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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

#221

Post by DidYaWipe »

ilyagr wrote: post #197
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.

If you have an ARM Mac and a USB enclosure for the drive, I had some success with smartmontools running in ARM Linux under VmWare. I also tried UTM (pretty much QEMU), but UTM's USB passthrough was not good enough.

Interesting. Thanks for that. I have the drive hooked up to a Mint computer running the openSeaChest utility, but that utility appears to only parse the logs. I can't find any way to extract the logs from the drive's memory. This is undocumented by the utility as far as I can tell.

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

#222

Post by kalleboo »

PaulHoule wrote: post #31
Joker_vD wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? Since you can't make an "X-gate" name for a scandal out of the Seagate's name, they can afford more bad publicity than other hard drive manufacturers. Truly an ingenious branding strategy.

Circa 2001 or so I bought about 5 Maxtor drives that all went bad in a year and I wasn't the only one. I never bought another Maxtor drive again. On the other hand, I've owned probably 20 Seagate drives and had maybe 1 fail, so I see them as a partner as much as a aprt.

Seagate acquired Maxtor and that's when people started complaining about Seagate reliability

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

#223

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #201
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm pretty dang happy with ZFS. It needs some extra RAM but gives a lot in return.

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

#224

Post by DidYaWipe »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #203
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?

I installed seagate_info (a separate part of SeaChest) and it pulls no stats at all from the drive.

The whole thing has been a non-trivial waste of time.

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

#225

Post by JAlexoid »

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…

They're not 20% less, they're a third of the price of a new one.

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

#226

Post by markus_zhang »

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…

Thanks. What do you buy nowadays? I mostly use them to backup family photos and videos. Frequent ingestion but few actual reads. And I hope they can last at least 10 years so I'll rotate another in 5-8 years.

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

#227

Post by rubiquity »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #216
floren wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recommendation is Tillamook. Their strawberry is fantastic.

Their ice-cream is firmly mid. If you live in Oregon and want good ice-cream, try salt and straw.

Tillamook is at least half the price of Salt and Straw, who is rather unremarkable after expanding to every major metropolitan in the US.
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