[HN Gopher] Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousand...
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Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours
Author : 6581
Score : 303 points
Date : 2025-01-29 13:42 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| felindev wrote:
| > 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?
| baobun wrote:
| > 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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.)
| knute wrote:
| 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_f
| a...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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.
| baobun wrote:
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| 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"
| account42 wrote:
| It really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| jerf wrote:
| "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.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an
| order of magnitude higher rates, too.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This reminds me that I haven't seen a drive report from
| Backblaze in a while posted here.
| remram wrote:
| There's one per quarter. Last one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122740
| gruez wrote:
| >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-...
| alias_neo wrote:
| > 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.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I think its actually 8TB and under that WD switched to SMR.
| All their drives over 8TB are CMR, last I heard.
| alias_neo wrote:
| 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?
| dml2135 wrote:
| 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.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| > 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.
| alias_neo wrote:
| 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.
| rendaw wrote:
| Toshiba (and Seagate) were mislabeling SMR drives at a
| premium too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| 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?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 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.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| danparsonson wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >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.
| linsomniac wrote:
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| marceldegraaf wrote:
| Those drives are amazing. Not exactly cheap, but very
| reliable and silent enough for home server use.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| teekert wrote:
| I avoid WD since the WD Red SMR controversy. Was under the
| impression Seagate has always been solid. Bummer.
| quesera wrote:
| Article is about reports from German customers (this is clear in
| the orignal title, but not the current HN title), and mostly with
| 16TB Exos HDDs.
|
| FWIW, I just bought a bunch of Seagate HDDs (US vendor) and my
| warranty periods line up with the DOMs on the packaging.
|
| You can check your warranty period/status at:
|
| https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements
| nbernard wrote:
| 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... :(
| JAlexoid wrote:
| 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.
| xnorswap wrote:
| How is listing used devices as new "not necessarily bad"?
|
| It's fraud.
| quesera wrote:
| 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.
| tedivm wrote:
| 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.
| nucleardog wrote:
| 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.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| wow. Good to know. Had no idea (but I understand why they
| would want to do that).
| quesera wrote:
| 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).
| sekh60 wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| kmoser wrote:
| > 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.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| 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.
| quesera wrote:
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| 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.
| RachelF wrote:
| 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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.
| Hizonner wrote:
| 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.
| nness wrote:
| Curiously, how did you identify them as counterfeit? (maybe
| they were much quieter than normal)
| Hizonner wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I only buy SSDs from Amazon honestly. Much rather get my hard
| drive in person, which sucks, most retailers don't have
| extensive options.
| Cerium wrote:
| Why buy any drives from Amazon? I always buy from a specialty
| dealer. Where I am that's usually B&H.
| michaelt wrote:
| Well you see, the website that lets third parties sell used
| drives as new always offers the best prices on "new" drives
| :)
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Amazon has usually always been the cheapest option,
| especially compared to a specialty dealer. Costs add up when
| you're buying many drives.
| Hizonner wrote:
| 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".
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not all of us live in countries with B&H, Newegg, etc.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| 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.
| rycomb wrote:
| 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.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| I'm really surprised B&H has turned to this, they've been a
| very good retailer in my experience.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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...
| madphilosopher wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| 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.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| 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.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| >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.
| Snoozus wrote:
| In this case practically all german retailers are affected.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| Supercompressor wrote:
| 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.
| nness wrote:
| 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.
| scrlk wrote:
| 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,
| Bottcher, Buroshop 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.
| Tepix wrote:
| "messed up"?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| accidentally sent out refurbs marked as new to retailers to
| sell as new
| scrlk wrote:
| 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-...).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| >> 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.
| scrlk wrote:
| 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| > messed up somewhere
|
| How do you "mess up" the smart hours accidentally?
| malfist wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.)
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The sensors are physically very different in the latest
| Sony a7, a7R (high resolution) and a7S (high sensitivity)
| cameras.
| Merrill wrote:
| 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.
| egorfine wrote:
| > the hardware phones home
|
| ah, nothing like Windows-only hardware that is being
| purchased for Linux usage.
| compootr wrote:
| > 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
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| tjoff wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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-...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Internal, not external. (Sure, people are known to shuck
| the drive out of the reliability-killing enclosure)
| jasonjayr wrote:
| How does the enclosure kill reliability?
| bombcar wrote:
| External drives are often designed for a shorter duty
| cycle and don't dissipate heat as well as they could.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| monkpit wrote:
| Wouldn't a NAS have the same problem, and wouldn't a
| battery backup solve it? Genuinely curious
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| loeg wrote:
| > 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| 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."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See http://danluu.com/filesystem-errors/ you are damned if
| you do and damned if you don't
| linker3000 wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| > 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.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Yes
|
| PSA to anyone reading: do _not_ use Purple drives for
| anything non-DVR /NVR related
| duskwuff wrote:
| Is there something that makes them unsuitable for other
| workloads?
| smegsicle wrote:
| 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
| buran77 wrote:
| 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.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > 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...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >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.
| snvzz wrote:
| >NILFS seems to make assumptions based on SSDs, blowing
| up during its cleaning operation
|
| Wait what? Isn't NILFS designed for spinning rust?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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?
| scottlamb wrote:
| > 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.
| yencabulator wrote:
| > ...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).
| scottlamb wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.)
| scottlamb wrote:
| > 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > 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
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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.
| yencabulator wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| 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.
| yencabulator wrote:
| 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.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > 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...
| juancn wrote:
| SMR is discouraged for DVR use, many vendors (e.g. Ubiquiti)
| specifically ask for CMR drives.
| LeFantome wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Similar workload for high energy physics, think CMS or ATLAS
| detectors at the LHC.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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".
| behringer wrote:
| 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.
| Meneth wrote:
| I just tested my pair of Seagate drives. Their "Power-on Hours"
| are the same between SMART and FARM logs (via smartctl).
| yobbo wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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!
| rsync wrote:
| "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
| mjw1007 wrote:
| > 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).
| wumms wrote:
| You can read out the FARM logs of Seagate hard drives using
| smartctl -l farm /dev/sd<n>
|
| They're supposed to be "more trustworthy" than the regular SMART
| stats.
|
| (My two "new" 16TB Exos drives had 0 hours (regular) and ~18k
| hours (farm) - DOM 04JUN2021 and 07JUN2021. Also, zfs refused to
| format the drive: 'already formatted as ddf_raid_member'.)
| angry_moose wrote:
| 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.
| jonatron wrote:
| There's a backport https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-
| backports/source/smartm...
| leidenfrost wrote:
| Having to install a backport of a version released one and
| half years ago is wild.
| diggan wrote:
| Favoring stability doesn't come without its drawbacks
| (nor without benefits).
| Lammy wrote:
| That's really not a lot of time in the scheme of things.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't
| like the age of packages in Stable
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Welcome to Debian. The newest stable release (bookworm)
| is from June 2023.
| rlpb wrote:
| 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)
| tuetuopay wrote:
| 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.
| TkTech wrote:
| 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.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| 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.
| TkTech wrote:
| 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.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. I have an old iMac running Mint, so I
| guess I'll start there with the openSeaChest utility.
| wumms wrote:
| You might have success booting some Linux live image from
| USB. I had success with nixos 24.11 on a Mac Pro (Intel).
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| 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.
| jmakov wrote:
| Why should one care if they're still under warranty?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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...
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| darknavi wrote:
| 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/
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| efitz wrote:
| 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/
| gpvos wrote:
| Which is why the article calls it fraud in the first line of
| the text.
| voytec wrote:
| Not to defend Seagate, but also:
|
| > Although it's not entirely clear if actual fraud is
| happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.
| snvzz wrote:
| That sentence protects against defamation lawsuits.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Had Seagate written off from bad experiences as a teen. Got one
| not long ago. Failed within 18 months. Yea not doing that again.
| helpfulclippy wrote:
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| 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...
| MisterTea wrote:
| >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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 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 the last
| FreeBSD verson of TrueNAS and the other is just minimal
| FreeBSD.
| wumms wrote:
| 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 Bottcher 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!
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| 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.
| andreldm wrote:
| 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.
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