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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

#131

Post by Hizonner »

Hamuko wrote: post #112
Cerium wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whenever I've looked, prices at B&H, or Newegg sold by Newegg, are usually within a few dollars of prices from any Amazon sellers that don't look obviously skeezy. It's a few dollars lower as often as it's a few dollars higher.

Except, of course, for the dramatically cheaper drives you find from Amazon... which are definitely going to be used, defective, dropped, or fake. If you get them at all.

They all seem to be selling them for very close to what they pay Seagate (or WD or whoever) for them, and the competition between manufacturers probably means there's not a whole lot of room for that price to vary. And I think everything gets repriced pretty frequently whenever anybody's costs move. You can see the prices change at the same time at different sellers.

The reason I bought drives from Amazon was that I'd had Newegg delay delivery of an accepted order, and then cancel it for "lack of stock". A few days later Newegg had the same drives listed at a higher price. I assume that what they really meant was "lack of stock of the drives we bought cheaply".

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

#132

Post by Hamuko »

Hizonner wrote: post #131
Hamuko wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Whenever I've looked, prices at B&H, or Newegg sold by Newegg, are usually within a few dollars of prices from any Amazon sellers that don't look obviously skeezy. It's a few dollars lower as often as it's a few dollars higher. Except, of course, for the dramatically cheaper drives you find from Amazon... which are definitely going to be used, defective, dropped, or fake. If you get them at all. They all seem to be s…

Not all of us live in countries with B&H, Newegg, etc.

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

#133

Post by autoexec »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #8

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…

One example of this is Breyers ice cream. They are the oldest ice cream company in the US, had a great reputation, and heavily marketed that they only used high quality all natural ingredients until they got bought up by Unilever who stuffed it full of artificial ingredients and fillers to the point where they could no longer legally call their product "ice cream" and had to relabel their products as "frozen dairy dessert". You'd think that doing that would have tanked the company, but they're still one of the top brands globally and in the US. Unilever took advantage of a company's reputation for quality, quietly filled the product with shit, and made a fortune because people continue to eat it up. There are plenty of competitors making actual ice cream too.

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

#134

Post by Merrill »

PaulHoule wrote: post #49
londons_explore wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

In an early minicomputer, the $500 power fail interrupt feature was field installed by clipping a jumper.

There were mainframe line printers that implemented a different lines per minute feature depending on which gear set was installed.

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

#135

Post by Lammy »

leidenfrost wrote: post #116
jonatron wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's really not a lot of time in the scheme of things.

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

#136

Post by alias_neo »

marxisttemp wrote: post #77
alias_neo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I'm thinking of switching my NAS to solid-state 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.

My NAS isn't really a NAS, it's a fairly hefty server with a Ryzen 9 on an ASRock Rack board in a CS381 case with 8 hot-swap bays occupied with SAS and SATA HDDs as well as 2 nvme drives in the board itself. It's a server doing server things and one of those things happens to be roleplaying as a NAS.

It runs a bunch of VMs with their primary drives on the HDDs but most of the VMs are idle most of the time unless I'm working on something, like deploying to the Kubernetes clusters so it's just Ubuntu, Debian, whatever else I'm running doing it's thing with logs etc.

Some of the drives are used for storage in the traditional NAS sense so they get hit for backups nightly.

The HDDs keep failing on a pretty regular cycle every few years so switching them to SATA SSDs might be an idea. I only used the "server" part of it once a month or so when I want to test some deployment etc, the only reason it's on 24/7 is because of its NAS usage.

I use mostly Z1 mirrors at the moment, 4 pairs of drives, as for SSDs, I'm yet to have a single one fail in any machine I own or have owned since SSDs were first a think. I tend to stick to good-brand drives such as Samsung EVO Pros or if I'm trying to save a bunch of cash and the data isn't I buy Crucial.

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

#137

Post by scottlamb »

buran77 wrote: post #124
smegsicle wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

WD mixed both CMR and SMR for the WD Purple, an a few other models too. The CMR wouldn't see any write amplification. But the SMR will suffer from all of the usual SMR limitations. Most importantly that it's only really useful with sequential writes, on top of the write amplification. Actually the Purple only has one distinguishing characteristic. An ATA command to skip bad sectors instead of trying to read/write rep…

> WD mixed both CMR and SMR for the WD Purple, an a few other models too.

Could you point me at an example of a SMR-based WD Purple drive? Is this just a historical thing? As mentioned in my other comment, the spec sheets [1] say all (current) drives are CMR.

> 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.

I'd also be interested to see a reference / details for this.

[1] https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief... https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief...

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

#138

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet

The huge issue here is that hard drive datasheets have gotten very inaccurate.

They're not wrong, per se, but they tend to make very weak promises that ruin the ability to compare. Like if every car said "more than 10 miles per gallon".

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

#139

Post by quesera »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #126
JAlexoid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The majority of everything on Amazon seems used. I stopped buying electronics from them (unless it's something cheap I don't care too much about) and I buy directly from manufacturers or walk into Best Buy and buy it new. Hard drives, memory sticks, GPUs, monitors/TVs, and headphones from Amazon are a hard NO from me. The chances of them being used or outright counterfeit is ridiculously high now. Pretty much everyth…

I wish I had a better understanding of the bimodal distribution of customer satisfaction with Amazon.

I know high volume customers who have 99.5% success with Amazon orders, and others who would say "pretty much everything I buy is used or fake".

First assumption is that it boils down to differences in product types. Certainly some types attract more seller fraud. But I wonder if there's also a region or distribution center variability, like the East Cupcake Regional warehouse does a crappy job of inspecting returns. Or the delivery manager in West Cupcake hires crappy drivers.

Amazon must do this analysis internally. I'd love to understand it better.

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

#140

Post by marcusb »

I had enough problems with new Seagate Exos drives (actually new, not remanufactured or whatever these folks ended up with,) that I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS. They're cheaper, and so far, reliable enough. I wrote a little more about my rationale[0], but, basically:

1. With RAID-6, I can take two drive failures, and it is quicker to get a replacement off Amazon than wait for an OEM to RMA a drive under warranty

2. The Ultrastars have been pretty reliable in Backblaze's published data

3. The reseller I went through seems reliable enough

4. There's at least some evidence these "remanufactured" drives are coming from the OEMs, and based on past experience working at a few hardware manufacturers, the no trouble found rate for RMA'd hardware is typically quite high - to the point there is likely to be nothing wrong with a product that has been returned under warranty.

I guess a side benefit of this is at least I know I'm buying used drives.

0 - https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech...

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