Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
smartctl -l farm /dev/sd<n>
(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'.)
Wasn't particularly concerned about mine, but thought it'd be fun to poke at.
(Debian 12: 10 June 2023; smartmontools 7.4: 1 August 2023)
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.
I have a new (?) 8TB Seagate drive out in front of my house right now, just delivered.
Incredible. Even stuff like range of voltages on voltage rails that the drive has seen, etc. I'm proud of my power supply, looking at the data. :D
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?
The whole thing has been a non-trivial waste of time.
1. With RAID-6, I can take two drive failures, and it is quicker to get a replacement off Amazon than wait for an OEM to RMA a drive under warranty
2. The Ultrastars have been pretty reliable in Backblaze's published data
3. The reseller I went through seems reliable enough
4. There's at least some evidence these "remanufactured" drives are coming from the OEMs, and based on past experience working at a few hardware manufacturers, the no trouble found rate for RMA'd hardware is typically quite high - to the point there is likely to be nothing wrong with a product that has been returned under warranty.
I guess a side benefit of this is at least I know I'm buying used drives.
0 - https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/03/used-hard-drives-from-tech...
Long ago, my friend worked for a Dell contractor (Unisys maybe) doing field service calls. His car would be full of swapped hardware, most of which would be thrown out. However, the hard drives had to be physically returned to his office. He gave me a bunch of stuff like a stack of eight working P4 motherboards, RAM, fans, CPU coolers, DVD drives, and so on. It all worked fine so I can totally see the disks making their way back into the supply chain via some shady contractor or recycler.
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.
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.
4 fake WD drives that had failed SMART long self test with surface read anomalies and looked very banged up and used (scratches, stripped mounting holes). The SMART attributes had been reflashed to look brand new and the drives cleaned with isopropyl alcohol or something similar and relabeled with not too bad looking fake labels using OEM or old serial numbers. The antistatic bags were also not genuine WD. The disks contained a test pattern unlike brand new WD disk which usually only have 00s.
This is not a new thing. I think I bought them off Amazon marketplace in 2023. Returns for full refund were not an issue however once I sent photos and SMART errors.
It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at prosumers are the exotic expensive products. It is senseless to me that vendors like WD make special SKUs for security camera use or for 2-3 bay NAS, 4-7 bay NAS, etc when all it means is Best Buy won't stock any of them, development costs are spread out over fewer units, more versions of firmware and hardware to have bugs, etc.
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 than products have ever be produced.
Not saying hard drive manufacturers do it, but it is both possible and done in some industries.
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 use it it just wasted. A vendor that even considers value subtraction is on thin ice and can only get away with it because there are barriers to exit. (This is particularly true of "fused off" features in Intel chips.)
Even real hardware is usually like this. An expensive camera is probably only expensive because it had more R&D go into it and all of its components. The actual sand to make the silicon chips didn't cost any extra.
Unfortunately, the way todays capitalist society works, it's pretty hard to say "I'd like to buy 1 million of your camera sensors please, and I'd like to have 200k of them be high performance and 800k be kinda noisy, but I'll let you know which are the high performance ones after I sell them".
A really vertically integrated company like Apple could do it though - and they do, selling super high performance chips in cheap iPads, but software locked to not run a decent desktop OS - for that you have to buy a macbook with the same chip for triple the money.
There were mainframe line printers that implemented a different lines per minute feature depending on which gear set was installed.
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.
ah, nothing like Windows-only hardware that is being purchased for Linux usage.
laughs in linux
my drives have physical extra pins that make it disable itself with a normal SATA connector that's left unplugged in its plastic case
It wasn't the best idea to reuse the deprecated 3.3v pins for controlling drive power, but it's easy enough to deal with.
Being able to charge $100 more for that is very worthwhile.
No matter what, it's a reason why you can't get any large capacity drive at Best Buy. They'd have room for one SKU but can't afford to stock an Amazonian variety of unusual types. I feel the whole industry has gone in a bad direction.
My workstation has a modern case that doesn't really have a lot of room in it for HDDs, so I added an external HDD for my sports photographs. I sure as hell don't get the bit about "serious external HDDs have their own power supply" because it is one more thing that can fail (get unplugged) and cause data loss. I'd get warmer and fuzzier feelings if the drive was powered off USB.
Is 24TB big enough for you?
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-24tb-external-usb-...
My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly. If I want to move files to or from it I use SFTP. If I want to back files up to it I use rsync. I have Lightroom running pretty good on an external HDD, no way I'd take my chances running it on a NAS.
> My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly.
This sure sounds like a NAS.
To make it more fun, you'll have people refer to "I don't have a NAS, I run FreeNAS on my server."
... Now that I think about i did have samba set up so I could watch 3d movies on my Meta Quest 3. But who cares if that is reliable?
There were definite hardware differences between drive categories back then, and as well as the firmware adjustments, there would be things such as additional accelerometers to detect and help protect against shock (eg: portable drives), higher quality bearings and head/head mechanism differences.
But, or course, that was then and I can't speak for now.
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 they're probably overboard on SKUs but having an obvious SMR SKU versus non-SMR is pretty important in my book. The fact they mixed in SMR into some regular drives and muddied the waters on which tech is going into which SKU really turned me off WD; I don't think I'll ever buy another one of their hard drives again.
PSA to anyone reading: do not use Purple drives for anything non-DVR/NVR related
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
Actually the Purple only has one distinguishing characteristic. An ATA command to skip bad sectors instead of trying to read/write repeatedly. This is great for an NVR but it's not mandatory to use.
Could you point me at an example of a SMR-based WD Purple drive? Is this just a historical thing? As mentioned in my other comment, the spec sheets [1] say all (current) drives are CMR.
> Actually the Purple only has one distinguishing characteristic. An ATA command to skip bad sectors instead of trying to read/write repeatedly. This is great for an NVR but it's not mandatory to use.
I'd also be interested to see a reference / details for this.
[1] https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief... https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief...
I was a fan of WD HDDs before and I was in the market for some drives for my new NAS a few years ago. When I checked what drives were on the market, I saw WD doing that while Seagate still clearly marked which drives were which.
I swore off WD that day because my time is too valuable for their bullshit. I have no clue if they have amended their marketing, but I don't care since as far as I'm aware Seagate still clearly marks them and the drives I bought from them have all been fine. I'll likely buy Seagate again next time I'm in the market.
Wait what? Isn't NILFS designed for spinning rust?
This is why WD figured they could get away with it, but it's a shame what it does if you're rebuilding your ZFS array (if they'd actually talked to customers they might have find a lot of people who buy big drives are ZFS heads!)
Myself I had a security camera set up to monitor my "cat room" last summer when I was trying to gentle a feral cat, I am thinking of pointing it at the driveway and monitoring it with ZoneMinder. ZoneMinder wants its own volume to write to, I am thinking of putting in a spare Intel SSD (superior, though review sites never told you) for that purpose, it's not like I need to store terabytes worth of video from it.
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?
...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.
There are supposed to be host-managed and hybrid host+drive-managed SMR drives out there, but AFAICT they're only sold to enterprises/hyperscalers (maybe only the latter even). And those are using custom proprietary software (e.g. Google's D servers).
...so who would write/use this glue code? unless the manufacturers decide to contract filesystem developers as a lead-up to wider sale of these things, or something to that effect.
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).
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.
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.)
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 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.
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
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.
The problem is that you cannot buy host managed zoned disks.
In theory you're right, SMR is not necessarily a problem for NVRs if well-implemented. However, I had poor luck running my own NVR software on drive-managed SMR. (The cheap kind that doesn't support zoned storage APIs, just pretends to be a standard drive.) 2/2 drives failed within a year, despite staying within the rated workload. Admittedly it's a small sample, but it soured me on drive-managed SMR. I suspect NVR software written to use host-managed SMR or hybrid SMR might have better luck, but AFAICT those drives are only sold to enterprises.
...and AFAICT, the WD Purple Surveillance Hard Drive and WD Purple Pro Smart Video Hard Drive lines do not use SMR. Looking at the current highest-capacity drives for both lines:
* The WD Purple Surveillance Hard Drive, 8TB (WD11PURZ) is specced at 180TB/yr.
* The WD Purple Pro Smart Video Hard Drive, 24TB (WD240PURP) is specced at 550TB/yr.
...vs something like 55 TB/yr that I've seen for SMR drives.
https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-d... also says that WD11PURZ is CMR. No listing for WD240PURP.
edit: oh, and the spec sheets for both lines explicitly say all drives use CMR. https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief... https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/product-brief...
Most storage workloads read more than they write. Surveillance is the opposite. You are always writing. Much ( maybe almost all ) of what you write is never used and is simply overwritten again.
The huge issue here is that hard drive datasheets have gotten very inaccurate.
They're not wrong, per se, but they tend to make very weak promises that ruin the ability to compare. Like if every car said "more than 10 miles per gallon".
I'm also skeptical about claims about power. Performance loss is real, power savings might not be. I had a $3000 desktop which I couldn't stand to use when I set the minimum CPU low because the machine would go to a lower power state between keystrokes or when I was only moving the mouse around, so it would seem to take forever for characters to appear when I'd type. Granted, my schizotypal nervous system is bad at latency compensation, even when my condition is remission, but I've found trying to save power makes a $3000 desktop feel worse to use than a $300 Chromebook.
[1] particularly inflamed at that time
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:
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.
It's fraud.
They are clearly marked in the description, but this is often awkwardly-conveniently after the truncation point for search results listings, so you need to be vigilant.
In contrast, the article is about used devices sold as new, and with SMART counters reset.
That absolutely smells like fraud -- though to be fair, I can concoct at plausible sequence of errors and omissions that arrives at the same result.
I expect that someone with subpoena power will need to take it from here.
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.
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 Shop sends their new, authentic Seagate Exos 16TB drives in, they get put in bin 1234.
If Sam the Scammer sends in a couple of "new Seagate Exos 16TB" drives in that are really just reflashed 80GB drives from the 90s, they get put in bin 1234.
You order a Seagate Exos 16TB... you get one from bin 1234.
The only way to avoid this is to contact the seller beforehand and see if they've opted out of the commingling. But at that point... very likely easier to just buy elsewhere.
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 that "refurb" doesn't reset your timeline on the curve (e.g. by replacing the PCB outside the platter box).
Also as a reference point, the refurbished drives I've bought have been less than $10/TB, while new internal drives are $15/TB on a good day.
This assumes you know and can control where in the curve you're buying into.
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 center variability, like the East Cupcake Regional warehouse does a crappy job of inspecting returns. Or the delivery manager in West Cupcake hires crappy drivers.
Amazon must do this analysis internally. I'd love to understand it better.
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.
There is speculation that these are ex-Chinese drives from crypto currencies that used "proof-of-storage" mining like Chia coin.
Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority of consumers don't drastically change their shopping habits when being abused.
Dealing with the cost of returns is a major part of a modern retailer, and Amazon has got to be through the roof with the numbers they receive.
What likely happened was that somebody had an old and broken Rode mic and decided to scam Amazon. They purchased a new one, put the old one in the new packaging, and sent it in as a return with "ordered by mistake" or some other reason that doesn't indicate a broken or faulty item.
Amazon warehouse employees certainly don't (and never can) check out every return item for full functionality. My guess is that at the most, they make sure it's not just an empty box or a brick.
So, the only signal that Amazon has about whether to restock the item again is what the buyer stated for a return reason. If they tell the truth, they might get someone to take a closer look at the item and decide that it's not actually new. If they lie, they are both scamming Amazon and the next buyer.
Amazon _could_ treat _all_ returns as defective and destroy the returned items (historically how many brick-and-mortar retailers did it), but given their generous return policies, this probably means quite a big hit to their bottom line.
For example: only sell returns as "open box". For some items, I'd be happy to chance an open box, for other items, not so much.
And some, apparently, turn to fraud.
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!
You might get a better response from regulators if you wait until you do have issues getting a refund, but that probably also between jurisdictions. Good luck!
20000 hours is more than 24 months. 50000 is five and half years.
Someone is probably selling drives that are being retired from datacenters.
I would suspect CHIA miners. CHIA miners have long been known to reset SMART parameters for resale:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436558
As that (absurd) project
One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?
WDs image was IIRC already not the best when the WD Red SMR thing blew up. I recall feeling smug but forget the background. I think they have a strong claim on title of most scandalous HDD maker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
(I had one, it died just after its warranty ended but Seagate did send me a replacement after bitching about it for long enough.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
At least I learned to take backups, which has saved my butt several times since.
My best guesses right now are some mix of organized crime disrupting their German distribution and/or less publically acknowledged graymarket/OEM channels gone wrong.
If it really comes from inside Seagate I don't think a sane person would buy from them again.
It gets more nuanced when talking about their responsibility to keep oversight over their supply chains and distribution.
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...
" Western Digital supplied it with faulty disk drives during 1988 and 1989"
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 selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising? Feels like a rite of passage for HDD sellers to somehow defraud consumers sooner or later.
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 demand to go through arbitration, and depending on how widespread this is could easily become class-action, which is the corporate nightmare the forced-arbitration clauses are trying to avoid. You can't write yourself an open-ended right to commit basic fraud into any contract, no, not even in the US.
I'm sure Seagate would rather not go through it, but the lesson for other companies will be just to get caught slower.
Source? Aside from bad models (eg. ST3000DM001), their failure rates are comparable to other vendors, hovering around the low single digit percentage points.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-...
WD switched their (larger; over 4TB iirc) WD Red drives from CMR to SMR without changing the model number at all, this is why I switched to buying Seagate.
The SMR problem became particularly apparent when NAS users (like myself) switched out a failed drive with one of the same model in their ZFS pools, and resilvering would fail.
Interestingly, the Seagate drives I switched them with just a couple of years ago have now started failing (one of them at least) so that didn't work out.
Does anyone know if it's possible to check this runtime data on the drives? According to the article it's not in the SMART data which has been reset in the case of the drives they're talking about.
I'm thinking of switching my NAS to solid-state as I've never had an SSD fail yet I'm replacing disks in my RAID1 ever couple of years on a home NAS that sees fairly light load other than some VMs and Kubernetes clusters writing logs etc since I'm not actively using much of it for 90% of the time it's on.
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.
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 working on something, like deploying to the Kubernetes clusters so it's just Ubuntu, Debian, whatever else I'm running doing it's thing with logs etc.
Some of the drives are used for storage in the traditional NAS sense so they get hit for backups nightly.
The HDDs keep failing on a pretty regular cycle every few years so switching them to SATA SSDs might be an idea. I only used the "server" part of it once a month or so when I want to test some deployment etc, the only reason it's on 24/7 is because of its NAS usage.
I use mostly Z1 mirrors at the moment, 4 pairs of drives, as for SSDs, I'm yet to have a single one fail in any machine I own or have owned since SSDs were first a think. I tend to stick to good-brand drives such as Samsung EVO Pros or if I'm trying to save a bunch of cash and the data isn't I buy Crucial.
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.
I buy used enterprise drives for large home NAS and some Amazon "refurb" sellers will wipe SMART data, inc drive hours. I avoid them. It's a dumb thing to do for a known, used drive.
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.
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.
This is, emphatically, not a good data point. You need thousands of drives running for years under normal loads to actually tease out outlier failure rates in a drive SKU. You need to literally do what Backblaze does.
It was a revelation. These drives have been so good to me.
Gone through a bunch of their MG/MN series drives over 5+y, and the 3/5y warranty was honored without BS on the one RMA case. You can also see them track well in Backblaze rankings.
Their N series are supposedly also great but never saw the point in paying the premium.
I have no idea why you would pay more or the same for same-sized drives from either Seagate or WD if you have the option.
It's either Seagate, Western Digital, or the rotating third player in the market, but there haven't really been any other options for scanadals.
I can't remember the last time the third player had a big scandal, but WD certainly goes through them from time to time. IBM DeskStar is a name that will live in infamy, but that was from before rotational drives really consolidated.
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.
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.
Guess who had two of these fail almost at the same time in his NAS a couple of years back.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/20.1 [2] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
> Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.
> According to readers, various retailers supplied the hard drives, with Amazon, JB Computer, Mindfactory and Reichelt being mentioned in numerous cases. Others mentioned: Alternate, Böttcher, Büroshop 24, Galaxus, Jacob, Kosatec, Maingau and Proshop - some of which are on the list of official Seagate retailers.
Given the number of affected retailers, I wonder if a distributor in Germany messed up somewhere.
Just speculation on my part, but I'm going to guess that something like this happened: old HDDs were removed from a DC, sent to a recycler, and the recycler sold the HDDs to a sketchy refurbisher that wipes SMART data. A supplier buys from the refurbisher, and the distributor buys the refurbished HDDs (without doing proper due diligence on the supplier or verifying the stock they were receiving). There's a mix-up between new and refurbished stock in the distributor's warehouse, which then results in various retailers receiving these bad refurbished HDDs.
Alternatively, the distributor went through unofficial/grey market channels to source these "new" HDDs. IMO, this veers into malice. No reputable distributor would gamble their reputation on sourcing new components via unofficial channels, as the risk of getting burned with counterfeits is high these days.
How do you "mess up" the smart hours accidentally?
Hard drive fraud is rampant, to the point I'm hanging on to ancient 4TB HDDs because I don't want to reward someone for fraud.
I also saw listings for SATA drives where the reviews were complaining about receiving SAS drives and complaints about bare HDDs being shipped rattling around in large cardboard boxes. I think the only conclusion I reached was that I should buy my HDD from somewhere that is not Amazon. Impossible to tell if they're selling a new or refurbished drive, a SATA or SAS drive or if it'll make it here safely.
The real drives have numbered "anti-counterfeit" labels. Each label has a QR code that takes you to a Seagate site, which takes label number X, and tells you that they put that label on drive serial number Y. The fake drives had labels that looked the same, but took you to a generic Seagate support page, nothing specific to anti-counterfeiting. If you went to the real anti-counterfeiting site and entered the numbers from the fake labels, they came up as non-hits.
Oh, and on edit, since naming names should go both ways: the "other source" was B&H, which is about as reputable as it's possible to get.
Except, of course, for the dramatically cheaper drives you find from Amazon... which are definitely going to be used, defective, dropped, or fake. If you get them at all.
They all seem to be selling them for very close to what they pay Seagate (or WD or whoever) for them, and the competition between manufacturers probably means there's not a whole lot of room for that price to vary. And I think everything gets repriced pretty frequently whenever anybody's costs move. You can see the prices change at the same time at different sellers.
The reason I bought drives from Amazon was that I'd had Newegg delay delivery of an accepted order, and then cancel it for "lack of stock". A few days later Newegg had the same drives listed at a higher price. I assume that what they really meant was "lack of stock of the drives we bought cheaply".
Shout out to https://diskprices.com/
I pretty much only buy them from Newegg anymore if I have to buy retail and even then my return rate for receiving DOA drives is nearly 50%.
Where I don't have this problem is buying via my server vendor contract w/ our Dell reseller. Buying enterprise drives through enterprise sales channels they always arrive new.
I had a look at how to run these FARM tests, and it seems I want smartctl 7.4 (which is too new for Debian stable but available in backports).
At one point I made it a mission to proactively correct the warranty records for the dozen or so Seagate drives I had in operation that had incorrect warranty terms showing in the RMA portal. Every day I’d contact them, give them my case number, and the customer service rep would “pull up the record” but still need me to list all the serial numbers again. Every couple tries, a few of the serials would get their warranties fixed. Towards the end they claimed that one of the drives was already returned as failed and destroyed by Seagate, and another one didn’t even exist. They made me literally pull the drives out of live systems and send them photos, and when I did, they continued with more excuses to not fix the warranty terms in the RMA portal. But I just tried again each day with a new rep, some of whom would fix some of the remaining drives, and eventually each drive got its warranty fixed.
Another time, they sent me a failed drive as a replacement, so I had to RMA my RMA. They cross-shipped me a replacement, but then lost my return in their own depot and tried telling me they never got it and I needed to either get it delivered or pay them for it.
Fuck Seagate.
Furthermore, for the customer, "the food might cost more than the freezer." Meaning, the work of changing the drive, restoring from backup, ect, ect, might cost more than the drive. Thus, it's "worth it" to expect a new drive.
"The food might cost more than the freezer." IE, a few years ago I bought a chest freezer for $150, and put $500 worth of food in the freezer. If the freezer died prematurely, I'm out more than the value of the freezer due to lost food. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer will ship me a new freezer for free.
Edit 2: I have a NAS in my basement, with drives paired in RAID. If a drive dies under warranty, will it be replaced with an identical drive? If the replacement is "equal or better," I'll have to pay to replace the other drive, because RAID drives should be identical. Likewise, replacing the drive is "time" to me: The time to contact the company, the time to open up the NAS, the time to wait for the new drive to be restored, the time to replace the other drive...
For another, drive warranties don't cover data extraction or downtime, and while pushing the drive 4 years ahead on the bathtub curve is possibly nice for avoiding early failures, it also means you're more likely to suffer from old age failures. It might not even help that much on avoiding early failures, because shipment probably brings its own set of possible failures.
I'm only aware of one open data set of drive failures, from Backblaze, but it shows the bathtub curve pretty well, after a small number of early failures, most drive models settle down for quite some time, and then start to trend up in failures again.
I'd like my 5 years of warrantied use to be the first 5 years of the drive's lifetime. If it doesn't fail in the first couple months, there's a pretty good chance it won't fail during the warranty period, regardless of brand; even if some brands do have a meaningfully higher failure rate than others.