HGST SAS3 Drives with 20k Hours

[JJ Duru]

Howdy,

I got these four drives off of ebay, sold as "new", at a good price, $139, for this seller: deals2day-364.
Now, I didn't expect them to be new, but I didn't expect the drives to have 20k power-on hours either. The fact that they are sold as "new" when they have even more hours than the "refurbished" ones, is really aggravating.

I am still well within the return period, but I am kind of on the fence about returning them. Need some input, some feedback on what to do next.

The drives are used for raid-z2 pool on Freenas.

I attached the extended smart report for each drive here. The one line that really offends me is this one:
da1: "Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 20748:58 [1244938 minutes]"
da2: "Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 20747:56 [1244876 minutes]"
da3: "Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 18080:02 [1084802 minutes]"
da4: "Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 20818:54 [1249134 minutes]"

On top of that, the smart report seems to be somehow "bleached" - that is, too clean to be believable. Do you notice anything in there to warrants me to be worried about?

 

[Marsh]

Return these drives soon.

See great deals section, HGST 8TB drives for $80 each
Seller had over 300 drives forsale , I purchased 8 drives and happy with it.
Some of the drives from the $80 deal have less hours.
folks posted the power on hours of the deals

 

[JJ Duru]

Thank you for you input!
Return has been initiated.

On a larger issue, what items do I have to follow when it comes to the smart report? I'm watching the power-on time, but I guess there are many more items I should be paying attention to.

Thanks a bunch.

 

[JJ Duru]

...And today it even crossed my mind to check the warranty status of these four drives by serial number on HGST's page, and to my surprise, the page says to return the drives to the point of sale.

 

[Iaroslav]

I've ordered nearly 30 of these for 110-120 each. All were 22-25k used and yes, someone tried to make them look newer by deleting some lines in smart and fancy packaging) Still 3 of them came dead already and one more started to degrade in a month. Not a great deal I think and won't buy more.

 

[Spartacus]

...And today it even crossed my mind to check the warranty status of these four drives by serial number on HGST's page, and to my surprise, the page says to return the drives to the point of sale.

This is common for many enterprise drives, they are 'warrantied' by the manufacturer through the distributor or vendor.

 

[soundman]

I've ordered nearly 30 of these for 110-120 each. All were 22-25k used and yes, someone tried to make them look newer by deleting some lines in smart and fancy packaging) Still 3 of them came dead already and one more started to degrade in a month. Not a great deal I think and won't buy more.

I purchased 2x of these drives from same seller deals2day-364 but the ebay auction Item listed 1k-20k hours on the drives. The drives showed 18k and 21k hours, so in my case the auction listing is mostly correct. Fancy clean packaging. Do you remember what Smart data was tampered with? i noticed upon plugging in the drives it was reported by HDSentinel that their max temps were their current temps at 31 and 32 degrees... which i thought seemed suspiciously low for a 20k hour drive. However, i'm not aware of what the temperature goal of enterprise installations are. I could also see that the previous owner had a self-test run every 60 days and none of those tests reported any errors.

 

[JJ Duru]

I purchased 2x of these drives from same seller deals2day-364 but the ebay auction Item listed 1k-20k hours on the drives. The drives showed 18k and 21k hours, so in my case the auction listing is mostly correct. Fancy clean packaging. Do you remember what Smart data was tampered with? i noticed upon plugging in the drives it was reported by HDSentinel that their max temps were their current temps at 31 and 32 degrees... which i thought seemed suspiciously low for a 20k hour drive. However, i'm not aware of what the temperature goal of enterprise installations are. I could also see that the previous owner had a self-test run every 60 days and none of those tests reported any errors.

See the full SMART reports attached here. Somehow the drives were not capable of running the long smart test.
They guy really found a niche to sell drives and he obviously does something right that he succeeds. He has a competitive price and, also, on a private message, he said he's offering 1 year warranty (which I do not trust).

The temperature itself was not a concern to me, because I had one giant fan sucking the hot air out from the HDDs bay. It's the power-on hours that really offended me - paying $139 for "new", when in fact they were 18k to 22k power-on hours.

That being said, I'd avoid him like plague next time. Once I get my money back, I'll place a negative feedback.

 

[soundman]

Somehow the drives were not capable of running the long smart test.

I have other Hitatchi Drives that aren't able to run the long smart test HITACHI HUS72302CLAR2000. I think that is probably an issue of protocol between the drive manufacter programming and the smart software, but i'm no expert. Of course I bought the 2tb drives off ebay too and originally they were formated a different sector size:e 520-byte i believe.

$139 for "new", when in fact they were 18k to 22k power-on hours.

I would be offended too if I purchased these listed as new. I'm betting maybe the seller got scammed himself because they look new. The auction I purchased from listed that they have up to 20k hours. One of my drives came in at 20600, but that is probably close enough to his estimate. I'm not as concerned with 20k hours as I am that I have a proper backup system. I have seagate consumer drives with power on at 8+ years still in use. I don't trust them, but they haven't lost data yet. I figure enterprise drives should last at least as long. If I purchased all new drives, I wouldn't have a healthy backup routine because i couldn't afford it. 20TB of Raid 1 primary copy + 2x offsite rotating backups. so for me, i think i'll keep these drives.

I saw the 1 year warranty thing too. I agree I would be skeptical of that. My thinking is, that unless you are using encryption, who wants to send their drive in to be warrantied. I also noticed the seller listed products from Georgia, but the drives shipped from Florida. I'm probably skeptical enough to avoid this seller in the future, but honestly for my auction, I think he delievered what the ebay ad promised.

However still no excuse for selling used drives as new.

 

[JJ Duru]

I decided to go with new drives, bought over a longer period of time instead of doing the expense upfront.

This is what I'll go for:

https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-7-e8-msft-data-sheetDS1957-5M-2005US-en_US.pdf

Base model: Seagate ST8000NM003A
8TB, 12Gbps, 4kn SAS

I'm sick of futzing around with second rate hard drives and live with the fear that I may lose 20k pictures from the family albums or my test Oracle machines, just because I cheaped out on the most critical piece of infrastructure. For reference, I do use Backblaze B2 buckets for offline backups.

 

[Spartacus]

I keep dropbox around for my family videos and photos, (i'm not over 2TB yet either though)

 

[JJ Duru]

Yeah, early on I considered dropbox or equivalents. However, it addresses just one need and one need only.
I need the storage array for the various Oracle db virtual machines and docker/kubernetes nodes, store pictures (not just family photos). Backblaze B2 as an offline backup solution is just perfect (versionin+long term retention).