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

[unwind-protect]

Perfect it's sas only because the sas drives are built to last for enterprise use, which is why people are not hesitate to use them even though they have hundreds of TB written and many hours of use. Also it makes them in "less demand" for the general population so lower price for us! Most people in the general world and ebay doesn't know how simple it is to get these cheap drives to work by just adding a cheap controller. Let them stick to sata so we can have ours...lol..

Yeah, but flexibility is restricted. In an emergency, or later in life, you can connect a SATA drive via USB, but not a SAS drive.

 

[wildpig1234]

That's what I'm wondering too. Man, these enterprise server guys get the lead on these drops. I wish I had those connections. I would make bank selling these, Lol.

I know this doesn't count for inventory loss and returns, ebay SNAD's etc, but just a simple calculation of $129.99 x 7,755 drives sold = over a million dollars alone!! Plus these guys have over 22,000 drives left? My goodness!!!

Heck, even if you take more conservative numbers and subtract for fees and shipping and stuff, you still get approx:

$99.95 x let's say, 7500 drives = $750k. Then maybe minus lets say, 20k in shipping, another 80k in fees, and you still have 650k on your hands, with still another 22,000 more drives left to be sold.

Even if you also count in storage fees and handling, thats still over half a million bucks made for not even a full quarter of the drives you have.

Damn, I wish I was one of these resellers

It's not bad. For one person, this would be a full time job to package them and ship them. Still not a bad full time job with not much thinking...lol...

 

[tjk]

Some recyclers don't even pay for the gear, they get PAID to come and remove it and wipe it.

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

Some recyclers don't even pay for the gear, they get PAID to come and remove it and wipe it.

Can confirm.

 

[Almighty]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but gotta ask...

I have 8x HUH721010ALE600 (SATA version of this drive) in an existing zfs pool:

Firmware Version: LHGNT92C
User Capacity:    10,000,831,348,736 bytes [10.0 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm

If I'm putting these in a Supermicro 846 with a SAS3 backplane, connected through an external SFF connector to an LSI SAS3 HBA, using zfs (ashift=12, which I believe will avoid any 512b vs 4096b sector issues), should I run into any problems mixing the SATA/SAS drives? I may keep the 8 SATA in their own raidz2 in the pool and add 8 sas as raidz2 and maybe another 8 sas as raidz2 later in the same pool. I know in the old days mixing SATA/SAS hardware was frowned upon, but from a little research I may not actually have any issue here.

Any help appreciated!

 

[wildpig1234]

anyone ever try to do a disk recovery to see what kind of life these hdd used to do?

 

[wildpig1234]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but gotta ask...

I have 8x HUH721010ALE600 (SATA version of this drive) in an existing zfs pool:

Firmware Version: LHGNT92C
User Capacity:    10,000,831,348,736 bytes [10.0 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm

If I'm putting these in a Supermicro 846 with a SAS3 backplane, connected through an external SFF connector to an LSI SAS3 HBA, using zfs (ashift=12, which I believe will avoid any 512b vs 4096b sector issues), should I run into any problems mixing the SATA/SAS drives? I may keep the 8 SATA in their own raidz2 in the pool and add 8 sas as raidz2 and maybe another 8 sas as raidz2 later in the same pool. I know in the old days mixing SATA/SAS hardware was frowned upon, but from a little research I may not actually have any issue here.

Any help appreciated!

I am guessing its not a good idea still because of different hardware type and sectors etc it wont be a stable array...

 

[ArthurA]

it's very interesting also to see that the amount of data written on these drives are a lot more than the amount read. Wonder what kind of operation they were in to have so much more byte written compared to read.

Nearline backup, S3 availability zone replicas, yada yada. Ball park 0.02 DWPD.... on magnetic media, fast filed in useless trivia that makes you go hmmm.

 

[tonkyhonk]

They have multiple quantity listings: 5, 20 ($125 each), 100

 

[wildpig1234]

They have multiple quantity listings: 5, 20 ($125 each), 100

wonder why the 20 lot is higher per hdd price. lower hours?

 

[heromode]

Perfect it's sas only because the sas drives are built to last for enterprise use, which is why people are not hesitate to use them even though they have hundreds of TB written and many hours of use. Also it makes them in "less demand" for the general population so lower price for us! Most people in the general world and ebay doesn't know how simple it is to get these cheap drives to work by just adding a cheap controller. Let them stick to sata so we can have ours...lol..

Without knowing anything about these i would still venture they are NL-SAS, or Nearline SAS. Means the HDD's are exactly the same as the SATA ones just with a SAS controller, and possibly custom sector sizes. Mechanically they are no more reliable or faster than sata.

 

[wildpig1234]

Without knowing anything about these i would still venture they are NL-SAS, or Nearline SAS. Means the HDD's are exactly the same as the SATA ones just with a SAS controller, and possibly custom sector sizes. Mechanically they are no more reliable or faster than sata.

Usually HDD fail fairly fast within the first year. So if they last 3 yrs at hundreds of TB written, that means likely a lot of these problem are less likely present.

 

[heromode]

I bought a couple 10TB ALE600's awhile ago, and because i was unaware of the P3 pin issue, one refused to spin up. During that time i researched and there are working controller boards for these for sale. I tried switching the controller board between the drives, before realizing it was just the P3 issue.

Switching the boards is dead easy because they are completely sealed due to being helium filled, the boards connect to the internals via surface mounted contact pins, there are no wires to detach etc.

But since the actual mechanical drive is exactly the same, i'd bet you could actually convert these SAS drives into SATA drives by switching controllers, maybe flash new firmware and reformatting to different sector sizes etc. I have no insight on this, but could be an interesting project.

There are thousands of controller boards for sale, i can't remember the reason, something about cloud storage vendors for some reasons end up with thousands of working controllers that they dump on Ebay due to EOL liability issues when they rotate the drives, or something.

Example: HDD PCB Board number: 006-0A90561 HGST HUH72101ALE Hard Disk Circuit Board | eBay

Addition: Come to think about it, we know there's been thousands of these sold as 'refurbished' in recent years, and it just might be they are actually cloud storage provider dumped drives without controller boards, which have then been fitted with replacement controller PCB's.

I read somewhere that during the data erasing process when cloud providers rotate out and discard these drives to 3rd party resellers, they have to remove the original controller PCB's due to data security issues, so nobody can analyse the error collecting logs etc to find patterns that corresponds to what certain databases etc leave behind. Then using those patterns to try to identify certain regions on the plattern surfaces and possibly be able to extract the previous state of the microscopic magnetic particles on that region, and then be able to sufficiently recreate the overwritten sensitive data. Spy agencies don't need to recreate all the data, just enough to be able to fill in the rest using deductive analysis.

Addition 2: some info from one Ebay seller:

This is just an electronic board, PCB (Printed Circuit Board / Logic board), only what is pictured above.
Accessories, power cords, cables, adapter, hard drive, etc. are not included unless pictured.
This PCB is intended for data recovery or HDD repair, in other words - it is intended for you to diagnose if your hard drive has a circuit board problem, and if it does, recover your data.

Please note that this item can fix drives with a circuit board problem ONLY.
Some drives have additional internal damages that can't be detected easily.
The ROM IC on the PCB board is programmed with the unique parameters/settings of it's original hard drive.
You need to swap the ROM IC, then the donor board will be compatible with your hard drive.

PCB 0j43690 ba5184 _ 006-0a90443 HGST Hitachi HDD SATA Logic Board Elektronik | eBay

So in theory, use the ROM IC from the SAS drive with this board, and you should have a working SATA drive.

Addition 3:

This seller actually points out the location of the ROM IC here:

006 0a90446 0j43734 ba5239b WD HGST SATA 3.5" HDD PCB Logic Board | eBay

Another issue is many of the boards are sold from Kiyv, Ukraine..

 

[wildpig1234]

I bought a couple 10TB ALE600's awhile ago, and because i was unaware of the P3 pin issue, one refused to spin up. During that time i researched and there are working controller boards for these for sale. I tried switching the controller board between the drives, before realizing it was just the P3 issue.

Switching the boards is dead easy because they are completely sealed due to being helium filled, the boards connect to the internals via surface mounted contact pins, there are no wires to detach etc.

But since the actual mechanical drive is exactly the same, i'd bet you could actually convert these SAS drives into SATA drives by switching controllers, maybe flash new firmware and reformatting to different sector sizes etc. I have no insight on this, but could be an interesting project.

There are thousands of controller boards for sale, i can't remember the reason, something about cloud storage vendors for some reasons end up with thousands of working controllers that they dump on Ebay due to EOL liability issues when they rotate the drives, or something.

Example: HDD PCB Board number: 006-0A90561 HGST HUH72101ALE Hard Disk Circuit Board | eBay

Addition: Come to think about it, we know there's been thousands of these sold as 'refurbished' in recent years, and it just might be they are actually cloud storage provider dumped drives without controller boards, which have then been fitted with replacement controller PCB's.

I read somewhere that during the data erasing process when cloud providers rotate out and discard these drives to 3rd party resellers, they have to remove the original controller PCB's due to data security issues, so nobody can analyse the error collecting logs etc to find patterns that corresponds to what certain databases etc leave behind. Then using those patterns to try to identify certain regions on the plattern surfaces and possibly be able to extract the previous state of the microscopic magnetic particles on that region, and then be able to sufficiently recreate the overwritten sensitive data. Spy agencies don't need to recreate all the data, just enough to be able to fill in the rest using deductive analysis.

Addition 2: some info from one Ebay seller:



PCB 0j43690 ba5184 _ 006-0a90443 HGST Hitachi HDD SATA Logic Board Elektronik | eBay

So in theory, use the ROM IC from the SAS drive with this board, and you should have a working SATA drive.

Addition 3:

This seller actually points out the location of the ROM IC here:

006 0a90446 0j43734 ba5239b WD HGST SATA 3.5" HDD PCB Logic Board | eBay

Another issue is many of the boards are sold from Kiyv, Ukraine..

That is too much additional cost and complication to add on to these used hdd that are bought for being cheap per TB cost...lol.... One of these controller board is basically the cost of one H310 sas controller which can control 8 hdd without backplane... not very cost effective to try to switch controller boards to go sata. lol,, good for probing the data if you are into that

 

[heromode]

That is too much additional cost and complication to add on to these used hdd that are bought for being cheap per TB cost...lol.... One of these controller board is basically the cost of one H310 sas controller which can control 8 hdd without backplane... not very cost effective to try to switch controller boards to go sata. lol,, good for probing the data if you are into that

Oh absolutely, but it's more like useful information regarding the fact that HDD manufacturers don't really make real SAS drives anymore, like the old days with the 10krpm enterprise drives, it's all the same mechanics with different controllers.

Also the above information might not be completely accurate, but it might point to the real history behind the 'refurbished' HGST drives, ie it's likely they are used drives that HGST, or now WD, has just fitted with new controllers. If anyone knows better then i'm happy to admit i'm completely wrong.

Note though these SAS drives in this thread don't seem to be that, they don't have new labels with the word 'refurbished' on them, like many of the SATA ones do.

 

[IamSpartacus]

Is anyone successfully updating the firmware on these drives? I have 24 of these and 1 of the 24 has an older firmware (A21D) and is seemingly making the drive perform a lot worse. I'd love to get this drive updated to the same A384 firmware.

 

[TXAG26]

Is anyone successfully updating the firmware on these drives? I have 24 of these and 1 of the 24 has an older firmware (A21D) and is seemingly making the drive perform a lot worse. I'd love to get this drive updated to the same A384 firmware.

I couldn't resist picking up a couple and mine were from Jan. 2018 and have fw: A3Z4.
Not sure which version is newer or how to update. I too would be interested in learning more if someone has successfully done this.

 

[tjk]

Not sure which version is newer or how to update. I too would be interested in learning more if someone has successfully done this.

Ditto, have a bunch and need to upgrade, please share if anyone has done this before.

 

[IamSpartacus]

I couldn't resist picking up a couple and mine were from Jan. 2018 and have fw: A3Z4.
Not sure which version is newer or how to update. I too would be interested in learning more if someone has successfully done this.

Ditto, have a bunch and need to upgrade, please share if anyone has done this before.

I just updated my firmware using this post and this firmware.

 

[Fritz]

I just updated my firmware using this post and this firmware.

Firmware linky stinky.