26TB Seagate HDD for 250 USD

[unmesh]

Their cases are a bit lackluster on cooling when pounding the drive for days at a time. Generally most externals are guily of this. I always just point a fan at them and it takes their temps way down and prevents any issues.

I got one of these and it idles at 51C so I'm going to return it and buy the 18TB. I have one of those and it idles in the low 40's.

What temps do you see with an external fan and how big is the fan? I would have expected that a plastic case would serve as a thermal barrier.

 

[T_Minus]

My wife's closest friend has had 3 of their externals (same model, different capacities - 18 first, followed by two 24s) fail within 3 months of buying them. It may just be that she's hard on it or treating it like a thumb drive,but I kinda doubt it tbh, and thought to at least mention it, just in case.

... Still tempting regardless though lol

theres lots of us older IT people who still refuse to use Seagate drives in general, I'm one of them
iirc their backblaze stats are near the worst always too, in 2025

 

[alaricljs]

theres lots of us older IT people who still refuse to use Seagate drives in general, I'm one of them
iirc their backblaze stats are near the worst always too, in 2025

Those first 4GB drives were so amazing tho! Our first order only had a 78% DOA rate.

 

[ccie4526]

theres lots of us older IT people who still refuse to use Seagate drives in general, I'm one of them
iirc their backblaze stats are near the worst always too, in 2025

Awww c'mon, that ST-4144R is still whining and clunking away! ;-)

 

[cw823]

theres lots of us older IT people who still refuse to use Seagate drives in general, I'm one of them
iirc their backblaze stats are near the worst always too, in 2025

Some of these guys never lived through 7200.11 and it shows

 

[Samir]

It can't mark anything because it can't see anything. The operating system doesn't have acess to physical sectors it's all virtual and controller managed. It might put a red mark in the mbr/gpt but those are meaningless and can be removed by just removing said mbr/gpt and creating it anew.
Physically it's all controller managed. Anything the OS does is irrelevant.

Edit after his edit: I'm referring to the controller embedded on the board of the disk .
And again "at the format level" isn't a thing. It's windows being ridiculous and saving it in a literal file in the drive and hasn't been relevant since the early 2000s. That list of addresses is literally useless. You can't avoid bad sectors at the filesystem level. Since what is now in sector 5000 can be in sector 6000 in a couple of minutes and the OS will never see a difference . The controller silently remaps it if there is a problem. It's not been a thing for a very long time. This is just legacy useless garbage that just hasn't been removed yet for compatability.

You are wrong. I posted a chkdsk command above that finished and marked bad sectors from being used. These sectors are marked bad at the format level, not the drive or controller level which is what you're fixed upon.

The bad sectors marked at the format level aren't meaningless since they do prevent anything being written to those sectors. And because of this, it is completely relevant--regardless of what you may think otherwise. These marks are erased by a full format--quickformats will generally keep these sectors marked, since a quickformat only clears the file allocation table.

It is a thing if you knew anything about windows, the formats, and how things actually work. This isn't linux/unix--I'm not sure how things are managed there. And it's not legacy garbage, but structures upon other structures that make things work the way they do. Don't be such a stupid little kid and think that there's no history here at work--there certainly is.

You can choose to learn how things really work, or keep your pretentious attitude and ignorance. Doesn't affect me either way.

 

[Samir]

I got one of these and it idles at 51C so I'm going to return it and buy the 18TB. I have one of those and it idles in the low 40's.

What temps do you see with an external fan and how big is the fan? I would have expected that a plastic case would serve as a thermal barrier.

I've used small fans and they'll generally drop by about 10F. The method I use is to feel where the hottest point is and aim the fan directly there--that's where I typically will get the 10F drop pretty easily. But that's only a few degrees in C. If I have something super hot like this I'll see how the enclosure airflow is designed and put a fan that forces air directly in. For example on the WD external cases, I'll just sit the case on a system fan or two blowing air straight up.

 

[BackupProphet]

chkdsk is a software from the 80s, @grenskul is correct
hard drive firmware has gotten a lot smarter the last decade

Actually, what chkdsk does, is that if it thinks the sector is bad, it add this sector to the file system metadata so windows will not use it.
Next time you reformat, this may go away since the disk firmware has fixed this.

 

[Samir]

theres lots of us older IT people who still refuse to use Seagate drives in general, I'm one of them
iirc their backblaze stats are near the worst always too, in 2025

Some of these guys never lived through 7200.11 and it shows

Some of you kids aren't old enough, lol. Seagate made the best drives hands down for decades. All this changed with the advent of the 'home' computer and the creation of consumer and 'business' or what today we call 'enterprise' lines. Seagate had to scramble because their pro level hardware was being passed over for the cheaper likes of WD, etc, who at the time made 'meh' drives at best. Seagate fumbled because they focused on this new market in addition to their core, and they fumbled in the consumer's eyes, while everyone with a server knew how a large percentage of their SAS drives are all Seagate. Their entrprise goods are still the same solid stuff. Backblaze's 'experiment' of trying to use consumer drives in an enterprise environment has just taught them all the lessons all the entrprise companies already know--consumer drives aren't enterprise, consumer controllers aren't enterprise, etc, etc. Every iteration of Backblaze's 'pods' brings them closer to enterprise solutions, and now for more money than used enterprise gear. But their drive stats on which consumer drives are the worst have held up to affect manufacturers' reputations, even if irrelevant for manufactuers' enterprise lines, Seagate being one of them.

I got some of the first get 16TB Exos when they came out. They are as solid as any other enterprise drive and even sound the same as the HGST/WD/Toshibas. All these drives are built to the same spec. They're not the same because they are made sometimes completely differently from an engineering standpoint, but the metrics they all aim for are the same. And Seagate's SAS drives are still OEM in both HP and Dell servers all over the world. If they weren't reliable, they wouldn't have those contracts because when you're paying MSRP for brand new enterprise storage, it better be nearly bulletproof.

Now get off my lawn, lol.

 

[Samir]

chkdsk is a software from the 80s, @grenskul is correct
hard drive firmware has gotten a lot smarter the last decade

Actually, what chkdsk does, is that if it thinks the sector is bad, it add this sector to the file system metadata so windows will not use it.
Next time you reformat, this may go away since the disk firmware has fixed this.

chkdsk is still available on modern windows ime. All drives have adopted the SCSI protocol since SCSI commands are a part of both SATA and SAS commands, so they're using the same method for reallocating sectors that was present in high end SCSI drives back in the day, which was a transparent reallocation by the drive when there were available sectors. It's when the spare sectors run out that the bad sectors are presented to the OS/system unless the controller is running interferance.

That's kinda what chkdsk does. It does mark the sector for the FAT to not use it, but it does not affect the drive level marking at all. If on a subsequent full scrub format or chkdsk, the same sector is found to be good, it may be not be marked bad in the FAT; also if during the format/chkdsk the drive's controller re-allocates the sector using a spare it may show as good and not be marked bad in the FAT.

 

[pimposh]

Yeah I think mine was reporting around 63C when doing a format or a large transfer. Which is... just too hot for regular use.

26T+ are all HAMR. I also noticed that during heavy-write loads, my X28's are warmer than non-HAMR ones.

 

[Samir]

Yeah I think mine was reporting around 63C when doing a format or a large transfer. Which is... just too hot for regular use.

Daayumm. I somehow missed the temp when you posted it--that is smoking hot! ~145F! Hot enough to burn your finger!

I'd be curious how the drive is oriented and how the natural convection cooling looks to be designed to work. I always found it interesting that WD went to a verical orientation for their WD externals when they came out with the current series, but the design works as the convective design does allow heat out the top and pulls in cooler air from the bottom. If these drives are on their side, that's probably one issue right there, although I do like the idea that sideways drives can't tip over as easily.

 

[grenskul]

You are wrong. I posted a chkdsk command above that finished and marked bad sectors from being used. These sectors are marked bad at the format level, not the drive or controller level which is what you're fixed upon.

The bad sectors marked at the format level aren't meaningless since they do prevent anything being written to those sectors. And because of this, it is completely relevant--regardless of what you may think otherwise. These marks are erased by a full format--quickformats will generally keep these sectors marked, since a quickformat only clears the file allocation table.

It is a thing if you knew anything about windows, the formats, and how things actually work. This isn't linux/unix--I'm not sure how things are managed there. And it's not legacy garbage, but structures upon other structures that make things work the way they do. Don't be such a stupid little kid and think that there's no history here at work--there certainly is.

You can choose to learn how things really work, or keep your pretentious attitude and ignorance. Doesn't affect me either way.

You're an idiot. There is no such thing as at a format level. In ntfs drives it's literally a file. Also what is happening is this.
Windows marks sector 6000 as bad. Refuses to write to it.
Hdd remaps sector 6000 to somewhere else. Hdd doesn't tell OS anything. Os won't write to the sector even though it works fine. That's all that happens. Windows isn't special. Ntfs doesn't do anything that helps with bad sectors. You just don't understand how it works and are going off wrong information. Google what the $badclus file is. That's all it does. There is no format level. No such thing exists.

 

[EasyRhino]

Daayumm. I somehow missed the temp when you posted it--that is smoking hot! ~145F! Hot enough to burn your finger!

I'd be curious how the drive is oriented and how the natural convection cooling looks to be designed to work.

Yeah mine was in a slightly warm basement, vertically oriented (I think we've demonstrated doesn't do jack), and the disk was receiving roughly a 14 terabyte backup, so lotta writing.

 

[Samir]

You're an idiot. There is no such thing as at a format level. In ntfs drives it's literally a file. Also what is happening is this.
Windows marks sector 6000 as bad. Refuses to write to it.
Hdd remaps sector 6000 to somewhere else. Hdd doesn't tell OS anything. Os won't write to the sector even though it works fine. That's all that happens. Windows isn't special. Ntfs doesn't do anything that helps with bad sectors. You just don't understand how it works and are going off wrong information. Google what the $badclus file is. That's all it does. There is no format level. No such thing exists.

STH isn't the place to call people names or have an attitude like yours. This isn't the vibe in this community and you're welcome to leave. The only idiot here is you with your non-understanding 'understanding'. You can't have a 'file' without a format on any drive, anywhere. It's why formats exist in the first place.

 

[Samir]

Yeah mine was in a slightly warm basement, vertically oriented (I think we've demonstrated doesn't do jack), and the disk was receiving roughly a 14 terabyte backup, so lotta writing.

Yeah, if I have an external in even a semi-warm environment doing a long copy job, I'll have a strong fan on it. Doesn't bring temps down to lower than ambient, but if it's even near ambient, it's plenty cool for a drive.

 

[kapone]

<tongue-in-cheek>

Who uses externals nowadays?? Doesn't everybody have a 100TB server sitting in a corner??

 

[Samir]

<tongue-in-cheek>

Who uses externals nowadays?? Doesn't everybody have a 100TB server sitting in a corner??

Pffff...if it's not 1/2 PB, it's just too small, lol.

 

[kapone]

Pffff...if it's not 1/2 PB, it's just too small, lol.

I was being …. generous. A 100TB server will fit on a kitchen shelf nowadays…

 

[Samir]

I was being …. generous. A 100TB server will fit on a kitchen shelf nowadays…

Yep! What's crazy is that some of these older NAS units I have that were never tested with larger drives work with them fine. So at 28TB, a little 4x drive NAS unit is already 112TB, and as the drive capacity scales out to 50TB, that will be 200TB in the size of a toaster. The question is what to do with all that space besides making it 4x redundant, lol.