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Comment by felindev | Hacker News Reader

> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US

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?

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> 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

> 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 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.

"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 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.

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.

You'll note I called it a "corporate nightmare" and didn't describe as anything like the white horse coming to the rescue of the consumer.

> Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising

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.

> 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 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.

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.

I think its actually 8TB and under that WD switched to SMR. All their drives over 8TB are CMR, last I heard.

You're probably right, I forget which way around it was, but if I was to take an educated guess, I'd say that SMR on the lower capacity models lets them cut costs because the added density of SMR lets them use fewer platters?

I'm not sure why SMR would save costs on lower capacity drives but not higher capacity drives. It may be a technical reason, but I'd also find a corporate-strategic reason to be plausible -- i.e., they were like, any consumers that give a shit about something as technical as SMR vs CMR are probably the ones buying our high-capacity drives.

Toshiba (and Seagate) were mislabeling SMR drives at a premium too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959

Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.

>Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.

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-...

This reminds me that I haven't seen a drive report from Backblaze in a while posted here.

There's one per quarter. Last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122740

> 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.

Does any WD model have its own Wikipedia page?

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.)

There's an IBM Deathstar (sold to Hitachi, sold to WD) model that has its own section, at least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...

Lost my first 3 years of programming thanks to a Deathstar... Still miffed about it, as I enjoy going back looking at my earlier code.

At least I learned to take backups, which has saved my butt several times since.

They both competed for worst drive :)

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...

" Western Digital supplied it with faulty disk drives during 1988 and 1989"

I agree it's not an easy call between the two! I guess the conclusion of this episode could tip the scales, if we ever get an explanation.

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.

It really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.

> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

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.

I avoid WD since the WD Red SMR controversy. Was under the impression Seagate has always been solid. Bummer.

It's not clear to me that this is Seagate's fault. Sounds like retailers are selling used drives as new. Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do?

> Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do?

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.

there are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)

The HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.

>My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.

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.

I know, that's why I didn't say "you should buy these drives because I've never had any failures". I was just adding some context.

I'm suspecting Toshiba might just be "a well-kept open secret" and people want to keep them for themselves. That's my only explanation for their absence in recommendations. Perhaps combined with that probably the other manufacturers actively market in ways that Toshiba doesn't care for.

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.

When I built my 48TB NAS a few years back I went with Toshiba MG Helium-sealed drives because of so many bad experiences with the remaining alternatives.

It was a revelation. These drives have been so good to me.

Those drives are amazing. Not exactly cheap, but very reliable and silent enough for home server use.

I'm a die-hard Ultrastar fan who was disappointed by their eventual sale to WD. But, for a sample size of 8 over a decade, I've been happy with my Toshiba laptop 2TB drives I have running in a small storage server.

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