Thoughts on reliability of Seagate Enterprise SATA drives for RAID?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

izx

Active Member
Jan 17, 2016
115
52
28
40
Seagate consumer SATA drives have a bad-to-mixed impression as we all know, depending on model. I recently got my hands on a lightly used (~4k hrs) Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (SATA) drive, with all the bells and whistles (2M hour MTBF, AFR of 0.44%, URE of 1 per 10E15 and 5-year warranty). Having put it through multiple badblocks torture passes, it's still clean as a whistle -- not even a transient UNC error in the extended log.

The Seagate Enterprise NAS series has very similar specs, but a slightly lower MTBF of 1.2M and correspondingly higher AFR of 0.63%; idles at 6W compared to 8W for the regular Enterprise Capacity.

The Seagate (regular) NAS series slashes MTBF to 1M and the warranty to 3 years from 5. Otherwise identical.

So, thoughts/experiences on using these enterprise SATA drives for SOHO? When an HGST consumer NAS 6TB with 3-yr warranty/1-in-10E14 URE sells for $270, and Seagate's Enterprise Capacity version with 5-yr warranty/1-in-10E15 for $300, wouldn't the latter seem a more logical choice? For the sake of argument, assume Intellipower/Coolspin is not being considered, and the somewhat higher power requirement of enterprise drives when idling is also not a problem.

If using 1-in-10E15 URE drives as part of a RAID5/6 array, would you feel more comfortable increasing the size of the array beyond your "normal" limit?

Edit: I say this as someone who lived through the horrors of the Seagate 7200.11 firmware FAIL and the more recent ST3000DM000 flakiness, but I've been happy with the ST4000DM000s I'm using in a 12-drive RAID-6 (switched from Hitachi 7K2000 2TBs)
 
Last edited: