$42 3TB HGST SATA disks are back

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am4593

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Feb 20, 2017
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Also read about Gohardrive and their smart forging. I would avoid them at all costs.
 

burtonmadness

Member
Feb 19, 2015
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i have a mixed bag of 3TBs. Reds/Greens secondhand HGSTs (bought a year ago.), and want to expand my array. I would probably like to pair them with something newer when extending a mirror, so might hedge my bets
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
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I could not disagree more with the praise for these drives or this deal. I've resisted this deal for like 3 months, even though i need drives badly. Obviously the price per GB is unbeatable, and HGST drives are between good and great. But make no mistake. You are buying drives that are well used, and likely to be near the end of their lives. So expect and plan for drive failures. If you need 12 of these, then buy 15 of them. Newegg, Monoprice, Ebay have been full of these drives recently. All from decommissioned server farms. Read a number of stories of large arrays of these failing and before the resilver can complete it loses another drive and wipes out the whole array.
i'd have to disagree with your disagreement. sure, there may be failures, so buy a few extra. that said, if i bought 50 of these, i don't expect more than 5 of them to fail before 3TB drives become obsolete.

on the issue of data loss, you don't protect yourself against data loss by relying solely on redundancy/parity. that's why you have backups.
 

am4593

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Feb 20, 2017
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i'd have to disagree with your disagreement. sure, there may be failures, so buy a few extra. that said, if i bought 50 of these, i don't expect more than 5 of them to fail before 3TB drives become obsolete.

on the issue of data loss, you don't protect yourself against data loss by relying solely on redundancy/parity. that's why you have backups.

well aware of the old saying "raid is not a backup" (this is STH isnt it?)

I dont think "may be failures" is an accurate assessment of what you expect with these drives.

Expect failures, potentially lots of them, and then sit by nervously as it takes 1-3 days to resilver your array.

Factor in drive failures and then suddenly the value in these is also not as good. No RMA so these are ewaste once they're defective. I'd love to have a mountain of these drives at 50% health but I think you're likely to get most drives at 70% health. Also likely to get drives with bad sectors. That has been alot of people experiences with these drives. So maybe i'd up my purchase estimate. If you need 12 good drives then maybe i'd buy 16-18 of them.

Again I've been resisting these for 3 months, ended up buying a bunch of shuckable wd40efrx but still dont have enough.
 

pr1malr8ge

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Nov 27, 2017
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Did goharddrive get back with your offer?
I'm after something similar but just want 10 not 13.,
They dropped the price to $57.50. Don't think thats low enough for me for used drives TBT. I could justify 40|45 and get my new freenas up and running then replace a drive every month or other month till all 12 have been replaced..
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
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Factor in drive failures and then suddenly the value in these is also not as good. No RMA so these are ewaste once they're defective. I'd love to have a mountain of these drives at 50% health but I think you're likely to get most drives at 70% health. Also likely to get drives with bad sectors. That has been alot of people experiences with these drives. So maybe i'd up my purchase estimate. If you need 12 good drives then maybe i'd buy 16-18 of them.

Again I've been resisting these for 3 months, ended up buying a bunch of shuckable wd40efrx but still dont have enough.
i don't know where you get your data and who "alot of people" are, but I'll tell you that I've bought (not from this seller) used HGST SAS/SATA drives off ebay and elsewhere, in quantities of a few hundred in the last 24 months. i check their SMART stats, and run them through badblocks for a week. so far, of the few hundred drives I've gotten; first, i've never had one with bad sectors, and second i haven't had one fail on me yet. they usually have somewhere between 10000 to 30000 hours on them, these 7K4 are not as old as some of the drives i've gotten, so they are probably on the lower side in terms of power on hours. do i expect them to eventually fail? sure, all things computing eventually fail. am I worried and walking on egg shells? no, but then i take other measures to protect my data. grant you, a few hundred isn't statistically significant relative to however many there are circulating the used market, but it is enough to give me confidence that these are worth the money at this price or lower. everything has an associated risk; just do your own research and make sure to hedge the risk (buy more drives, use smaller disk pools, use more parity, have more frequent and multiple backups, etc.).

on the issue of warranty, a warranty doesn't protect against data loss, it only protects against financial loss of the equipment. if hard drives were still a $600-$1000 investment, i might agree with you more. but here, we're talking about $25-$60 (that's the price range of 3TB drives I've bought in recent times). so yeah, self warranty and just buy 20% more drives.

frankly, i've had worst luck with brand new drives and dealing with their infant mortality rates; hence why i always run drives through a burn-in period (new or used) before I put them to use. just because a hard drive is brand new doesn't mean there's no risk either, and that risk curve over time isn't a simple linear, monotonically increasing straight line. maybe i've been around spinning drives for too long, i know they fail, but frankly old hdd doesn't always mean they are all going to fail in my experience; the majority of them become obsolete *before* they actually fail. My ancient Seagate Cheetah 10K RPM 9/18GB SCSI drives are a testament to that... i have many that still run in old Sun equipment that I really should get rid of, they wine more, and at 9 or 18GB they are useless now, but nonetheless they are still running whenever i power them on. yes, i've seen a few of them die over the years, but the majority of them still power on and work and feel utterly worthless when a 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive is cheaper. i'm also not one who hasn't experience data loss, drive failures, array failures; seen plenty of those, had to try recovery from many such instances. hated the feeling of array failures during rebuilds, but i really don't think using these 7K4 HGST drives is going to land you there at any significant chance.

risk is a personal thing i suppose, so to each their own. maybe i'm ancient and just don't see things the way you've described this risk.
 

am4593

Active Member
Feb 20, 2017
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i don't know where you get your data and who "alot of people" are, but I'll tell you that I've bought (not from this seller) used HGST SAS/SATA drives off ebay and elsewhere, in quantities of a few hundred in the last 24 months. i check their SMART stats, and run them through badblocks for a week. so far, of the few hundred drives I've gotten; first, i've never had one with bad sectors, and second i haven't had one fail on me yet. they usually have somewhere between 10000 to 30000 hours on them, these 7K4 are not as old as some of the drives i've gotten, so they are probably on the lower side in terms of power on hours. do i expect them to eventually fail? sure, all things computing eventually fail. am I worried and walking on egg shells? no, but then i take other measures to protect my data. grant you, a few hundred isn't statistically significant relative to however many there are circulating the used market, but it is enough to give me confidence that these are worth the money at this price or lower. everything has an associated risk; just do your own research and make sure to hedge the risk (buy more drives, use smaller disk pools, use more parity, have more frequent and multiple backups, etc.).
risk is a personal thing i suppose, so to each their own. maybe i'm ancient and just don't see things the way you've described this risk.
Sure. everyone has different risk tolerance for their hard drive buying needs. I've also had bad new drives, also run badblocks on every drive before it goes into our machines. I dont think my expectations for what a drive should do is too high though. I dont expect drives to last forever, but buying these to hope, that is hope, you get 2-3 years out of them, just not worth it. Check out the Slickdeal and reddit posts of users experiences with these drives. They're all over the map. And having to buy an extra amount amount of extra drives just to hedge against the risk of failure hoping to get 2-3 years. thats not value. constant resilvering of arrays. not worth it but obviously other people will drive a different conclusion.
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
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I could not disagree more with the praise for these drives or this deal. I've resisted this deal for like 3 months, even though i need drives badly. Obviously the price per GB is unbeatable, and HGST drives are between good and great. But make no mistake. You are buying drives that are well used, and likely to be near the end of their lives. So expect and plan for drive failures. If you need 12 of these, then buy 15 of them. Newegg, Monoprice, Ebay have been full of these drives recently. All from decommissioned server farms. Read a number of stories of large arrays of these failing and before the resilver can complete it loses another drive and wipes out the whole array.
I have more than 20 of this model, all refurbs, some with more than 50k hours on them (AFTER they were refurbed). zero failures, zero pending sectors, zero bad sectors. I have gotten *way* more life out of these than brand new wd blacks I've had
 

sfair

New Member
Jan 4, 2018
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Hi,

This is my first post but I wanted to weigh in on these drives.

So far I in the last couple months I have purchased two sets of these HGST 3TB drives. The first set tested out well with HGST extended test. I purchased a second set and they also tested out well. They are a little loud but still quieter than the WD RE3 I have in use still. The HGST drives had under 2 years of up time and around 17 spin ups.

So far they have been good. I have a set of 4x refurbished WD RE3 that are much older and had much more usage and they have spun along happily for many years with no issues. With the RE3 2 of 4 failed the initial tests with too many bad sectors and were promptly RMAed to Newegg and replace with two that tested out fine.

I also purchased 3x new 1TB WD black 2.5" this year. Of those three new drives one of three failed the extended test. Unfortunately I had thrown away the original box so I needed to RMA through WD vs Newegg.

The moral of the story... Test all your drives either new or refurbished. Looking back on my drives over the last decade I have had better long term luck with refurbished enterprise drives vs new consumer drives. Just always test a drive before putting it into production. Also save the boxes packing material until you have tested your drives. It's usually fast and free to RMA drives through the seller vs having to RMA through the manufacturer.

I am debating buying another 4 of these drives while the price is still good.
 
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qqq

New Member
Feb 19, 2017
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Hi, I bought couple of these HGST 3TB drives, and one is vibrating like crazy when powered on. Other thing I have noted when I start HGST Windows Drive Fitness Test (Extended test) my drives first make short loud noise and then proceed with test normally. Did anyone have similar issues/experiences with these drives?
 

bash

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Dec 14, 2015
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Still testing the batch of 10 or so I bought. So far one noisy one and one that is just spitting out errors on badblocks. Will probably have full data set to post by this weekend. Badblocks takes forever.......
 

funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
Jan 15, 2017
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We started testing these, and a LOT of them have reallocated and pending sectors. Thanks newegg...

Going through a full DD on them and will see about sending them back once we've tested them all.

Any tips on getting bad drives replaced with Newegg?
 

frogtech

Well-Known Member
Jan 4, 2016
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It seems like the price on these drives just keeps slowly climbing. Or is it just me?
 

qqq

New Member
Feb 19, 2017
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We started testing these, and a LOT of them have reallocated and pending sectors. Thanks newegg...

Going through a full DD on them and will see about sending them back once we've tested them all.

Any tips on getting bad drives replaced with Newegg?
What software do you use for readinf SMART info and testing?
My drives tested fine (even the drive that vibrates a lot) SMART values look OK to me. I used Passmark DiskCheckup for reading SMART info and HGST Windows Drive Fitness Test for testing drives.
 

funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
Jan 15, 2017
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USA
ioflood.com
What software do you use for readinf SMART info and testing?
My drives tested fine (even the drive that vibrates a lot) SMART values look OK to me. I used Passmark DiskCheckup for reading SMART info and HGST Windows Drive Fitness Test for testing drives.
In linux, smartctl -a

Any drive with -any- pending or reallocated sectors is an automatic fail for us.
 

WeekendWarrior

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Apr 2, 2015
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FYI: NewEgg will have a flash sale on the 2TB HGST SATA drives starting on 1/21 @ 9am PT.

The start date/time is visible at Electronics, housewares, beauty, fashions, jewelry, tech and more – NeweggFlash.com if you click on the 3rd product in the search results.

The 2TB models presumably have more use/issues because they are almost certainly older than 3TB/4TB/etc models. But, these may still be attractive to some members if the price is right.