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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

#151

Post by PaulHoule »

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.

There is no SMB or NFS, no 'network filesystem', though I could configure one if I want. I don't believe network filesystems are faat and reliable...

... Now that I think about i did have samba set up so I could watch 3d movies on my Meta Quest 3. But who cares if that is reliable?

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

#152

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

I don't think "at least 5 years" is supposed to suggest a high failure rate after 5 years. It's more a description of use case. I wouldn't expect a particularly high failure rate until the drives are ready to be retired and replaced with much bigger drives.

Also as a reference point, the refurbished drives I've bought have been less than $10/TB, while new internal drives are $15/TB on a good day.

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

#153

Post by MisterTea »

marcusb wrote: post #140

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…

>4. ... 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.

Long ago, my friend worked for a Dell contractor (Unisys maybe) doing field service calls. His car would be full of swapped hardware, most of which would be thrown out. However, the hard drives had to be physically returned to his office. He gave me a bunch of stuff like a stack of eight working P4 motherboards, RAM, fans, CPU coolers, DVD drives, and so on. It all worked fine so I can totally see the disks making their way back into the supply chain via some shady contractor or recycler.

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

#154

Post by nucleardog »

tedivm wrote: post #65
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.

It's bad if they're lying about it. I will say I bought two HDDs from Amazon just in November, and they were new. I just validated that as well. I purchased directly from Seagate on Amazon.

This is the usual reminder that the seller you select on Amazon is no guarantee about who supplied the product when it's fulfilled by Amazon.

Unless the seller has opted out of Amazon's inventory commingling, their products got binned with everyone else claiming to sell the same product and you got one at random.

If Seagate sends a box of Seagate Exos 16TB drives in, Amazon puts them in bin 1234.

If Joe's Computer Shop sends their new, authentic Seagate Exos 16TB drives in, they get put in bin 1234.

If Sam the Scammer sends in a couple of "new Seagate Exos 16TB" drives in that are really just reflashed 80GB drives from the 90s, they get put in bin 1234.

You order a Seagate Exos 16TB... you get one from bin 1234.

The only way to avoid this is to contact the seller beforehand and see if they've opted out of the commingling. But at that point... very likely easier to just buy elsewhere.

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

#155

Post by rlpb »

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.

It's not wild for people who choose to use a stable distribution that last released prior to smartmontools 7.4. It's exactly what they want and choose.

(Debian 12: 10 June 2023; smartmontools 7.4: 1 August 2023)

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

#156

Post by juancn »

vel0city wrote: post #66
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…

> 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…

SMR is discouraged for DVR use, many vendors (e.g. Ubiquiti) specifically ask for CMR drives.

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

#157

Post by scottlamb »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #142
magicalhippo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

...and I'm not sure that will change. The thing is, the "drive-managed SMR" models I've managed to get my hands on don't have a zoned storage API. I'm not sure how a filesystem (or application that directly goes to the block device layer) is supposed to work with them intelligently.

There are supposed to be host-managed and hybrid host+drive-managed SMR drives out there, but AFAICT they're only sold to enterprises/hyperscalers (maybe only the latter even). And those are using custom proprietary software (e.g. Google's D servers).

...so who would write/use this glue code? unless the manufacturers decide to contract filesystem developers as a lead-up to wider sale of these things, or something to that effect.

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

#159

Post by kmoser »

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…

> I guess I can see electing to buy into the lower part of the bathtub curve

This assumes you know and can control where in the curve you're buying into.

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

#160

Post by marceldegraaf »

busterarm wrote: post #119
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)

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.

Those drives are amazing. Not exactly cheap, but very reliable and silent enough for home server use.
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