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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

#161

Post by magicalhippo »

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?

I've tried to find it but it was almost certainly a 10+ year old video and I watched it 3-4 years ago. I do vividly recall screaming at the screen tho, trying in vain to clear up the confusion.

It was a simple mistake, one I've made myself many times. You're so primed to hear A you hear A even though the other party says E.

Anyway, this was of course for host-managed drives, and I haven't heard much talk about that since in ZFS leadership meetings or similar.

ZFS has 16MB block size support, and there has been talk about bumping that up as storage grows, so perhaps one day one could imagine 128-256MB record sizes for storing large blobs, which could fit with SMR better.

But yeah, would need to write code for that and ZFS ain't exactly overflowing with devs.

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

#162

Post by tuetuopay »

wumms wrote: post #61

You can read out the FARM logs of Seagate hard drives using smartctl -l farm /dev/sd They're supposed to be "more trustworthy" than the regular SMART stats. (My two "new" 16TB Exos drives had 0 hours (regular) and ~18k hours (farm) - DOM 04JUN2021 and 07JUN2021. Also, zfs refused to format the drive: 'already formatted as ddf_raid_member'.)

how are they "more trustworthy"? after all, it's data on a flash on the drive board.

is it lack of tooling, as demonstrated by needing the last smartmontools version to even read them, or some protection in the firmware to prevent resetting them (hey, no legit business resetting the power-on hours to zero...).

I checked the recertified ironwolf 12TB drives I bought, and both SMART and FARM report times in line with when I installed them in my nas. Of course, since they're recertified by seagate themselves, they may very well have a backdoor to reset FARM.

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

#163

Post by yencabulator »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #90
vel0city wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

DMSMR is TERRIBLE for a DVR workload. It writes first to a CMR cache and then flushes to SMR when the drive isn't busy. With a DVR the drive is never not going to be busy. Further the pitiful write speed of SMR is likely not enough for a modern high resolution security camera installation.

At least for some brands/models, a workload of purely sequential large writes doesn't exhibit that slowdown -- so I'm assuming they go straight to an open SMR zone. There might be an extra criteria where the rate of writes has be just below some threshold so the drive has time to seal full zone & open up a new one in time, to avoid CMR buffering.

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

#164

Post by RachelF »

quesera wrote: post #6

Article is about reports from German customers (this is clear in the orignal title, but not the current HN title), and mostly with 16TB Exos HDDs. FWIW, I just bought a bunch of Seagate HDDs (US vendor) and my warranty periods line up with the DOMs on the packaging. You can check your warranty period/status at: https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements

Ebay and, to a lessor extent, Amazon, have many vendors selling "new" Seagate HDDs that are actually refurbished. The SMART data is just reflashed to zero.

There is speculation that these are ex-Chinese drives from crypto currencies that used "proof-of-storage" mining like Chia coin.

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

#165

Post by yencabulator »

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?

I believe the latest on zoned devices is that they are scrapping the explicit zone operations API and are letting the OS merely provide a "region hint", to separate writes by the expected lifespan of the data stored. That could be as simple as different zfs datasets using different hints, if one dataset is archival and another contains actively-overwritten data.

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

#166

Post by yencabulator »

scottlamb wrote: post #157
Dylan16807 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> ...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.

Mostly by making large sequential writes. F2FS is a lot faster on a consumer drive-managed SMR drive than the others (at least until you need to fsck / upgrade kernel version / do any of the actions that utterly suck with f2fs).

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

#167

Post by harrall »

quesera wrote: post #139
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve noticed this too. People complain about counterfeit products but I have never had a problem.

I basically avoid name brand fungibles. Find any two hard drives and they look and function the same, which means I’m not buying that on Amazon.

But I see people complaining about counterfeit products but they buy batteries and hard drives from Amazon and I would never.

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

#168

Post by victorbjorklund »

nucleardog wrote: post #154
tedivm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Sh…

wow. Good to know. Had no idea (but I understand why they would want to do that).

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

#169

Post by scottlamb »

yencabulator wrote: post #166
scottlamb wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> ...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. Mostly by making large sequential writes. F2FS is a lot faster on a consumer drive-managed SMR drive than the others (at least until y…

Maybe, but I'm not sure I trust that to be enough. The drive's proprietary SMR management firmware might still end up doing something really wasteful under normal usage patterns, in a way that's hard to diagnose and might not be necessary if the application were in control.

Let's imagine an NVR that simply uses the drive as a ring buffer for media data. [1] And it does it via an application using the whole thing at the block device layer, no filesystem. And all the metadata is stored separately on an SSD. This should be the absolute best case for SMR, but even then I'm not confident it will work well. Eventually the drive fills and it starts rewriting. On each write, now it has to guarantee the bytes just beyond your write stay the same. My understanding is it has some minimum write size, or always some fixed-length overwrite, or something to that effect. Using large sequential writes surely helps, yes, and the device presumably has a generous amount of RAM-based write cache, but even so I'm suspicious it'll end up regularly reading and rewriting a bunch of data that will probably be overwritten anyway pretty soon, and even swapping to the CMR area of the drive constantly.

If the application were in control, it'd probably ensure there's some "don't care" buffer between the write zone and the read zone to avoid this. But I don't think there's any way to tell many of these drive-managed SMR HDDs to do that.

[1] You might want a ring per camera stream so you use less read bandwidth on playback of a single stream, and you might want the ability to redact bits of recording in the middle, but let's ignore that.

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

#170

Post by wumms »

Has anyone had experience involving the police in matters like this?

I reached out to the German news source that first reported on this issue, but they couldn’t help. The writer of the article mentioned that "The dealer will probably hide behind the supplier."

Here's the response I received today from Böttcher AG, where I purchased the hard drives, after sending them the FARM logs and photos of the drives (translated from German):

---

"Dear Sir or Madam,

Attached you will find the manufacturer's feedback regarding your complaint:

Please send the hard drives back. You will receive a credit immediately upon receipt.

We are currently unable to provide a statement, as we need to first examine the hard drive and the situation. Therefore, please ask the customer to hand over the hard drive to you.

You will promptly receive a refund of the purchase price and the shipping costs. As soon as we have a statement from our supplier, we will inform you immediately."

---

Given this, I am wondering if anyone has dealt with a situation like this and whether it's worth involving the police to ensure compensation for the damages or if this process should be handled through other legal channels. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!

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