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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

#141

Post by mrguyorama »

danparsonson wrote: post #34
bluGill wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.

>My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.

This is, emphatically, not a good data point. You need thousands of drives running for years under normal loads to actually tease out outlier failure rates in a drive SKU. You need to literally do what Backblaze does.

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

#142

Post by Dylan16807 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #79
PaulHoule wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odd thing is that SMR may actually improve performance for many mainstream workloads because it turns random access writes to sequential writes. Similar techniques are used in software for write-heavy workloads (e.g. cache helps with reads more than writes, only helps with writes if they are battery backed and it can help a lot of if writes are sequentialized) This is why WD figured they could get away with it, b…

There was an early SMR talk by a WD (IIRC) engineer to a crowd of ZFS devs and sysadmins, and the engineer thought it should fit well because he misheard the default record size being 128MB rather than the actual 128kB, so thought it one record would fit one zone.

That seems like a pretty big mistake, are you sure that's real?

ZFS has a lot of genuine potential to work well with SMR drives, but that potential depends on glue code that nobody has written yet.

I think BTRFS is halfway there?

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

#143

Post by sekh60 »

quesera wrote: post #111
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.

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 tha…

For my last two Exos drives (22TB each) I decided to try refurbs. I have them in my homelab's ceph cluster. I figured I'd try them due to cost. They were two thirds the cost of a new drive, so I figure I can do a 3 for the price of 2 sort of thing and have more redundancy that way. That said, ceph with replica count 3 (min_size 2), so my data is pretty protected. Important stuff is backed up anyway. So far the older one has been running for about 4 months and the newer about 2 months, no SMART errors yet.

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

#144

Post by dml2135 »

alias_neo wrote: post #48
dml2135 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its actually 8TB and under that WD switched to SMR. All their drives over 8TB are CMR, last I heard.

You're probably right, I forget which way around it was, but if I was to take an educated guess, I'd say that SMR on the lower capacity models lets them cut costs because the added density of SMR lets them use fewer platters?

I'm not sure why SMR would save costs on lower capacity drives but not higher capacity drives. It may be a technical reason, but I'd also find a corporate-strategic reason to be plausible -- i.e., they were like, any consumers that give a shit about something as technical as SMR vs CMR are probably the ones buying our high-capacity drives.

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

#145

Post by sangnoir »

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.

Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't like the age of packages in Stable

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

#146

Post by Dylan16807 »

compootr wrote: post #105
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…

> the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer laughs in linux my drives have physical extra pins that make it disable itself with a normal SATA connector that's left unplugged in its plastic case

If a normal SATA power connector disables your drives, that just means your power supply is old.

It wasn't the best idea to reuse the deprecated 3.3v pins for controlling drive power, but it's easy enough to deal with.

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

#147

Post by sangnoir »

loeg wrote: post #128
PaulHoule wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Personally I don't trust 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.

An appliance with the primary role of storage, and the ability to share files over the network are the distinguishing features for a NAS. Network support for iSCSI, SMB, NFS makes a NAS; sharing data exclusively over the media protocols (http, rtsp, etc) makes it a media server

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

#148

Post by arcanemachiner »

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.

Welcome to Debian. The newest stable release (bookworm) is from June 2023.

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

#149

Post by bombcar »

loeg wrote: post #128
PaulHoule wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Personally I don't trust 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.

By "NAS" most people mean "box they bought from someone to share files on a network" - think Qnap or Synology. They'll call a "NAS" that is home-built a server, even if they do basically the same thing.

To make it more fun, you'll have people refer to "I don't have a NAS, I run FreeNAS on my server."

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

#150

Post by Dalewyn »

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

I was a fan of WD HDDs before and I was in the market for some drives for my new NAS a few years ago. When I checked what drives were on the market, I saw WD doing that while Seagate still clearly marked which drives were which.

I swore off WD that day because my time is too valuable for their bullshit. I have no clue if they have amended their marketing, but I don't care since as far as I'm aware Seagate still clearly marks them and the drives I bought from them have all been fine. I'll likely buy Seagate again next time I'm in the market.

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