You can read out the FARM logs of Seagate hard drives using
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'.)
Hm, FARM is Seagate-specific but the standard is open, neat. I'll add support for this to https://github.com/TkTech/smartie/. Introduction here, https://www.snia.org/educational-library/introduction-hdd-fi... and the Mozilla v2 licensed libraries from seagate under https://github.com/Seagate all seem to support FARM now.
how are they "more trustworthy"? after all, it's data on a flash on the drive board.
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.
Seems to require smartmontools 7.4 (August 2023) which at least Debian isn't including yet (7.3).
Wasn't particularly concerned about mine, but thought it'd be fun to poke at.
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.
It's not wild for people who choose to use a stable distribution that last released prior to smartmontools 7.4. It's exactly what they want and choose.
(Debian 12: 10 June 2023; smartmontools 7.4: 1 August 2023)
Favoring stability doesn't come without its drawbacks (nor without benefits).
Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't like the age of packages in Stable
Only having to update once every couple of years is wild. And it’s also awesome.
That's really not a lot of time in the scheme of things.
Welcome to Debian. The newest stable release (bookworm) is from June 2023.
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?
Wow, this is great. I don't care about "more trustworthy", but this has so much more information than regular smart data.
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
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.
I'm not 100% sure you can out of the box, the default driver on macOS is very restrictive in what commands can be passed through to the device.
Thanks for the reply. I have an old iMac running Mint, so I guess I'll start there with the openSeaChest utility.
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.
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.
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 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...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>4. ... 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.
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.
Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site)
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.
> WD make special SKUs for security camera use
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.
The odd thing is that SMR may actually improve performance for many mainstream workloads because it turns random access writes to sequential writes. Similar techniques are used in software for write-heavy workloads (e.g. cache helps with reads more than writes, only helps with writes if they are battery backed and it can help a lot of if writes are sequentialized)
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.
There was an early SMR talk by a WD (IIRC) engineer to a crowd of ZFS devs and sysadmins, and the engineer thought it should fit well because he misheard the default record size being 128MB rather than the actual 128kB, so thought it one record would fit one zone.
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.
I believe the latest on zoned devices is that they are scrapping the explicit zone operations API and are letting the OS merely provide a "region hint", to separate writes by the expected lifespan of the data stored. That could be as simple as different zfs datasets using different hints, if one dataset is archival and another contains actively-overwritten data.
> 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.
...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.
> ...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.
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).
Maybe, but I'm not sure I trust that to be enough. The drive's proprietary SMR management firmware might still end up doing something really wasteful under normal usage patterns, in a way that's hard to diagnose and might not be necessary if the application were in control.
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.
> now it has to guarantee the bytes just beyond your write stay the same [...] "don't care" buffer between the write zone and the read zone to avoid this.
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.)
> If the firmware is competent the drive will have TRIM support.
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 know some drives do it though.
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.
> 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
I've tried to find it but it was almost certainly a 10+ year old video and I watched it 3-4 years ago. I do vividly recall screaming at the screen tho, trying in vain to clear up the confusion.
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.
DMSMR is TERRIBLE for a DVR workload. It writes first to a CMR cache and then flushes to SMR when the drive isn't busy. With a DVR the drive is never not going to be busy. Further the pitiful write speed of SMR is likely not enough for a modern high resolution security camera installation.
At least for some brands/models, a workload of purely sequential large writes doesn't exhibit that slowdown -- so I'm assuming they go straight to an open SMR zone. There might be an extra criteria where the rate of writes has be just below some threshold so the drive has time to seal full zone & open up a new one in time, to avoid CMR buffering.
> 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.
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...
Yes
PSA to anyone reading: do not use Purple drives for anything non-DVR/NVR related
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
WD mixed both CMR and SMR for the WD Purple, an a few other models too. The CMR wouldn't see any write amplification. But the SMR will suffer from all of the usual SMR limitations. Most importantly that it's only really useful with sequential writes, on top of the write amplification.
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.
> WD mixed both CMR and SMR for the WD Purple, an a few other models too.
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...
>WD mixed both CMR and SMR
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.
>NILFS seems to make assumptions based on SSDs, blowing up during its cleaning operation
Wait what? Isn't NILFS designed for spinning rust?
SMR is discouraged for DVR use, many vendors (e.g. Ubiquiti) specifically ask for CMR drives.
Or the only difference of those specialized SKUs is a single parameter in the firmware making a different tradeoff for, lets say, random seek vs. sustained sequential reads/writes. A different cache strategy. Or whatever.
Being able to charge $100 more for that is very worthwhile.
2014-2017 I worked for HGST, just as it was being assimilated by WD.
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.
I think the "larger NAS" drives have better shock absorption, which is a hardware thing.
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.
>No matter what, it's a reason why you can't get any large capacity drive at Best Buy.
Is 24TB big enough for you?
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-24tb-external-usb-...
Internal, not external. (Sure, people are known to shuck the drive out of the reliability-killing enclosure)
How does the enclosure kill reliability?
External drives are often designed for a shorter duty cycle and don't dissipate heat as well as they could.
I'm mostly concerned about the power cord getting unplugged if, say, somebody is vacuuming around the area. On top of the usual "whole machine gets turned off" failure mode that happens maybe 10-20x a year in my neighborhood because of power loss there is a "machine is turned on but HDD is powered off" case.
Wouldn’t a NAS have the same problem, and wouldn’t a battery backup solve it? Genuinely curious
Personally I don't trust a NAS as far as I can throw it, or rather I'd use one the way I use Amazon S3.
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.
> Personally I don't trust 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.
By "NAS" most people mean "box they bought from someone to share files on a network" - think Qnap or Synology. They'll call a "NAS" that is home-built a server, even if they do basically the same thing.
To make it more fun, you'll have people refer to "I don't have a NAS, I run FreeNAS on my server."
An appliance with the primary role of storage, and the ability to share files over the network are the distinguishing features for a NAS. Network support for iSCSI, SMB, NFS makes a NAS; sharing data exclusively over the media protocols (http, rtsp, etc) makes it a media server
There is no SMB or NFS, no 'network filesystem', though I could configure one if I want. I don't believe network filesystems are faat and reliable...
... 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?
People have been battle testing those cheap as possible external drives on top of hot xboxs in enclosed cabinets for years and years now. Backup, and I would think failure rates would be too small to consider.
IIRC the main difference for WD was how it reacts to errors. Consumer drives will spend minutes to retry rw operations. Surveillance drives will mostly ignore errors as it's more important to have some footage than none. And NAS drives will immediately report the errors.
See http://danluu.com/filesystem-errors/ you are damned if you do and damned if you don't
> claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet
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".
Surveillance represents a pretty big market though and the OEMs are not getting them from Best Buy.
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.
Similar workload for high energy physics, think CMS or ATLAS detectors at the LHC.
> 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 than products have ever be produced.
Not saying hard drive manufacturers do it, but it is both possible and done in some industries.
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 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.)
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.
In an early minicomputer, the $500 power fail interrupt feature was field installed by clipping a jumper.
There were mainframe line printers that implemented a different lines per minute feature depending on which gear set was installed.
When you look deep enough, nearly all 'tech' products costs are IP. For IP, it costs nothing to include a feature locked out.
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.
The sensors are physically very different in the latest Sony α7, α7R (high resolution) and α7S (high sensitivity) cameras.
> the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer
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
If a normal SATA power connector disables your drives, that just means your power supply is old.
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.
> the hardware phones home
ah, nothing like Windows-only hardware that is being purchased for Linux usage.
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:
Thanks! I just checked an 10TB Ironwolf bought to a German seller through Amazon.fr less than two months ago: Its warranty expires in a few days... :(
From my experience dealing with them, Seagate's default warranty info is based on drive's date of manufacture. So it is possible that this drive had sat in some Amazon warehouse for 5 years before you got it.. You can register the drive with receipt to get that data corrected on Seagate's side.
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.
How is listing used devices as new "not necessarily bad"?
It's fraud.
Amazon sells both "new" and "refurbished" HDDs.
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.
It's bad if they're lying about it.
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.
This is the usual reminder that the seller you select on Amazon is no guarantee about who supplied the product when it's fulfilled by 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.
wow. Good to know. Had no idea (but I understand why they would want to do that).
The majority of everything on Amazon seems used. I stopped buying electronics from them (unless it's something cheap I don't care too much about) and I buy directly from manufacturers or walk into Best Buy and buy it new. Hard drives, memory sticks, GPUs, monitors/TVs, and headphones from Amazon are a hard NO from me. The chances of them being used or outright counterfeit is ridiculously high now. Pretty much everything I purchase from Amazon these days seems to be used or fake. This includes something as simple as Vitamin D supplements, where you can tell the packaging has been tampered with. Sometimes I even get consumable products where the seal is gone or has been torn in half.
I wish I had a better understanding of the bimodal distribution of customer satisfaction with Amazon.
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’ve noticed this too. People complain about counterfeit products but I have never had a problem.
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.
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 that "refurb" doesn't reset your timeline on the curve (e.g. by replacing the PCB outside the platter box).
For my last two Exos drives (22TB each) I decided to try refurbs. I have them in my homelab's ceph cluster. I figured I'd try them due to cost. They were two thirds the cost of a new drive, so I figure I can do a 3 for the price of 2 sort of thing and have more redundancy that way. That said, ceph with replica count 3 (min_size 2), so my data is pretty protected. Important stuff is backed up anyway. So far the older one has been running for about 4 months and the newer about 2 months, no SMART errors yet.
I don't think "at least 5 years" is supposed to suggest a high failure rate after 5 years. It's more a description of use case. I wouldn't expect a particularly high failure rate until the drives are ready to be retired and replaced with much bigger drives.
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.
> I guess I can see electing to buy into the lower part of the bathtub curve
This assumes you know and can control where in the curve you're buying into.
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.
Has anyone had experience involving the police in matters like this?
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!
I think in many countries you’d be better off reaching out to a consumer protection-specific agency or tribunal, making sure to cc the vendor or manufacturer. For instance, in the United States, you could contact the Federal Trade Commission or your state’s attorney general, or potentially file a case in small claims court if the matter isn’t quickly resolved.
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!
One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality. I've seen similar things happening more frequently in different markets, not just tech. If you notice something like it, the best way to deal with it imo is ask for your money back, make it public if possible and boycott the business from then on. Customers need to penalize such behavior as much as possible or soon we can't trust anything anymore. Hard disks especially are one of the most critical components, you don't want failures there.
One example of this is Breyers ice cream. They are the oldest ice cream company in the US, had a great reputation, and heavily marketed that they only used high quality all natural ingredients until they got bought up by Unilever who stuffed it full of artificial ingredients and fillers to the point where they could no longer legally call their product "ice cream" and had to relabel their products as "frozen dairy dessert". You'd think that doing that would have tanked the company, but they're still one of the top brands globally and in the US. Unilever took advantage of a company's reputation for quality, quietly filled the product with shit, and made a fortune because people continue to eat it up. There are plenty of competitors making actual ice cream too.
Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again.
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.
So I'm going to do something I don't normally do and defend Amazon only a little bit...
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.
There is a large spectrum of options between the extremes of "destroy all returns" and "resell returns as new without any checks".
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.
I've had this experience with several big retailers recently. One is B&H, who sold me a "new" Focusrite 18i20 4th Gen last month which had clearly been opened, cosmetically damaged, and returned. I've also had this experience many times with Sweetwater (musical instruments retailer). There used to be a sales rep there who would participate in a particular musician's forum that I was a member of and would get us a slightly better price than is standard if we ordered through him directly. Many people who did so, including me, received what was clearly opened and returned items, sold as new. I assume they do this because the vast majority of people would rather not bother and will just accept a small defect.
I'm really surprised B&H has turned to this, they've been a very good retailer in my experience.
I've spent 5 figures with them over the last few years, and they've always been good to me too. I'm writing this off as a one-time mistake, but I really hope it doesn't become a trend.
They’ve been sorta good, but rumors if things like this have been persistent for a decade. Photographers would get a few copies of a lens, and then return copies ones that were not up spec. B&H would allegedly just relist those as new, not open box. Many manufacturers don’t seal their boxes…
This isn't new, it's just becoming a bit more prevalent. Anyone who shopped at Fry's Electronics knew it was nearly impossible to find something that hadn't been reshrinkwrapped by them (I suspect they'd reshrinkwrap everything sometimes so you couldn't tell).
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.
Things I absolutely won't order from Amazon: products you put in your body, products you put on your body, and electronics. Their business model and fraud are pretty much indistinguishable at this point.
I had the same thing happen with a soldering iron bought from amazon. sold as brand new. clearly had been used and crammed back in the box.
>One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality.
And some, apparently, turn to fraud.
In this case practically all german retailers are affected.
[dead]
> The time used ranges from 15,000 to 36,000 hours except for two 4TB HDDs, which were both used for about 50,000 hours
20000 hours is more than 24 months. 50000 is five and half years.
Someone is probably selling drives that are being retired from datacenters.
"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
I guess one way to avoid this would be only to buy drives that were released recently; a drive that first shipped in Dec 2024 can't be five and a half years old!
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 ago, and last I checked they still stuck to that policy.
Don't buy Seagate.
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.
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.
Had 4 of the 5000 version of the models. Quickly moved to other drives. Got lucky.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
It really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.
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.
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is specifically illegal in the US[1] (and probably everywhere). If this were in the US then it would be prudent for the buyer to contact the FTC[2] and their local state AG.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/20.1 [2] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
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.
From the original heise.de article (https://www.heise.de/news/Betrug-mit-Seagate-Festplatten-Dut...):
> 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.
> messed up somewhere
How do you "mess up" the smart hours accidentally?
Judging by the hard drives you get from amazon, you mess up smart hours by forgetting to flash them to zeros.
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.
"messed up"?
My bet would be on someone in a warehouse mislabelling a pallet or something. Actual malice is a possibility, but it does seem odd to blow up an entire distribution business for some 16 TB HDDs, when HDDs aren't supply constrained at the moment. There were all sorts of shenanigans going on in 2020-21 when supply chains were disrupted (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/chip-shortages-lead-...).
>> It’s hard to imagine this is just a simple mixup, not just because so many retailers are apparently involved but also because they’ve all had their SMART stats reset, which would be very useful to someone trying to pretend a used drive is new.
If the distributor is dealing with new and refurb stock, I wouldn't be surprised if the refurb stock is being sourced from a more questionable supply chain.
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.
accidentally sent out refurbs marked as new to retailers to sell as new
The headline makes this out to be deception by Seagate but the article reads as if it's just one shady, but approved distributor who's sneaking these out as new drives.
I thought that part was unclear, too. This seems to be a particularly big issue on Amazon in Europe. So much so that certain NAS communities, like r/synology recommend to avoid Amazon for HDD purchases.
If you're looking for cheap bulk storage, refurbished/used is a great way to go. It'd just be nice if they told you that's what you were getting :)
Shout out to https://diskprices.com/
Some of the ebay sellers are super honest with their product they are moving too. I saw a photo of a wd red, it looked like someone tried to destroy it with a blowtorch. But they could have easily lied and put up the wd stock product photo.
Yeah esp with enterprise gear. Consumer stuff on eBay is more hit and miss
I just tested my pair of Seagate drives. Their "Power-on Hours" are the same between SMART and FARM logs (via smartctl).
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.
What do you call a scandal when the company name already ends in 'gate? Seagategate?
Had Seagate written off from bad experiences as a teen. Got one not long ago. Failed within 18 months. Yea not doing that again.
I won't ever touch Segate because at one point they released 3TB hdds that were failing catastrophically in 1-2 years of desktop use. I've lost some stuff I shouldn't have.
> after a quick look at the SMART stats, everything appeared normal. Later, though, the reader did a more thorough Field Accessible Reliability Metrics (FARM) test and discovered [that it wasn't]
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).
I've recently been browsing Amazon.de listings for a new HDD and I'm pretty sure I saw someone complain about their supposedly new Seagate EXOS already having hours on it.
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.
I got a couple of outright counterfeit 12TB Ironwolf drives from "AlamCh Trading Inc" on Amazon a couple of months ago. Slipped up and didn't notice that I was buying from an obviously suspicious seller. They did refund them... after being appropriately threatened.
Curiously, how did you identify them as counterfeit? (maybe they were much quieter than normal)
They were physically quite different from some other supposedly "identical" drives I'd just ordered from another source; the actual castings were different (and looked inferior to me). They were also packaged differently (and more cheaply).
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.
Why buy any drives from Amazon? I always buy from a specialty dealer. Where I am that's usually B&H.
Well you see, the website that lets third parties sell used drives as new always offers the best prices on "new" drives :)
It's always more exciting to put your important data on a drive that's been shipped in a box that's much too big for it, with much too little packing material.
Amazon has usually always been the cheapest option, especially compared to a specialty dealer. Costs add up when you're buying many drives.
Whenever I've looked, prices at B&H, or Newegg sold by Newegg, are usually within a few dollars of prices from any Amazon sellers that don't look obviously skeezy. It's a few dollars lower as often as it's a few dollars higher.
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".
Not all of us live in countries with B&H, Newegg, etc.
I only buy SSDs from Amazon honestly. Much rather get my hard drive in person, which sucks, most retailers don't have extensive options.
Seagate’s entire warranty program seems to be a mess. Every time I have to deal with them I get this endless runaround where they demand ridiculous amounts of “proof” that the drive failed, or deny that the drive is under US warranty (bought it new in the US from Newegg).
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.
Enterprise drives that make it into retail channels have been suspect for years and I've received used/dead drives from Amazon, Newegg, etc. pretty habitually.
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.
Had the same thing happen to me with an amazon seller and an ssd. I made sure to rough up the labeling on the device before sending it back.
[dead]
Why should one care if they're still under warranty?
Because hard drives have a limited lifespan. If you buy the drive expecting it to last 5 years, and it's already been used for 1 year, that means you aren't getting what you paid for.
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 one thing, these drives aren't retail drives, and aren't covered by the retail warranty. Which is unexpected when you bought it in a retail environment. OEM drive warranty starts when originally sold, not whenever you purchased it, labeled as new.
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.