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Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/10/06/datablocks-white-label-drives/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.e...
- econ 1y agoOT > Half of tech YouTube has been sponsored by companies like... It just struck me that the product reviews are a part of the social realm that is barely explored. Imagine a video website like TikTok or YouTube etc where all videos are organized under products. Priority to those who purchased the product and a category ranked by how many similar products you've purchased. The thing sort of exists currently in some hard to find corner of TEMU etc but there are no channels or playlists.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 1y agoThe reason you don’t see videos arranged by product is because everyone knows not to trust unknown creators telling you how great a product is. Viewers want to see opinions from specific people they’ve come to trust, not the first video that comes up for a product.
- aspenmayer 1y agoCoincidentally or not, those folks who have more subscribers usually charge more for their consideration. That’s why I generally trust Steve of Gamers Nexus more than other folks, because they don’t do ads except for promoting their own products, so there’s no conflict of interest. On the one hand, Gamers Nexus doesn’t manufacture their own hard drives, but on the other, they publish their methodology and have a reputation to uphold, so I would trust their judgement regarding testing computer hardware more than folks who do engage in outside advertising.
- markerz 1y agoAlternatively, unknown creators have less incentive to falsely promote or lie. It’s the reason I tend to trust random strangers on Reddit than popular YouTubers who have achieved monetization and sponsorship.
- Aurornis 1y agoNo, that’s the opposite of how it works. I’ve seen how PR firms interact with creators. It’s much easier to get the small time creators to take your product and make a positive video because getting some free product is the biggest payout they’re getting from their channel. They will always give positive reviews because they have more to gain from flattering the companies that send them free stuff than from the $1.50 they’re going to earn in ad money. The PR firms who worked with the company I was at had a long list of small time video creators who would reliably produce positive videos of something as long as you sent them a free product. The creators know this game.
- econ 1y agoThey don't have to tell you anything. Just unbox and show what they got. I just purchased a bicycle chain cleaning device. It was absurdly cheap. The plastic was extruded poorly, it was hard to assemble, it was not entirely obvious how to use it. However! It did the job and it barely got dirty. I expected it to be full of rusty oil both inside and outside but it accumulated just a tiny smudge on the inlet. If anyone made a video it would be a fantastic product.
- noAnswer 1y ago1. You could be that anyone. 2. The world is filled to the brim with videos about "fantastic products".
- ghostly_s 1y agoGod, the flood of absolutely useless "review" videos Amazon has incentivized customers to shit all over their site which are nothing more than unboxings are the worst thing about that ecosystem. No thank you.
- econ 1y agoThink of it like a football channel, a place to contain such things. Amazon is just not interested in organizing it properly. You should have a look what river of fresh nonsense is uploaded to YouTube. The difference is that amazon has you look at it as if something valuable.
- 9dev 1y agoI don’t trust big channels especially, because I assume they have just sold themselves out to the biggest sponsor. Influencers only exist due to campaign deals, where companies try to sneak their ads into your mind by abusing your inclination to trust another human being. All of it is sickening. In comparison, I’d rather read a general review magazine with a long history. At least they don’t try to trick me into believing they are working out of the goodness of their hearts, and they usually aren’t married to a single big sponsor. Online reviews are broken beyond repair.
- ghostly_s 1y ago>I’d rather read a general review magazine with a long history. Do any of these still exist?
- tatersolid 1y agoConsumer Reports
- numpad0 1y agoThere's Kakaku.com[1] in Japanese Internet for all consumer electronics, Minkara for cars, bookmeter.com for books, and 5ch.net as fallback. It's surprising that there's only Goodreads on English Internet that everyone have heard of... 1: https://review.kakaku.com/review/K0001682323/ https://review.kakaku.com/review/K0001682323/ | https://review-kakaku-com.translate.goog/review/K0001682323/?_x_tr_sl=ja&_x_tr_tl=en& https://review-kakaku-com.translate.goog/review/K0001682323/...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- speedgoose 1y agoI admire the courage to store data on refurbished Seagate hard drives. I prefer SSD storage with some backups using cloud cold storage, because I’m not the one replacing the failing hard drives.
- stirlo 1y agoAnd I prefer to have a healthy bank account balance. Storing 18TB (let alone with raid) on SSDs is something only those earning Silicon Valley tech wages can afford.
- patrakov 1y agoNot really. I know that my sleep is worth more than the difference between HDD and SSD prices, and I know the difference between the failure rates and the headache caused by the RMA process, so I buy SSDs. In essence, what we together are saying is that people with super-sensitive sleep that are also easily upset, and that don't have ultra-high salaries, cannot really afford 18 TB of data (even though they can afford an HDD), and that's true.
- gambiting 1y agoWell, again, well done on being able to afford it. I have 24TB array on cheap second hand drives from CEX for about £100 each, using DrivePool - and guess what, if one of them dies I'll just buy another £100 second hand drive. But also guess what - in the 6 years I had this setup, all of these are still in good condition. Paying for SSDs upfront would have been a gigantic financial mistake(imho).
- arjie 1y agoWe bought a few Kioxia 30.72 TiB SSDs for a couple of thousand in a liquidation sale. Sadly, I don't work there any more or I could have looked it up. U.2 drives if I recall, so you do need either a PCIe card or the appropriate stuff on your motherboard but pretty damn nice drives.
- jabart 1y ago
- hddherman 1y agoHello, author here! It's a nice surprise to notice my own post here, but the timing is unfortunate as I'm shuffling things around on my home server and will accidentally/intentionally take it offline for a bit. Here's a Wayback Machine copy of the page when that does happen: https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/10/06/datablocks-white-label-drives/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.e...
- justinclift 1y agoHave you considered 2nd hard enterprise SSDs? Sometimes larger sized models of those (15TB+) can be found with very good pricing. :)
- hddherman 1y agoI have considered going that route, but I'd have to switch to a platform that supports those formats and that will likely be too expensive for me as a hobbyist.
- leobg 1y agoI was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?
- tw04 1y agoIf you don’t need any performance it’s a great backup strategy. If your only way of connecting the drives to the laptop is USB I would be concerned about data integrity if it’s important data.
- amelius 1y agoWhy is USB so bad at data integrity. Doesn't it have error detection/correction? If so, that sounds like a huge design flaw.
- beagle3 1y agoIndividual writes are safe, in my Experience with thousands of uSB drives in many configurations, some with 12 2tb drives hanging on multiple USB hubs at the same time. However, there are disconnects/reconnects every now and then. If you use a standard raid over these usb drives, almost every disconnect/reconnect will trigger a rebuild — and rebuilds take many hours. If you are unlucky enough to have multiple disconnects during a rebuild, you are in trouble.
- amelius 1y agoI've had bitflips with USB transfers of 1-10TB. I don't remember the specifics, but my personal confidence in USB is low.
- beala 1y agoThe official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a reliable experience. For example, I’ve heard that some usb-to-sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data. That said, there are of course many people on the internet who have thrown caution to the wind and report that it’s working fine for them. Personally I’m in the process of building a NAS with an old 9th gen Intel i5. Many mobos support 6 SATA ports and three mirrored 20 TB pairs is enough storage for me. I’m guessing it’ll be a bit more power hungry than a ugreen/synology/etc appliance but there will also be plenty of headroom for running other services. [1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/corehardwareguide/ https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/coreha...
- buckle8017 1y agoThese drives are very likely refurbs that are unofficial. White labeling avoids lawsuits.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aftbit 1y agoI've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they also feel just an order of magnitude too small to me. How do you store ~100 TB of content with room to grow without a wide NAS? Archiving rarely used stuff out to individual pairs of disks could work, as could running some kind of cluster FS on cheap nodes (tinyminimicro, raspberry pi, framework laptop, etc) with 2 or 4x disks each off USB controllers. So far none of this seems to solve the problem that is solved quite elegantly by the 1U enterprise box... if only you don't look at the power bill.
- dragontamer 1y agoI have to imagine that the best NAS build is simply a 6-core or 8-core standard AMD or Intel with a few HBA controllers and maybe 10Gbit SPF+ fiber or something. "Old server hardware" for $300 is a bit of a variation, in that you're just buying something from 5 years ago so that its cheaper. But if you want to improve power-efficiency, buy a CPU from today rather than an old one. -------- IIRC, the "5 year old used market" for servers is particularly good because many datacenters and companies opt for a ~5-year upgrade cycle. That means 5-year-old equipment is always being sold off at incredible rates. Any 5-year-old server will obviously have all the features you need for a NAS (likely excellent connectivity, expandibility, BMS, physical space, etc. etc.). Just you have to put up with power-efficiency specs of 5 years ago.
- hypercube33 1y agoDell R500 series is very good for dense storage at low costs if you lean to SATA or NL-SAS
- _cenw 1y agoFor AMD Zen, they have power consumption overhead on all chiplet designs, even if the chip only has one core complex, the separate IO die makes it hard to get idle power consumption under 30W. Usually the chips with explicitly integrated GPUs (G-suffix, or laptop chips) are monolithic and can hit 10W or lower.
- hexagonwin 1y agoWhat exactly are these "white label drives"? Aren't these just normal seagate exos drives with SMART information wiped and labels removed? i.e. just a worse used drive.
- bluedino 1y agoWeren't shucked drives (removed from enclosures) referred to as White label drives at one point?
- compsciphd 1y agomost shucked drives have a normal manufacturer label on them. the drives identify as a normal drive and even many (most?) times have their serial # registered in the manufacturer's system.
- ghostly_s 1y agoTrying to think of reasons why the manufacturer wouldn't want their name on them and none of them are good. And for not even much of a discount.
- userbinator 1y agoApparently Seagate drives that weren't good enough to have their own name on them... which given the history of even their branded drives, is something I'd only use for temporary caching of data that's easily regenerated.
- ndiddy 1y agoThe "OS" on the drive stands for "off-spec". As far as I understand, here's where they come from: 1. A large company (think cloud storage provider or something) wanting to build out storage infrastructure buys a large amount of drives from Seagate. 2. When the company receives the drives from Seagate, they randomly sample from the lot to make sure the drives are fully functional and meet specifications. 3. The company identifies issues from the sampled drives. These can range from dents/dings in the casing or torn labels to firmware or reliability issues. 4. The company returns the entire lot to Seagate as defective. Seagate now doesn't want anything to do with these drives, so they relabel them as "OS" with no Seagate branding and sell them as-is at a discount to drive resellers. 5. The drive resellers may or may not do further testing on the drives (you can probably tell by how much of a warranty a given reseller offers) before selling them onto people wanting cheap storage.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoI never understood why they let Seagate et al do this game about hard drives. If they offer a warranty, then replace the drive to brand new, and shove the recertified, fixed whatever bullshit up your wahzoo.
- walrus01 1y agoI was hoping for a full text dump of the SMART data from the drives.
- awaymazdacx5 1y agoIf CSPRNG encrypts /dev/urandom, encrypting the data using a binary 256 bit AES cmd to update entropy pool would double contain the data, which is writing /dev/random to /dev/nvme0n1p1.
- serf 1y agoThe way the story lead with the belief that the drives were likely going to be untrustworthy made me think the author was going to throw them in a system with multiple redundancies or use them as additional parity drives.. god speed!
- userbinator 1y agoReading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-rigid mount. Around 20 years ago it was a short-lived fad in the silent-PC community to suspend drives on rubber bands, and many of those who did that experienced unusually short drive lifetimes and very high seek error rates. Elasticity is the worst, since it causes the actuator arm to oscillate. The ideal mount is as rigid as possible.
- mmaunder 1y agoThanks, very interesting. TIL.
- ranma42 1y agoI've been mounting my 3.5" hard drives on those "fad" rubber band 5.25" drive bay adapters for decades and have not noticed any increased failure rate at all. Sure, seek time may be worse, but the reduced noise has been worth it for me.
- justsomehnguy 1y agoI think OP is talking about something quite different. Can you give a pic or link on what you are using?
- userbinator 1y agoThe problem isn't just slower seeks; it's when vibration causes the head to go off-track and write data where it shouldn't, faster than the servo can correct. Track pitch in modern hard drives is only a few dozen nanometers.
- matt-p 1y agoYes. If you need this you are far better off buying SSDs than wasting time on these silly ideas.
- vintagedave 1y agoWhat a fascinating website (in general - other articles are worth reading too.) The author is Estonian; the website name (and his name) 'õunapuu' means 'apple tree'. I love Estonian names: often closely tied to nature.
- t312227 1y agohello, thanks for the great article!! 2 remarks from my side: * some smartctl -a ... output would have been nice ~ i don't care if it is from "when the drives where shipped" or from any later point in time * prices are somewhat ... aehm ... lets call them "uncompetitive" at least for where i'm at (austria, central-europe, eu) i compared prices normalized by cost pro TB with new (!) drives from the austrian price-portal "geizhals" * https://geizhals.at https://geizhals.at for example: for 3,5 inches HDDs sorted by "price / TB" * https://geizhals.at/?cat=hde7s&xf=5704_3.5%22~5717_SATA%203Gb%2Fs~5717_SATA%206Gb%2Fs&sort=r https://geizhals.at/?cat=hde7s&xf=5704_3.5%22~5717_SATA%203G... sometimes the prices are slightly higher for the used (!) drives ... sometimes also a bit lower, but imho (!) not enough to justify buying refurbished drives over new (!) ones ... just my 0.02€
- sigio 1y agoThe reduction in warranty from 5 years to 1 when buying these doesn't weigh up to the quite limited reduction in price. This would only cover failures during the first few months of runtime, and while most drive-failures will be in the beginning, or after 5+ years, i've seen enough drives die in year 2-5 to prefer some warranty cover, especially on the $200 drives.
- compsciphd 1y agoanecdote: I've had very bad experience with these OS white label drives, even when marked as new. I've had much better luck shucking USB drives. 4+ years ago I bought 20 "new" (can't validate), "seagate manufactured" (can't validate) "OS" SAS drives, and 2 started throwing errors in truenas quickly (sadly after I had the ability to return them). Had another 20 WD and Segate drives I shucked at the same time (was going into 3 12x SAS/SATA machines and 1 4x SATA NAS). The NAS got sidelined as had to use the SATA drives were meant for and no longer trusted the SAS drives so wanted to keep the 2 extra drives as backup. Which was a good idea, as over the next 4 years another 2 of SAS drives started throwing similar errors. so 20% of the white label drives didn't really last, while 100% of the shucked drives have. What was even worse, the firmware on the "OS" drives was crap, while it "technically" had smart data, it didn't provide any stats, just passed/not passed. (main lesson learned from this, don't accept Another anecdote: For a long time I wasn't sure what to do with the SAS drives as in the past I used unused drives for this for cold offline storage, but SAS docks were very expensive ($200+). Recently it seems they have come down in price to under $50 so I bought and was able to fill the drives up (albeit very slowly, it seems they did have problems (was only getting 10-20MB/s), but at least I was able to validate their contents a few times after that, a bit less slow (80MB/s). Aside: 3 weeks ago I had multiple power outages that I thought created problems in one of the shucked drives (was getting uncorrectable reads, though ZFS handled it ok) and a smart long test show pending sectors. But after force writing all the pending sectors with hdparm, none of the sectors were reallocated. I now think it just had bad partial writes when the power outage hit, so the sectors literally had bad data as the error correcting code didn't match up, also explains why they were all in blocks of 8), and multiple smart long tests later and "fingers crossed", everything seems fine.