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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

#171

Post by Dylan16807 »

scottlamb wrote: post #169
yencabulator wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 t…

> now it has to guarantee the bytes just beyond your write stay the same [...] "don't care" buffer between the write zone and the read zone to avoid this.

If the firmware is competent the drive will have TRIM support.

Also it could start overwriting a zone even when there's old live data in it, as long as it buffers a few megabytes to stay at least a track away from the old live data.

And even if it does have to read back the whole zone, it could keep that in RAM to keep the performance impact from being too bad. (Ideally with some kind of power loss protection.)

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

#172

Post by scottlamb »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #171
scottlamb wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> now it has to guarantee the bytes just beyond your write stay the same [...] "don't care" buffer between the write zone and the read zone to avoid this. If the firmware is competent the drive will have TRIM support. Also it could start overwriting a zone even when there's old live data in it, as long as it buffers a few megabytes to stay at least a track away from the old live data. And even if it does have to read…

> If the firmware is competent the drive will have TRIM support.

Sure, if false then false is a true statement.

It's not competent, though? iirc my ST8000DM004 did not support TRIM. I think it's typical of the genre of drives on the market.

I have no faith these drives will not degenerate to the stupidest possible access pattern; their firmware is opaque and bad and their interface is limited.

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

#173

Post by Dylan16807 »

scottlamb wrote: post #172
Dylan16807 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now it has to guarantee the bytes just beyond your write stay the same [...] "don't care" buffer between the write zone and the read zone to avoid this. If the firmware is competent the drive will have TRIM support. Also it could start overwriting a zone even when there's old live data in it, as long as it buffers a few megabytes to stay at least a track away from the old live data. And even if it does have to read…

> If the firmware is competent the drive will have TRIM support. Sure, if false then false is a true statement. It's not competent, though? iirc my ST8000DM004 did not support TRIM. I think it's typical of the genre of drives on the market. I have no faith these drives will not degenerate to the stupidest possible access pattern; their firmware is opaque and bad and their interface is limited.

I know some drives do it though.

I found a comment saying "Sadly it’s 2024 and WD seem to be the only manufacturer actually implementing TRIM."

And I'd expect it to be more common on the higher end drives where someone might intentionally choose SMR to get more space, as opposed to the <=8TB market where SMR is a cost saving they don't want anyone to notice.

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

#174

Post by TkTech »

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'.)

Hm, FARM is Seagate-specific but the standard is open, neat. I'll add support for this to https://github.com/TkTech/smartie/. Introduction here, https://www.snia.org/educational-library/introduction-hdd-fi... and the Mozilla v2 licensed libraries from seagate under https://github.com/Seagate all seem to support FARM now.

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

#175

Post by DidYaWipe »

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'.)

Anyone know how to check these drives on a Mac?

I have a new (?) 8TB Seagate drive out in front of my house right now, just delivered.

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

#176

Post by TkTech »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #175
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'.)

Anyone know how to check these drives on a Mac? I have a new (?) 8TB Seagate drive out in front of my house right now, just delivered.

I'm not 100% sure you can out of the box, the default driver on macOS is very restrictive in what commands can be passed through to the device.

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

#177

Post by BeetleB »

Years ago, a Seagate HD suddenly crashed. Wasn't particularly old.

Then some point later, there was a good deal on Seagate HDs, and I bought another one.

Also crashed "early" in its life.

I never buy them again. The main PC building forum I used to frequent also have a pinned topic announcing that they've lost all hope with Seagate and will never recommend it for anyone asking for help on a build. That was 10 years ago, and last I checked they still stuck to that policy.

Don't buy Seagate.

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

#178

Post by DidYaWipe »

TkTech wrote: post #176
DidYaWipe wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone know how to check these drives on a Mac? I have a new (?) 8TB Seagate drive out in front of my house right now, just delivered.

I'm not 100% sure you can out of the box, the default driver on macOS is very restrictive in what commands can be passed through to the device.

Thanks for the reply. I have an old iMac running Mint, so I guess I'll start there with the openSeaChest utility.

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

#179

Post by wumms »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #175
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'.)

Anyone know how to check these drives on a Mac? I have a new (?) 8TB Seagate drive out in front of my house right now, just delivered.

You might have success booting some Linux live image from USB. I had success with nixos 24.11 on a Mac Pro (Intel).

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

#180

Post by scottlamb »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #173
scottlamb wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the firmware is competent the drive will have TRIM support. Sure, if false then false is a true statement. It's not competent, though? iirc my ST8000DM004 did not support TRIM. I think it's typical of the genre of drives on the market. I have no faith these drives will not degenerate to the stupidest possible access pattern; their firmware is opaque and bad and their interface is limited.

I know some drives do it though. I found a comment saying "Sadly it’s 2024 and WD seem to be the only manufacturer actually implementing TRIM." And I'd expect it to be more common on the higher end drives where someone might intentionally choose SMR to get more space, as opposed to the <=8TB market where SMR is a cost saving they don't want anyone to notice.

> And I'd expect it to be more common on the higher end drives where someone might intentionally choose SMR to get more space, as opposed to the Yeah, "don't want anyone to notice" is probably a big factor, and in fairness the drive I mentioned was of the surprise SMR scandal era. (8TB was decently large then though I think.)

I guess fundamentally the hidden complexity of the firmware managing the storage also applies to SSD, but I think they've got more wiggle room there due to the inherent better performance of the media, and for whatever reason the average firmware quality appears better IMHO, with some notable exceptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243

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