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Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

215 points by thomasjb

by userbinator

5 subcomments

Reading 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.

by hddherman

1 subcomments

Hello, 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.e...

by aftbit

9 subcomments

I'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.

by leobg

14 subcomments

I 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?

by speedgoose

6 subcomments

I 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.

by compsciphd

0 subcomment

anecdote: 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.

by hexagonwin

4 subcomments

What 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.

by sigio

0 subcomment

The 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.

by t312227

0 subcomment

hello,
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
for example: for 3,5 inches HDDs sorted by "price / TB"
* 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€

by vintagedave

0 subcomment

What 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.

by walrus01

1 subcomments

I was hoping for a full text dump of the SMART data from the drives.

by buckle8017

1 subcomments

These drives are very likely refurbs that are unofficial.
White labeling avoids lawsuits.

by serf

0 subcomment

The 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!

by econ

3 subcomments

OT
> 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.

0 subcomment

by lofaszvanitt

0 subcomment

I 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.