3 ms·

And people will still say they dont trust Seagate because of the 3TB drives that failed over a decade ago.

kstrauser 2y ago
Anecdata is such a weird thing. In my own NAS, I've had 3 out of 3 WD Red drives, each a different size, die in an identical manner well before their warranty expired over the last several years. SMART says everything is fine, but the drive's utilization creeps up to a constant 100% and its write IOPS decrease until the whole array is slow as frozen molasses. That's in a constantly comfortable operating environment that's never too hot, cold, or otherwise challenging. And yet it looks like I'm the statistical outlier. Other people -- like Backblaze here -- have decent luck with the same drives that have a 100% failure rate here. Probability is a strange thing, yo. The odds of a specific person winning the lottery are effectively 0, but someone's going to. Looks like I've won the "WD means Waiting Death" sweepstakes.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Indeed, and anecdata is weighted so heavily by our minds, even when we are aware of it and consciously look at the numbers. That's what evolution gives us though. The best brains at survival are the ones that learned from their observations, so we're battling our nature by trying to disregard that. I'll never buy another Seagate because of that one piece of shit I got :-D
- vel0city 2y ago
  Sounds like you're a victim of WD selling Reds with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). Quite a scandal a few years ago. SMR takes advantage of the fact read heads are often smaller than write heads, so it "shingles" the tracks to get better density. However, if you need to rewrite in between tracks that are full, you need to shuffle the data around so it can re-shingle the tracks. This means as your array gets full or even just fragmented, your drives can start to need to shuffle data all over the place to rewrite a random sector. This does hell to drives in an array, which a lot of controllers have no knowledge of this shingling behavior. Shingled drives are OK when you're just constantly writing a stream of data and not going to do a lot of rewriting of data in betweeen. Think security cameras and database backups and what not. They're complete hell if you're doing lots of random files that get a lot of modifications. https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/ https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-...
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    No, these were 100% CMR drives. I checked them very closely when the scandal broke and confirmed that mine were not shingled.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Huh, weird, because that's 100% the failure mode friends of mine who did have shingled drives experienced. Maybe your drives were shingled despite labeling suggesting otherwise, or maybe they had whatever potential different error you got without it being the SMR that killed the arrays in the end. Either way it made me never want to use WD for drives in arrays and not trust their labeling anymore. "WD Red" drives lost all meaning to me; who knows what they're doing inside.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        > Maybe your drives were shingled despite labeling suggesting otherwise I'm not ruling that out. The whole debacle was so amazingly tonedeaf that I wouldn't be surprised if they did that behind the scenes. I wrote this at the time: https://honeypot.net/2020/04/15/staying-away-from.html https://honeypot.net/2020/04/15/staying-away-from.html
redox99 2y ago
I've had so many Seagate drives fail that I won't buy Seagate again. If a brand sells bad drives, they should be aware of the reputational damage it causes. Otherwise there is no downside to selling bad drives.

Anecdata is such a weird thing. In my own NAS, I've had 3 out of 3 WD Red drives, each a different size, die in an identical manner well before their warranty expired over the last several years. SMART says everything is fine, but the drive's utilization creeps up to a constant 100% and its write IOPS decrease until the whole array is slow as frozen molasses. That's in a constantly comfortable operating environment that's never too hot, cold, or otherwise challenging. And yet it looks like I'm the statistical outlier. Other people -- like Backblaze here -- have decent luck with the same drives that have a 100% failure rate here. Probability is a strange thing, yo. The odds of a specific person winning the lottery are effectively 0, but someone's going to. Looks like I've won the "WD means Waiting Death" sweepstakes.

freedomben 2y ago
Indeed, and anecdata is weighted so heavily by our minds, even when we are aware of it and consciously look at the numbers. That's what evolution gives us though. The best brains at survival are the ones that learned from their observations, so we're battling our nature by trying to disregard that. I'll never buy another Seagate because of that one piece of shit I got :-D
vel0city 2y ago
Sounds like you're a victim of WD selling Reds with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). Quite a scandal a few years ago. SMR takes advantage of the fact read heads are often smaller than write heads, so it "shingles" the tracks to get better density. However, if you need to rewrite in between tracks that are full, you need to shuffle the data around so it can re-shingle the tracks. This means as your array gets full or even just fragmented, your drives can start to need to shuffle data all over the place to rewrite a random sector. This does hell to drives in an array, which a lot of controllers have no knowledge of this shingling behavior. Shingled drives are OK when you're just constantly writing a stream of data and not going to do a lot of rewriting of data in betweeen. Think security cameras and database backups and what not. They're complete hell if you're doing lots of random files that get a lot of modifications. https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-red-smr/ https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-smr-vs-cmr-tested-avoid-...
- kstrauser 2y ago
  No, these were 100% CMR drives. I checked them very closely when the scandal broke and confirmed that mine were not shingled.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Huh, weird, because that's 100% the failure mode friends of mine who did have shingled drives experienced. Maybe your drives were shingled despite labeling suggesting otherwise, or maybe they had whatever potential different error you got without it being the SMR that killed the arrays in the end. Either way it made me never want to use WD for drives in arrays and not trust their labeling anymore. "WD Red" drives lost all meaning to me; who knows what they're doing inside.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      > Maybe your drives were shingled despite labeling suggesting otherwise I'm not ruling that out. The whole debacle was so amazingly tonedeaf that I wouldn't be surprised if they did that behind the scenes. I wrote this at the time: https://honeypot.net/2020/04/15/staying-away-from.html https://honeypot.net/2020/04/15/staying-away-from.html

redox99 2y ago

I've had so many Seagate drives fail that I won't buy Seagate again. If a brand sells bad drives, they should be aware of the reputational damage it causes. Otherwise there is no downside to selling bad drives.