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> One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the onl

by diggan 2y ago

> One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the only ones laughing about that. AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite. > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? If it isn't Seagate, it's someone else. Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising? Feels like a rite of passage for HDD sellers to somehow defraud consumers sooner or later.

jerf 2y ago
"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.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  Class actions are for lawyers. They will lowball how much damage was done and consumers will see $6 once all is said and done. I'm sure Seagate would rather not go through it, but the lesson for other companies will be just to get caught slower.
  - jerf 2y ago
    You'll note I called it a "corporate nightmare" and didn't describe as anything like the white horse coming to the rescue of the consumer.
immibis 2y ago
Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
- dylan604 2y ago
  This reminds me that I haven't seen a drive report from Backblaze in a while posted here.
  - remram 2y ago
    There's one per quarter. Last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122740
- gruez 2y ago
  >Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too. Source? Aside from bad models (eg. ST3000DM001), their failure rates are comparable to other vendors, hovering around the low single digit percentage points. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-...
alias_neo 2y ago
> 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.
- dml2135 2y ago
  I think its actually 8TB and under that WD switched to SMR. All their drives over 8TB are CMR, last I heard.
  - alias_neo 2y ago
    You're probably right, I forget which way around it was, but if I was to take an educated guess, I'd say that SMR on the lower capacity models lets them cut costs because the added density of SMR lets them use fewer platters?
    - dml2135 2y ago
      I'm not sure why SMR would save costs on lower capacity drives but not higher capacity drives. It may be a technical reason, but I'd also find a corporate-strategic reason to be plausible -- i.e., they were like, any consumers that give a shit about something as technical as SMR vs CMR are probably the ones buying our high-capacity drives.
- marxisttemp 2y ago
rendaw 2y ago
Toshiba (and Seagate) were mislabeling SMR drives at a premium too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959

by diggan 2y ago

jerf 2y ago

"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.

Capricorn2481 2y ago
Class actions are for lawyers. They will lowball how much damage was done and consumers will see $6 once all is said and done. I'm sure Seagate would rather not go through it, but the lesson for other companies will be just to get caught slower.
- jerf 2y ago
  You'll note I called it a "corporate nightmare" and didn't describe as anything like the white horse coming to the rescue of the consumer.

immibis 2y ago

Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.

dylan604 2y ago
This reminds me that I haven't seen a drive report from Backblaze in a while posted here.
- remram 2y ago
  There's one per quarter. Last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122740
gruez 2y ago
>Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too. Source? Aside from bad models (eg. ST3000DM001), their failure rates are comparable to other vendors, hovering around the low single digit percentage points. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-...

alias_neo 2y ago

> 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.

dml2135 2y ago
I think its actually 8TB and under that WD switched to SMR. All their drives over 8TB are CMR, last I heard.
- alias_neo 2y ago
  You're probably right, I forget which way around it was, but if I was to take an educated guess, I'd say that SMR on the lower capacity models lets them cut costs because the added density of SMR lets them use fewer platters?
  - dml2135 2y ago
    I'm not sure why SMR would save costs on lower capacity drives but not higher capacity drives. It may be a technical reason, but I'd also find a corporate-strategic reason to be plausible -- i.e., they were like, any consumers that give a shit about something as technical as SMR vs CMR are probably the ones buying our high-capacity drives.
marxisttemp 2y ago

rendaw 2y ago

Toshiba (and Seagate) were mislabeling SMR drives at a premium too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959