6 ms·

Where's the Seagate lawsuit? They've been doing this too for years now. AFAIK you can no longer buy 4TB Seagate consumer 3.5" drives now, the current product li

Where's the Seagate lawsuit? They've been doing this too for years now. AFAIK you can no longer buy 4TB Seagate consumer 3.5" drives now, the current product line is all undisclosed SMR unless you go to higher tiers. E.g the ST4000DM000 (which I have a pile of in an array) was replaced with the ST4000DM004, which is sold as a direct replacement in that product line but is SMR.

teruakohatu 6y ago
Did they label them as being for NAS? This is the issue. They are unsuitable for use in a NAS.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  That's fair, though it's still sad that you need to spend more money for a Seagate NAS drive today when 4 years ago a Barracuda cost 20% less than that and worked just fine.
- Agentlien 6y ago
  As someone who has no experience in this field, why are they specifically unsuitable for NAS?
  - p1necone 6y ago
    They'll work fine (although with the normal expected slower writes of SMR drives) until a drive fails normally and the raid array has to rebuild (which is kind of the reason you use a raid array), then it could take a week+ and there's a very good chance you'll get more failures during and lose all your data.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
whyleyc 6y ago
Looks like if they did do this in the past they are now attempting to move away from it: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
FractalParadigm 6y ago
> the ST4000DM000 (which I have a pile of in an array) was replaced with the ST4000DM004 So I had no idea about this, and was curious if this is why I've been having so many issues with 3x4TB Seagate drives in FreeNAS. Turns out all three are the SMR ST4000DM004 model, and I will be looking to replace these post-haste. My own fault using consumer drives! If anyone is curious about said issues, it usually starts within 24 hours of booting the server. Eventually it will start throwing checksum errors on that array, even with as few as two disks in RAID1. Scrubs/resilvers generally have errors (10+ daily), and if your pool survives "too long," it will start kicking disks out of the array, and will not re-initialize them on a reboot.
AmVess 6y ago
They disclose it right on their website: https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/ https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that page is a recent addition after all the bad press this issue has gotten. It does not contain proper model numbers, and the info isn't (or wasn't) in the drives' spec sheets, which is where it should be.
  - jannes 6y ago
    At least their entire IronWolf line (which is their NAS line) seems to be free of SMR.
jannes 6y ago
Both the ST4000DM000 and the ST4000DM004 are not marketed for NAS usage, because they are part of the Barracuda line. You should've gotten IronWolf drives.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I shouldn't "have gotten" NAS drives, because I have 15 of the DM000s in an array and only one has failed so far. That means, assuming getting NAS drives would've earned me a 0% failure rate (which they wouldn't have), I would've spent two to four times as much money on the NAS markup as I have on replacing the single failed drive. Just because Seagate says they want to upsell me for dubious market segmentation reasons doesn't mean I need to pay attention to them. I know what I'm doing, I know desktop drives work just fine for my use case. Before SMR. Now with SMR, they've found the perfect way of getting rid of everyone who was buying desktop drives for NAS use they were perfectly suitable for, and force them into the NAS upsell. 4 years later and it still costs more to buy a NAS drive today than it cost to buy an equally fit por purpose non SMR desktop drive back then.

teruakohatu 6y ago

Did they label them as being for NAS? This is the issue. They are unsuitable for use in a NAS.

marcan_42 6y ago
That's fair, though it's still sad that you need to spend more money for a Seagate NAS drive today when 4 years ago a Barracuda cost 20% less than that and worked just fine.
Agentlien 6y ago
As someone who has no experience in this field, why are they specifically unsuitable for NAS?
- p1necone 6y ago
  They'll work fine (although with the normal expected slower writes of SMR drives) until a drive fails normally and the raid array has to rebuild (which is kind of the reason you use a raid array), then it could take a week+ and there's a very good chance you'll get more failures during and lose all your data.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

whyleyc 6y ago

Looks like if they did do this in the past they are now attempting to move away from it: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...

FractalParadigm 6y ago

> the ST4000DM000 (which I have a pile of in an array) was replaced with the ST4000DM004 So I had no idea about this, and was curious if this is why I've been having so many issues with 3x4TB Seagate drives in FreeNAS. Turns out all three are the SMR ST4000DM004 model, and I will be looking to replace these post-haste. My own fault using consumer drives! If anyone is curious about said issues, it usually starts within 24 hours of booting the server. Eventually it will start throwing checksum errors on that array, even with as few as two disks in RAID1. Scrubs/resilvers generally have errors (10+ daily), and if your pool survives "too long," it will start kicking disks out of the array, and will not re-initialize them on a reboot.

AmVess 6y ago

They disclose it right on their website: https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/ https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

marcan_42 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that page is a recent addition after all the bad press this issue has gotten. It does not contain proper model numbers, and the info isn't (or wasn't) in the drives' spec sheets, which is where it should be.
- jannes 6y ago
  At least their entire IronWolf line (which is their NAS line) seems to be free of SMR.

jannes 6y ago

Both the ST4000DM000 and the ST4000DM004 are not marketed for NAS usage, because they are part of the Barracuda line. You should've gotten IronWolf drives.

marcan_42 6y ago
I shouldn't "have gotten" NAS drives, because I have 15 of the DM000s in an array and only one has failed so far. That means, assuming getting NAS drives would've earned me a 0% failure rate (which they wouldn't have), I would've spent two to four times as much money on the NAS markup as I have on replacing the single failed drive. Just because Seagate says they want to upsell me for dubious market segmentation reasons doesn't mean I need to pay attention to them. I know what I'm doing, I know desktop drives work just fine for my use case. Before SMR. Now with SMR, they've found the perfect way of getting rid of everyone who was buying desktop drives for NAS use they were perfectly suitable for, and force them into the NAS upsell. 4 years later and it still costs more to buy a NAS drive today than it cost to buy an equally fit por purpose non SMR desktop drive back then.