121–130 of 227 posts
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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.
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…
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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
Actually the Purple only has one distinguishing characteristic. An ATA command to skip bad sectors instead of trying to read/write repeatedly. This is great for an NVR but it's not mandatory to use.
At one point I made it a mission to proactively correct the warranty records for the dozen or so Seagate drives I had in operation that had incorrect warranty terms showing in the RMA portal. Every day I’d contact them, give them my case number, and the customer service rep would “pull up the record” but still need me to list all the serial numbers again. Every couple tries, a few of the serials would get their warranties fixed. Towards the end they claimed that one of the drives was already returned as failed and destroyed by Seagate, and another one didn’t even exist. They made me literally pull the drives out of live systems and send them photos, and when I did, they continued with more excuses to not fix the warranty terms in the RMA portal. But I just tried again each day with a new rep, some of whom would fix some of the remaining drives, and eventually each drive got its warranty fixed.
Another time, they sent me a failed drive as a replacement, so I had to RMA my RMA. They cross-shipped me a replacement, but then lost my return in their own depot and tried telling me they never got it and I needed to either get it delivered or pay them for it.
Fuck Seagate.
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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.
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I got a couple of outright counterfeit 12TB Ironwolf drives from "AlamCh Trading Inc" on Amazon a couple of months ago. Slipped up and didn't notice that I was buying from an obviously suspicious seller. They did refund them... after being appropriately threatened.
Curiously, how did you identify them as counterfeit? (maybe they were much quieter than normal)
The real drives have numbered "anti-counterfeit" labels. Each label has a QR code that takes you to a Seagate site, which takes label number X, and tells you that they put that label on drive serial number Y. The fake drives had labels that looked the same, but took you to a generic Seagate support page, nothing specific to anti-counterfeiting. If you went to the real anti-counterfeiting site and entered the numbers from the fake labels, they came up as non-hits.
Oh, and on edit, since naming names should go both ways: the "other source" was B&H, which is about as reputable as it's possible to get.
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Wouldn’t a NAS have the same problem, and wouldn’t a battery backup solve it? Genuinely curious
Personally I don't trust a NAS as far as I can throw it, or rather I'd use one the way I use Amazon S3. My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly. If I want to move files to or from it I use SFTP. If I want to back files up to it I use rsync. I have Lightroom running pretty good on an external HDD, no way I'd take my chances running it on a NAS.
> My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly.
This sure sounds like a NAS.
I pretty much only buy them from Newegg anymore if I have to buy retail and even then my return rate for receiving DOA drives is nearly 50%.
Where I don't have this problem is buying via my server vendor contract w/ our Dell reseller. Buying enterprise drives through enterprise sales channels they always arrive new.
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…
In theory you're right, SMR is not necessarily a problem for NVRs if well-implemented. However, I had poor luck running my own NVR software on drive-managed SMR. (The cheap kind that doesn't support zoned storage APIs, just pretends to be a standard drive.) 2/2 drives failed within a year, despite staying within the rated workload. Admittedly it's a small sample, but it soured me on drive-managed SMR. I suspect NVR software written to use host-managed SMR or hybrid SMR might have better luck, but AFAICT those drives are only sold to enterprises.
...and AFAICT, the WD Purple Surveillance Hard Drive and WD Purple Pro Smart Video Hard Drive lines do not use SMR. Looking at the current highest-capacity drives for both lines:
* The WD Purple Surveillance Hard Drive, 8TB (WD11PURZ) is specced at 180TB/yr.
* The WD Purple Pro Smart Video Hard Drive, 24TB (WD240PURP) is specced at 550TB/yr.
...vs something like 55 TB/yr that I've seen for SMR drives.
https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-d... also says that WD11PURZ is CMR. No listing for WD240PURP.
edit: oh, and the spec sheets for both lines explicitly say all drives use CMR. https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief... https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief...