My experiences buying drives in bulk...


sota

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I figured I'd pass along my experiences over the past year, of buying hard drives in bulk.

 

20x Seagate ST4000NM0023 3.5" SAS 4TB Server HDDs | Grade C, bought 2020/02/03

These were 3PAR drives, and had to be reformatted to 512b.

18 drives formatted and passed with no issues.

2 drives died during reformatting.

Vendor refunded the cost of the 2 drives.

5 were high 33,000+ hours. 15 were high 38,000+ hours.

These are currently serving as cold storage backup for unRAID, but are getting "migrated" to cold storage for Shinobi video footage (scumbag neighbor evidence.)

 

12x Seagate ST4000NC000 Terascale 4TB, bought 2020/08/11.

All drives passed with no issues.

1x 1156 hours, 1x 899 hours, 5x 356 hours, 5x 8 hours.

These were put into the Windows Server 2012R2 backup disk roles.

 

Listed as 4TB SATA Hard Drive HP 695503-004 7200RPM ST4000NM0033 657753-007, lot of 20. bought 2020/11/12.

Actually received: 16x ST4000NM0033, 4x HP/HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 HUS724040ALA640 (0F19470) drives.

This lot... not so great.

Most were were in the high 28,000+ hour range. 2 were low 34,000+. 1 was 17,000+.

1 is totally dead. (HGST)

3 have Reallocated Sectors (124, 485, 1387, all Seagate) and aborted during preclear (disappeared from the system during the test)

1 has Reallocated Sectors (918) and a 187_Reported_Uncorrect value of 262146.  This was an HGST.

Needless to say, 5 out of 20 is a pretty bad failure rate.

I'm waiting on a response from the seller on this one, as I just finished testing a couple hours ago.

eta: 20201124

I told them the situation for the 5 wonky disks, and they're sending me 5 replacements.  They did not ask to see the logs of the drives.  An acceptable solution (providing 1 of the 5 doesn't statistically barf), and I would have taken a partial refund.

 

Edited by sota
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