2y ago

Is this Seagate Exos drive too good to be true?

I found this its the cheapest 10TB Exos drive on Newegg and looking to buy 4 of them. I will be putting them in my NAS that I use for my media library and pc backups. The price I’m posting this is $130, I’m also looking similar Exos drives that are $250 is there a difference? Should I shell up for the more expensive drives?

20 comments

- I got a set off ebay, Jesus christ they're loud. I ended up returning them cause I could hear the grinding through my whole house
  
  I have 3 14tb exos drives. I have them in a Roswell 4u hotseap chassis. Running unraid.
  It's nearly inaudible over the very reasonable case fans. No grinding noises. I can hear the heads moving a bit but it's quite subtle. Not sure why people have such different experiences with these
- Aren’t they meant to go in data centers? You wouldn’t want a drive in a data center to spin down. That introduces latency in getting the data off of them.
- I have an Exos x16 and x18 drive and they both spin down fine in Debian using hdparm. I use them for cold storage and they're perfectly adequate.
It's just the cheapest type of drive there is. The use case is in large scale RAIDs where one disk failing isn't a big issue. They tend to have decent warranty but under heavy load they're not expected to last multiple years. Personally I use drives like this but I make sure to have them in a RAID and with backup, anything else would be foolish. Do also note that expensive NAS drives aren't guaranteed to last either so a RAID is always recommended.
- To support this: Backblaze consistently reports much higher failure rates for Seagate drives than all others. I personally don't trust them. All my failed drives are Seagate, but that's anecdotal. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/ the by manufacturer graph.
  
  That tracks with my experience as well. Literally every single Seagate drive I've owned has died, while I have decade old WDs that are still trucking along with zero errors. I decided a while back that I was never touching Seagate again.
  
  For sure higher but still not high, we're talking single digit percentage failed drives per year with a massive sample size. TCO (total cost of ownership) might still come out ahead for Seagate being that they are many times quite a bit cheaper. Still drives failures are a part of the bargain when you're running your own NAS so plan for it no matter what drive you end up buying. Which means have cash on hand to buy a new one so you can get up to full integrity as fast as possible. (Best is of course to always have a spare on hand but that isn't feasible for a lot of us.).
- Ok cool, I plan on using them in RAID Z1
Hell of a deal. i started using refurb drives, still 5 year warranty, because I was going through so many. Sometimes you get them half off.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters

HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
NAS Network-Attached Storage
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #383 for this sub, first seen 29th Dec 2023, 10:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Fewer Letters	More Letters
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage

20 comments