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Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

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Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#121
post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

The laptop batteries tend to go bad(either just stop working or expand and become a major fire hazard) after a year or two as they are not built to be fully charged for years on end. I tried doing it twice and that is what happened both times.

Would not recommend; if you want a UPS just buy one, the small ones are not that expensive, like 70 USD.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#122

Reading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-ri…

Meanwhile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#123

Hello, author here! It's a nice surprise to notice my own post here, but the timing is unfortunate as I'm shuffling things around on my home server and will accidentally/intentionally take it offline for a bit. Here's a Wayback Machine copy of the page when that does happen: https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.e...

Have you considered 2nd hard enterprise SSDs?

Sometimes larger sized models of those (15TB+) can be found with very good pricing. :)

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#124
anecdote: I've had very bad experience with these OS white label drives, even when marked as new. I've had much better luck shucking USB drives.

4+ years ago I bought 20 "new" (can't validate), "seagate manufactured" (can't validate) "OS" SAS drives, and 2 started throwing errors in truenas quickly (sadly after I had the ability to return them). Had another 20 WD and Segate drives I shucked at the same time (was going into 3 12x SAS/SATA machines and 1 4x SATA NAS). The NAS got sidelined as had to use the SATA drives were meant for and no longer trusted the SAS drives so wanted to keep the 2 extra drives as backup. Which was a good idea, as over the next 4 years another 2 of SAS drives started throwing similar errors.

so 20% of the white label drives didn't really last, while 100% of the shucked drives have. What was even worse, the firmware on the "OS" drives was crap, while it "technically" had smart data, it didn't provide any stats, just passed/not passed. (main lesson learned from this, don't accept

Another anecdote: For a long time I wasn't sure what to do with the SAS drives as in the past I used unused drives for this for cold offline storage, but SAS docks were very expensive ($200+). Recently it seems they have come down in price to under $50 so I bought and was able to fill the drives up (albeit very slowly, it seems they did have problems (was only getting 10-20MB/s), but at least I was able to validate their contents a few times after that, a bit less slow (80MB/s).

Aside: 3 weeks ago I had multiple power outages that I thought created problems in one of the shucked drives (was getting uncorrectable reads, though ZFS handled it ok) and a smart long test show pending sectors. But after force writing all the pending sectors with hdparm, none of the sectors were reallocated. I now think it just had bad partial writes when the power outage hit, so the sectors literally had bad data as the error correcting code didn't match up, also explains why they were all in blocks of 8), and multiple smart long tests later and "fingers crossed", everything seems fine.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#125
post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

The laptop batteries tend to go bad(either just stop working or expand and become a major fire hazard) after a year or two as they are not built to be fully charged for years on end. I tried doing it twice and that is what happened both times. Would not recommend; if you want a UPS just buy one, the small ones are not that expensive, like 70 USD.

On my ThinkPad T430, I have a weekly full discharge cycle set up using "tlp recalibrate BAT0", it helps avoid that issue and helps confirm that the battery is still functional.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#126

Reading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-ri…

I'm pretty sure whatever that community experienced is more anecdotal that statistically provable...

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#127
post #104
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the inter…

These shucked USB adapters from WD Elements external drives are pretty reliable, from my experience. They kinda have to be, since otherwise it would affect the reputation of WD's external drives as a whole. Obviously, direct SATA is still better if possible, but if not, these are probably the next best thing.

Those pesky WD bridges usually support USB Bulk Storage only but not UASP, resulting in worse performance and higher CPU usage.

Also HDD power management is often complicated by the bridge chip sometimes intervening.

Not recommended for long-term use.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#128

Reading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-ri…

Meanwhile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

this vid is like a xkcd on its own for hard drives

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#129
post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

i had a m.2 to pci-e for a sata controller. worked fine but the ups thing is a bit non workable as the drives are not powered by the laptop

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#130
post #112

Reading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-ri…

Yes. If you need this you are far better off buying SSDs than wasting time on these silly ideas.

How much would 18TB of SSDs cost compared to 18TB of HDDs? Probably a big reason why many go for HDDs still today.
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