Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 227 posts

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

#201

Post by marcus0x62 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #188
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.

Arch Linux. It’s an easy default for me, although I’ll probably build the next iteration on FreeBSD with ZFS. I don’t have much faith that btrfs or bcachefs will catch up to ZFS in the next few years.

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

#202

Post by marcus0x62 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #187
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…

For personal use, its really hard to see how this would go wrong. You get an (arguably) much better drive in the Ultrastar, and even if the resellers (typically 2 year) warranty doesn't pan out, the drives are cheap enough compared to new you can replace one or two in a typical RAID-6 array out of pocket and still come out ahead.

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

#203

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'.)

I hooked my new (arrived today) Seagate drive up to a computer running Linux, and installed the openSeaChest utility https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest_LogParser

But I don't see how to gain access to the whatever logs are buried in the drive's memory. The instructions for the utility don't provide any guidance on this. How does one actually extract logs from the drive?

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

#204

Post by eadmund »

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.

Only having to update once every couple of years is wild. And it’s also awesome.

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

#205

Post by ciupicri »

alias_neo wrote: post #136
marxisttemp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm thinking of switching my NAS to solid-state My NAS is mostly read-only and I’m very keen to do this. My understanding is that since SSDs are still readable when they fail, you don’t need the same degree of RAID parity to avoid data loss.

My NAS isn't really a NAS, it's a fairly hefty server with a Ryzen 9 on an ASRock Rack board in a CS381 case with 8 hot-swap bays occupied with SAS and SATA HDDs as well as 2 nvme drives in the board itself. It's a server doing server things and one of those things happens to be roleplaying as a NAS. It runs a bunch of VMs with their primary drives on the HDDs but most of the VMs are idle most of the time unless I'm…

How good is the CS381 case? Do you have any problems cooling the hard disks?

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

#206

Post by rwmj »

bombela wrote: post #191
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?

BTRFS can handle zoned disks. The doc claims that it was a natural fit with the way BTRFS works. The problem is that you cannot buy host managed zoned disks.

WD was pushing for this standard a few years back: https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovation/zoned-stor... I'm not sure what happened to it / whether it was successful or not.

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

#207

Post by rwmj »

RachelF wrote: post #164
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.

It's worrying that SMART data can be reflashed. You'd think the drive vendors would try to prevent this.

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

#208

Post by alias_neo »

ciupicri wrote: post #205
alias_neo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My NAS isn't really a NAS, it's a fairly hefty server with a Ryzen 9 on an ASRock Rack board in a CS381 case with 8 hot-swap bays occupied with SAS and SATA HDDs as well as 2 nvme drives in the board itself. It's a server doing server things and one of those things happens to be roleplaying as a NAS. It runs a bunch of VMs with their primary drives on the HDDs but most of the VMs are idle most of the time unless I'm…

How good is the CS381 case? Do you have any problems cooling the hard disks?

I'm very happy with it overall; the only potential issue I have with the case is the short clearance between the CPU socket and the HDD cage above, means you need a very low profile CPU cooler; I use a Noctua cooler, don't recall the name, but it's a very flat one, with a 10mm depth fan on top, all in the cooler is no more than about 40mm deep.

I've never had an issue cooling the HDDs, I swapped out the fans it came with for the back of the case for some Noctua Redux PWM fans (I think those rear ones are 120mm) and I let the motherboard control them, the HDD backplanes also have a connector for a fan for each side of 4 bays. Not sure if they're always on, never used them, but looking at my drive temps, the HGST 10kRPM helium drives average 41C, and Seagate IronWolfs averaging 34C.

I also have an HBA, Quad-Intel GbE NIC and a Tesla P4 in there all putting out a tonne of heat. I've down-specced the CPU to 64W for longevity and power savings, but I've not seen any temperatures I'd be concerned about yet, other than the passively cooled P4 which I printed a bracket for and strapped a high-static-pressure fan to push air through it and out the back, but that's GPUs for you.

EDIT: For the record, I bought it in 2020, and it has been running 24/7 since, with regular HDD swaps, and the Tesla was added just recently.

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

#210

Post by dingaling »

PaulHoule wrote: post #49
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…

I was impressed in the 1980s when I heard about how 390 mainframes had a modem in them so IBM could phone in orders to unlock extra capacity if the customer needed it for a short time. Today I think that's a sign to sell the stock of the company involved. It costs money to build hardware that is locked out, either the customer pays for it or the stockholders of the vendor pay for it, if the customer doesn't get to us…

On-demand scaling is still a feature of zSeries mainframes, now called Elastic Capacity on Demand .

To non-corporates it might look like wasted resources or gouging the users, but from the enterprise perspective it's a marvellous feature. It's basically on-premises cloud-scaling.

Post reply on HN