Honestly, when I first got into forums, I thought they were literally talking about Linux distros, because at the time, that's literally all I was seeding since that's what I was into.

And they do have more Seagate failures than other brands, but that's because they have more Seagates than other brands. Seagate is generally pretty good value for the money.

Well, it does cost less and less every year. I bought two 8TB drives for $300 each or so, and today a 24TB drive is about that much.

Why did they make an enterprise grade drive SMR? I’m out.

Depends on your use case. The linked drive according to seagate’s spec sheet is only rated for about ~6.5 power-on hours per day(2400 per year). So if just in your desktop for storage then sure. In an always (or mostly) on NAS then I’d find a different drive. It’ll work fine but expect higher failure rates for that use.

Never change pedantic Internet, never change!

IMO, its not a brand issue. Its a seller/batch/brand issue. Hard drives are sensitive to vibration, and if you buy multiple drives from the same place, at the same time, and all the same brand and model, you might be setting yourself up for a bad experience if someone accidentally slammed those boxes around earlier in their life.

I highly recommend everyone buy their drives from different sellers, at different times, spread out over various models from different brands. This helps eliminate the bad batch issue.

Average Lemmy user

Yeah. In the Backblaze data, you can see that annualized failure rates vary significantly by drive model within the same manufacturer.

But if maintaining drive diversity isn't your thing, just buy a cold spare and swap it out when a failure inevitably happens (and then replace the spare).

For affordable set it and forget it cold storage, this is incredible. For anything actively being touched, yeah definitely a pass.

Because they simply cannot do it otherwise.

I would absolutely not use refurbs personally. As part of the refurb process they wipe the SMART data which means you have zero power-on hours listed, zero errors, rewrite-count, etc - absolutely no idea what their previous life was.

Thanks! It seems too risky for something like a hard drive.

That’s fine…they don’t need to release it under their Exos line of enterprise drives. SMR don’t do well in raid arrays especially not highly utilized ones. They require idle time to cleanup and the rebuild times are horrendous.

If you've got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.

If you're really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.

Ain't nothing about me is average except for the size of my cock.

with this I can store at least 3 modern "AAA" games

I've had the same experience. The first HDD that failed on me was a Barricuda 7200.11 with the infamous firmware self-brick issue, and a second 7200.11 that just died slowly from bad sectors.

From then on I only bought WD, I have a Caviar Black 1TB from oh, 2009-ish that's still in service, though it's finally starting to concern me with it's higher temperature readings, probably the motor bearings going.
After that I've got a few of the WD RE4 1TBs still running like new, and 6 various other WD Gold series drives, all running happily.

The only WD failure I've had was from improper shipping, when TigerDirect (rip) didn't pack the drive correctly, and the carrier football tossed the thing at my porch, it was losing sectors as soon as it first started, but the RMA drive that replaced it is still running in a server fine.

Because Seagate sell the most drives and all drives fail?

The problem with same batch drives is failing together, potentially beyond your ability to recover with replacement drives.