to defend Seagate, but also:

> Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.

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

#116

Post by leidenfrost »

jonatron wrote: post #83
angry_moose wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Having to install a backport of a version released one and half years ago is wild.

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

#117

Post by PaulHoule »

londons_explore wrote: post #108
PaulHoule wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was impressed in the 1980s when I heard about how 390 mainframes had a modem in them so IBM could phone in orders to unlock extra capacity if the customer needed it for a short time. Today I think that's a sign to sell the stock of the company involved. It costs money to build hardware that is locked out, either the customer pays for it or the stockholders of the vendor pay for it, if the customer doesn't get to us…

When you look deep enough, nearly all 'tech' products costs are IP. For IP, it costs nothing to include a feature locked out. Even real hardware is usually like this. An expensive camera is probably only expensive because it had more R&D go into it and all of its components. The actual sand to make the silicon chips didn't cost any extra. Unfortunately, the way todays capitalist society works, it's pretty hard to say…

The sensors are physically very different in the latest Sony α7, α7R (high resolution) and α7S (high sensitivity) cameras.

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

#118

Post by toomuchtodo »

LeFantome wrote: post #106
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…

Surveillance represents a pretty big market though and the OEMs are not getting them from Best Buy. Most storage workloads read more than they write. Surveillance is the opposite. You are always writing. Much ( maybe almost all ) of what you write is never used and is simply overwritten again.

Similar workload for high energy physics, think CMS or ATLAS detectors at the LHC.

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

#119

Post by busterarm »

bluGill wrote: post #28
felindev wrote: 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?

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)

When I built my 48TB NAS a few years back I went with Toshiba MG Helium-sealed drives because of so many bad experiences with the remaining alternatives.

It was a revelation. These drives have been so good to me.

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

#120

Post by smegsicle »

duskwuff wrote: post #97
lmpdev wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is there something that makes them unsuitable for other workloads?

write amplification. random writes can take, what twice as long?

wear leveling could mitigate, but the choices are somewhat limited:

NILFS seems to make assumptions based on SSDs, blowing up during its cleaning operation

btrfs or bcachefs could help, but who knows whats going on with those

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