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

There's a backport https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/source/smartm...

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.

You might have success booting some Linux live image from USB. I had success with nixos 24.11 on a Mac Pro (Intel).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

SMR is discouraged for DVR use, many vendors (e.g. Ubiquiti) specifically ask for CMR drives.

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.

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.

Similar workload for high energy physics, think CMS or ATLAS detectors at the LHC.

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.)

> 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

> the hardware phones home

ah, nothing like Windows-only hardware that is being purchased for Linux usage.

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.

It's worrying that SMART data can be reflashed. You'd think the drive vendors would try to prevent this.

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.

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.

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.

Had 4 of the 5000 version of the models. Quickly moved to other drives. Got lucky.

"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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

Not to defend Seagate, but also:

> Although it’s not entirely clear if actual fraud is happening here, something has definitely gone very wrong.

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.

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-...).

accidentally sent out refurbs marked as new to retailers to sell as new