Seagate 8TB Shingled Drives in UnRAID


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Question for all.  I have used these 8tb external Seagate drives in the past that I have shucked from case.  No issues.  So black friend I purchased 3 from Newegg and 1 from Amazon.  All of them now have Reallocated sector count!  In the past didn't get this.  So I put them all back in cases and tested them with SeaTools and ran the Fix All - Long and they all pass.  Is Seagate doing something to these drives now?

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4 hours ago, rmilyard said:

Ok so it has to be something Seagate is doing.  I picked up 8 of these new.  All 8 have failed with same issues.  No way would 8 fail.  I have used them in the past with no issues but now can't get one to work.  Remove them from UnRAID put back in case and run Seagate tools and all test fine.

Very strange, can you post a couple of those SMART reports?

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5 minutes ago, rmilyard said:

Here is one more that had 9000hrs on it.  All the others I have returned.

milyard-tower-smart-20181210-0838.zip

That one shows problems in different attributes, like reported uncorrect and runtime bad block, in my mind further confirming nothing to do with being shucked, probably just bad luck, or you might have some issues on your server, like bad power, that can damage drives.

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2 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

That one shows problems in different attributes, like reported uncorrect and runtime bad block, in my mind further confirming nothing to do with being shucked, probably just bad luck, or you might have some issues on your server, like bad power, that can damage drives.

Just switched to a WD Red and zero errors in same port.  So don't think it's the controller or power.

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Just now, rmilyard said:

Just switched to a WD Red and zero errors in same port.  So don't think it's the controller or power.

Then bad luck, I'm sure Seagate could cause bad sectors on a disk if they wanted to, I have a program that can create pending sectors on many disks, but for me it doesn't make any sense they doing that on purpose, at least not without a big warning on the disks "using this disk outside the USB enclosure will damage it" or most users would just think they got a bad disk, and that's not good for the brand.

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17 hours ago, rmilyard said:

Ok so it has to be something Seagate is doing.  I picked up 8 of these new.  All 8 have failed with same issues.  No way would 8 fail.  I have used them in the past with no issues but now can't get one to work.  Remove them from UnRAID put back in case and run Seagate tools and all test fine.

Were they all purchased at the same time? Maybe somebody dropped the pallet.

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On 8/31/2017 at 11:40 PM, johnnie.black said:

 

On further reading, looks like TGMR can still be SMR o.O, so probably shingled the same but with bigger platters, still better, wont comment on the warranty, you need to decide about that yourself.

Hi!

 

Is there more info on what exactly is TGMR?

 

I have a 8TB Seagate Desktop drive (CystalDiskInfo says it is a ST8000DM004-2CX188, haven't shucked it yet).

The interesting thing is, CDM shows normal (as in "not SMR") values for 4K writing (same as for reading, about 1 MB/s), unlike about 10 MB/s, like for example my other 5TB SMR drive.

 

Regards,

David

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  • 1 month later...

So last month, I started having some issues writing to certain 8TB drives, but never took note of which specifically since no parity errors ever popped up before or after checks.  I was looking into adding more 8TBs to a 19-disk array this week when I realized I’ve been adding ST8000DM004-2CX188s left and right over the past couple of years.

 

SIX disks in a nineteen-disk array (not counting parity) are SMR drives (one is ST8000AS).

 

Some have been going for years with decently intense read use and no real issues now, but reading this thread has me kind of freaking out about the possibility of multiple SMR drives failing simultaneously.

 

Instead of looking to expand, which I still really need to do, I’m now wondering if I’m better off using my next 3-4 HD purchases to replace some of these 8TB SMR drives before I even try swapping some 4 or 6TB drives out with 8TBs.

 

If I’ve made it this far without any failing (three pre-shuck preclears on each drive, too), is there any safe way to stress-test each SMR drive individually and maybe figure out which should be replaced first - or, ideally, if some look like they’ll be more reliable than others, which can stay in safely for awhile, so I don’t need to immediately replace 4 and just leave those 8TBs lying around to eventually replace the SMR 8TB “slot” whenever it inevitably fails?

 

Whole situation feels wasteful, but that’s on me for continuing to buy these drives without looking here for guidance each time...

 

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Edited by wheel
Realized I had an 8000AS disk, too
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