February 23, 201511 yr Available at Newegg thru Ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Seagate-Expansion-5TB-USB-3-0-Desktop-External-Hard-Drive-STBV5000100/301380766274 Apparently this did use to have some issues wrt controller compatibility so YMMV, but I thought it was a low enough price to take a gamble given the newer firmware reports.
March 1, 201511 yr Author Appears so. Mine arrived with CC44 firmware and had no problem doing a hdparm -B on it. Not that I've really noticed any excessive noise from it. Ran a few smart tests (conveyance and long), and now running preclear on it... I see that this is at the same price now on amazon.com and bhphotovideo.com
March 3, 201511 yr Please let us know how the preclear went, mine were not so good with same drive on 2 drives when i did them internally.
March 3, 201511 yr I'd be cautious about buying these drives -- there have been several folks who had very bad luck with the 5TB Seagates. If you do buy them, test them VERY thoroughly while you're still in the Newegg 30-day return period
March 3, 201511 yr Im just going to get the 6gb internal seagates for 199 from amazon, quite a bit more expensive but i know they work (for around 3 years according to backblaze) - its so damn hard to choose a drive and not spend top dollar.
March 10, 201511 yr Author So I did have issues running preclear where it would fail around the 70% mark during the clear (drive would just drop out of linux). I suspect this has something to do with the fact that this is a shingled (SMR) drive and there's some interaction with the way the script does the clear (maybe it's doing random sectors, or interspersed reads?) and the persistence cache inside this drive. Regardless, I had no issues doing a regular badblocks test, and right now it's running happily in my array as a parity drive with no issues or parity sync errors.
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