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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

#181

Post by Capricorn2481 »

jerf wrote: post #12
diggan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the only ones laughing about that. AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite. > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? If it isn't Seagate, it's someone else. Wasn't Western Digital caught s…

"AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite." Claiming you're selling a new product and then selling a used product is straight-up fraud. This isn't even a warrantee issue, and no, the US legal system wouldn't just shrug and go "Oh well". This is the sort of thing that penetrates any amount of verbiage in a EULA the company may throw at you, including any sort of dem…

Class actions are for lawyers. They will lowball how much damage was done and consumers will see $6 once all is said and done.

I'm sure Seagate would rather not go through it, but the lesson for other companies will be just to get caught slower.

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

#182

Post by andreldm »

This reminded me the time I bought a brand new HDD only to notice at home it was labelled as “refurbished”, next day I returned it, they guys from the shop didn’t want to admit this wasn’t a new part, after much back and forth they agreed to refund me. If my memory serves me well that was a Seagate drive, I hope they didn’t become sloppy with labelling.

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

#183

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

BeetleB wrote: post #177

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 a…

I was a system builder from 1990 onward.

Seagate's 10. and 11. lines were notorious for going bad. I have stacks of bad Seagate drives from those days (2010s, iirc). For 3.5 inch form factor models, Seagate drives were dying at a rate of 10x all other brands combined.

The earliest HDD scandal I recall was when Seagate bough Conner, just as Conner's run of leaky-seals started eating platters. Seagate refused to honor those warranties for years. Something eventually changed. IDK what, I always assumed a court was involved.

For non-Seagate drives: I did have a bunch of 500GB WD Blue SSDs die a couple of years back. I replaced some under warranty; I later found a firmware update restored the rest of them.

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

#184

Post by DidYaWipe »

wumms wrote: post #179
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.

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

Thanks for the suggestion. I wiped my orphaned 2014 iMac and installed Mint on it, so I guess I should be good to go. I just didn't want to go under my desk to unplug my toaster dock and move it unless necessary.

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

#185

Post by snvzz »

smegsicle wrote: post #120
duskwuff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something that makes them unsuitable for other workloads?

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

>NILFS seems to make assumptions based on SSDs, blowing up during its cleaning operation

Wait what? Isn't NILFS designed for spinning rust?

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

#186

Post by snvzz »

voytec wrote: post #115
gpvos wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the article calls it fraud in the first line of the text.

Not to defend Seagate, but also: > Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.

That sentence protects against defamation lawsuits.

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

#187

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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…

> I've taken to buying used Western Digital Ultrastar drives on Amazon for my NAS.

Same. I bought a bunch of 10TB HGST drives for my home NAS. They were $79 ($95 now) vs $325 new. I ran badblocks for 24H on each and found one dodgy one, which the seller swapped out.

Last year I was buying new old stock 6TB Ultrastar SAS drives from B&H for $90 ea. They were a few years old with 0 hours. None of the drives showed any indication of use, ex: no witness marks. They're in a hotswap NAS.

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

#188

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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…

> for my NAS

What are you using for an OS? It seems like our NAS OS options are fewer than they were a decade ago - especially if you want ZFS.

For the 2 NAS I recently set up, one is running TrueNAS Core (last freeBSD) and the other is just minimal FreeBSD.

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

#189

Post by beAbU »

BeetleB wrote: post #177

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 a…

One of their drives was famously so unreliable that it has its own wikipedia page [1].

Guess who had two of these fail almost at the same time in his NAS a couple of years back.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001

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

#190

Post by [deleted] »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #184
wumms wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for the suggestion. I wiped my orphaned 2014 iMac and installed Mint on it, so I guess I should be good to go. I just didn't want to go under my desk to unplug my toaster dock and move it unless necessary.

[deleted]
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