[Update: Seller Complaints Accumulating] HGST Ultrastar He10 - 10TB @ $129.95

[eduncan911]

Oh my... Read this reply I just got from the eBay seller...

I haven't left out a single thing. I have no idea what they are talking about.

And btw, "I" was the one who linked them to this thread showing many other issues (that they said no one else is reporting issues).

And this is their response... They want to invoice ME for their warranty exchange of 3 bad drives, because of a bad review and then feeling "different" now.

"I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further." Holding the returned drives for a ransom now.

I dont care what their quick testing shows. One drive kills my entire HBA when plugged in, and the other two fail after stress testing for a few days - dropping in and out.

---
Hope all is well ,

After going thru all the testing the drives passed our quick test

And we are going through the next steps to fulfill your exchange .
However after we see the "review" you have given and provided and cutting out details on the forums you have posted

We feel very indifferent to this experience please send your paypal so that we may send an invoice for the shipping label for the drives

so we may end this issue
Kindest Regards
Reply

Your previous message

Please provide an update/tracking number asap.

They were delivered 1 week ago.

 

[Jaket]

Oh my... Read this reply I just got from the eBay seller...

I haven't left out a single thing. I have no idea what they are talking about.

And btw, "I" was the one who linked them to this thread showing many other issues (that they said no one else is reporting issues).

And this is their response... They want to invoice ME for their warranty exchange of 3 bad drives.

"I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further." Holding the returned drives for a ransom now.

I dont care what their testing shows. One drive kills my entire HBA when plugged in, and the other two fail after stress testing for a few days - dropping in and out.

---
Hope all is well ,

After going thru all the testing the drives passed our quick test

And we are going through the next steps to fulfill your exchange .
However after we see the "review" you have given and provided and cutting out details on the forums you have posted

We feel very indifferent to this experience please send your paypal so that we may send an invoice for the shipping label for the drives

so we may end this issue
Kindest Regards
Reply

Your previous message

Please provide an update/tracking number asap.

They were delivered 1 week ago.

Well at least you are getting a reply.
They have ghosted us on email multiple times.
Kind of sad as we had plans on picking up a row of 14 racks worth of these for our data center.
They failed to provide a whole unit with caddies and haven't refunded or provided them.

 

[Madhelp]

Yeah I had a similar experience with this seller. I ordered 87 drives. A couple of drives I had issues with right from the jump and because it was within the return window the return process was very straight forward.

Then I had two drives fail smart tests 4-5 months after purchase. Like others have stated, I went back and forth with them for weeks and they tried to get out of honoring the one year warranty that was in the description at the time of purchase. I stayed persistent and eventually they relented and accepted the bad drives and sent me replacements. It was definitely a horrible experience but I will admit my expectations were low about them covering the drives for a year or any eBay reseller for that matter.

With that said, overall I like the drives and they have been running well.

 

[eduncan911]

Got my 3 drive replacements. Running them through tests now.

Two of the original drives have now reported errors writing to a specific sector (same sector, over and over). fio to the rescue here to identify what I thought: I got (at least) 5x drives of a bad batch (the same batch).

Yeah, I really got screwed with the entire batch of 10x drives (I am not going to trust any of these now), and the seller refuses to honor the original request for a different lot - as I now have a 50% failure rate of the original 10x sent.

@ArthurA Can you update the original post, so others won't get screwed?

You can see over the last 5 or 6 or so pages, and in my other thread for a server they are offering, that this seller cannot be trusted. Far too many orders are fracked up and their CS just ignoring those issues. And far too many CS complaints of ghosting, ignoring people, changing he-said-she-said, "send them back for us to test first" requirement under warranty, etc. And actually changing the terms AFTER they read their own bad reviews posted here of many of us complaining (my favorite - I've never been demanded to pay twice for shipping, both ways - they waited to get my drives, and then demand payment for them to send them back?!?).

They may show good deals; however, we are rolling the dice buying anything from this vendor:

deals2day-364

 

[eduncan911]

As a slight update, the 3 replacements (after all of the back and forth) seem to have tested fine. Same 50k hours though...

 

[Jaket]

After opening up a claim on PayPal seller replied quickly and got us the missing 56 caddies and set of rails.

 

[Fritz]

Squeaking wheel gets the grease.

 

[VaultedGopher]

When i receive my second hand SAS drives i know i'll be pissed off if i'm not gonna be able to check the helium levels on them.

Regarding the mechanics once more, no HDD manufacturer makes physically separate SAS drives anymore, there is no point.

You can't make them faster by spinning them at 10k rpm, and you can't make them more reliable etc.. If you look at the HGST he8, he10 and he12 spec sheets you see arrows to the left pointing to the SATA versions on all parameters except formatting, interface and power attributes. Because they are the same.

https://documents.westerndigital.co...astar-sas-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-he8.pdf

https://documents.westerndigital.co...c500-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-dc-hc510.pdf

https://documents.westerndigital.co...c500-series/data-sheet-ultrastar-dc-hc520.pdf

nothing but arrows to the left.

For some reason this struck me as odd, so I swapped the controllers between the sas and sata He8's on my desk, and they spin up, report to smartctl (verypermissive) but throw heaps of errors and don't populate under HUGO (but do at least announce themselves with sdparm/hdparm/smartctl.

Is there a way to swap the controllers properly with full functionality that doesn't require messing with ROM?

 

[Samir]

Well i don't disagree, i'm just doing home stuff here. Again, second hand SAS drives used to be available alot cheaper than SATA drives per terabyte, and that was a huge incentive to get a SAS controller. Lately looking at the fleabay markets, that advantage is pretty much gone here in europe. I rest my case, have no arguments.

edit: there could be an argument that running SATA drives over pcie lanes is no less 'professional', infact, it's less complicated and removes complications like bad and/or corrupted SAS controllers, expensive and possibly bad cables, plus the extra conversion between standards. SAS used to be faster and more reliable, now it's no faster at all, and the physical drives are mostly all the same just with different PCB's (nearline sas essentially).

but i digress, your arguments are just as valid.

edit2: another issue is the ridiculous SAS cables, which requires A SATA power connector on top of the SAS connector. In many instances where the case isn't designed for that it makes for a flimsy connection that protrudes alot further out from the drive, in some cases like mine, i had issues getting the side cover on my tower case to fit because the connector was so bulky.

edit3: seems like i did have arguments after all

I think your arguments are invalid or enterprise would be pushing sata vs sas in configurations > 4 drives.

 

[twin_savage]

I think your arguments are invalid or enterprise would be pushing sata vs sas in configurations > 4 drives.

SAS still has benefits over SATA, it's signaling voltages are higher, more than double SATA's, greatly increasing it’s ability to deal with marginal quality cables and EMI. Between the higher voltages and the dual port design, this is why SAS drives will use more power than SATA drives.

SAS drives also enjoy an expanded command set which has real world benefits if data read issues are encountered.

This is less of a hard and fast rule now a days but SAS drives used to have components that were binned to a higher quality than what was put in SATA drives (platters, heads, vc amps).



edit: my quoting didn't come out right. I was agreeing with you Samir.

 

[Samir]

SAS still has benefits over SATA, it's signaling voltages are higher, more than double SATA's, greatly increasing it’s ability to deal with marginal quality cables and EMI. Between the higher voltages and the dual port design, this is why SAS drives will use more power than SATA drives.

SAS drives also enjoy an expanded command set which has real world benefits if data read issues are encountered.

This is less of a hard and fast rule now a days but SAS drives used to have components that were binned to a higher quality than what was put in SATA drives (platters, heads, vc amps).



edit: my quoting didn't come out right. I was agreeing with you Samir.

Yep and that goes back to the origins of SAS as Serially Attached Scsi because SCSI has different variants such as differential which used better signalling to deal with the increased number of drives on a single channel compared to its consumer rival, IDE or PATA. And if we look at the origins of SATA, it evolved from the bottom, IDE, which depended on the host cpu for data transfers and was a pretty 'dumb' interface while SCSI didn't use host CPU, had its own set of commands and could do things such as multiple commands between hosts and initiators on the bus--things which only came to SATA as it and the SAS interface finally started sharing many things, right down to some parts of the hardware.

But as you mentioned, SAS is still 'the real deal' when it comes to drives if you want the best in storage. It's why it's the standard in enterprise and why even backblaze in their quest to make cheap storage were at one point was using sas controllers and expanders vs multiple sata controllers.

I was always pro SCSI back in the day, so being pro SAS is just par for the course for me.

 

[jtaj]

dual port design this is why SAS drives will use more power than SATA drives.

how much more power are we looking at?

 

[Samir]

how much more power are we looking at?

The spec sheets are the best place to see this as they will have the idle wattage for both sata and sas side-by-side for a particular model.

 

[EasyRhino]

But generally 2 or 3 more watts per drive

 

[BackupProphet]

I also prefer SAS harddrives above SATA. It's just less issues, especially this bad cabling thing has been almost non existent. I do know that Dropbox choose to use SATA drives when they built their own storage cluster.

 

[i386]

I use exclusively (enterprise/datacenter) sata hdds with sas controllers/expanders

 

[Sleyk]

So wow, this thread got super long. It's been running since earlier this year. This is for the guy on ebay who sells the 10TB SAS drives. I always meant to purchase from him, but I just didn't get around to it. Then he changed to the paid shipping model some months back, and I just deleted him from my watch list, as I try to avoid sellers who make you pay for return shipping. I see why they did it, but I still avoid them.

So what is the consensus now? The seller is sending out poor health drives?

 

[eduncan911]

So wow, this thread got super long. It's been running since earlier this year. This is for the guy on ebay who sells the 10TB SAS drives. I always meant to purchase from him, but I just didn't get around to it. Then he changed to the paid shipping model some months back, and I just deleted him from my watch list, as I try to avoid sellers who make you pay for return shipping. I see why they did it, but I still avoid them.

So what is the consensus now? The seller is sending out poor health drives?

Consensus is:

- buy at your own risk as the seller has numerous complaints of customer service / post - purchase support. Like, returns, wrong orders, missing parts etc. They will basically ghost you until you open an eBay claim.

- all drives are 4yr to 5yr old with 50,0000 hours (24/7/365 on for 5 years) with huge read and writes during that whole time.

- most drives seem to be fine. but don't invest any real money from this vendor as it's a old hardware usage risk of continued use.

 

[Sleyk]

Consensus is:

- buy at your own risk as the seller has numerous complaints of customer service / post - purchase support. Like, returns, wrong orders, missing parts etc. They will basically ghost you until you open an eBay claim.

- all drives are 4yr to 5yr old with 50,0000 hours (24/7/365 on for 5 years) with huge read and writes during that whole time.

- most drives seem to be fine. but don't invest any real money from this vendor as it's a old hardware usage risk of continued use.

Damn. Well, thank you for that brother! Gonna stay away for now.

 

[mikevipe]

Hello,

I was searching some SMART errors (FIRMWARE IMPENDING FAILURE SEEK ERROR RATE TOO HIGH), and found this thread. The seller deals2day-364 is the same seller we have been purchasing our 8TB and 10TB SAS drives from. All together we have purchased over 260 drives and only had about 9 failures over the last year, that's less than 3.5% failure rate. 6 of those failures happened within the first 20-40 days and even the few that were over the 30 day window the seller graciously accepted and exchanged. The ones which failed 60+ days we just ate and threw away as we initially ordered expecting a 5-10% failure rate on such old drives. Drives are a mixture of 2015, 2016 and 2017 purchased over the past year with between 35k to 55k hours.

My thoughts are since the majority fail out of the box it could be due to shipping and handling. We have all seen the way UPS and FedEx kick these boxes for more than a few field goals.

When buying this kind of hardware we expected higher rates of failure. Our main nodes are running 18 and 20TB Seagate SAS EXOS drives which makes these a pretty good deal comparatively for our daily and or weekly cold storage backups of critical infrastructure giving us two offsite nodes with around 500TB each of usable raid protected storage.