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?
It depends. They're simply the most annoying drives out there because Seagate on their wisdom decided to remove half of the SMART data from reports and they won't let you change the power settings like other drives. Those drives will never spin down, they'll even report to the system they're spun down while in fact they'll be still running at a lower speed. They also make a LOT of noise.
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
Ahaha that's about what they do.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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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.