Is this Seagate Exos drive too good to be true?
I found this its the cheapest 10TB Exos drive on Newegg and looking to buy 4 of them. I will be putting them in my NAS that I use for my media library and pc backups. The price I’m posting this is $130, I’m also looking similar Exos drives that are $250 is there a difference? Should I shell up for the more expensive drives?
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It depends. They're simply the most annoying drives out there because Seagate on their wisdom decided to remove half of the SMART data from reports and they won't let you change the power settings like other drives. Those drives will never spin down, they'll even report to the system they're spun down while in fact they'll be still running at a lower speed. They also make a LOT of noise.
I got a set off ebay, Jesus christ they're loud. I ended up returning them cause I could hear the grinding through my whole house
I have 3 14tb exos drives. I have them in a Roswell 4u hotseap chassis. Running unraid.
It's nearly inaudible over the very reasonable case fans. No grinding noises. I can hear the heads moving a bit but it's quite subtle. Not sure why people have such different experiences with these
I noticed when they first spin up on boot they do some sub routine and they're pretty loud and chatty. First time I heard it I was spooked but it worked fine and I just use it for backup so I just moved on. Once it's on and in normal operation it's like any other disk I've used over the decades. Nothing as loud as an old scsci disk or a quantum fireball.
I'm questioning your auditory acuity :P
Ahaha that's about what they do.
Aren’t they meant to go in data centers? You wouldn’t want a drive in a data center to spin down. That introduces latency in getting the data off of them.
That should be a choice of the OS / controller card not of the drive itself. Also what datacenter wants to run drives that don't report half of the SMART data just because they felt like it?
Data centers replace drives when they fail and that's about it. They don't care much about SMART data.
We used to use smart data to predict when to order new drives and on really bad looking days increase our redundancy. Nothing like getting a bad series of drives for PB of data to make you paranoid I guess.
What kind of attributes did you find relevant? I imagine the 19x codes...
I've read the Blackblaze statistics and I'm using a tool (Scrutiny) that takes those stats into account for computing failure probability, but at the end of the day the most reliable tell is when a drive gets kicked out of an array (and/or can't pass the long smart test anymore).
Meanwhile, I have drives with "lesser" attributes sitting on warning values (like command timeout) and ofc I monitor them and have good drives on standby, but they still seem to chug along fine for now.
I have an Exos x16 and x18 drive and they both spin down fine in Debian using hdparm. I use them for cold storage and they're perfectly adequate.
Care you share your hdparm config then?
It's really boring, Debian 12: /dev/disk/by-uuid/8f041da5-6f7a-4ff5-befa-2d3cc61a382c { spindown_time = 241 write_cache = off }
Tried that and doesn't seem to work. :(
Relevant documentation for others about
-S/spindown_time: