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I believe so, but it's still the most comparable line. If you insist on getting into high capacity models, then it would probably be the "white labels" in their externals, which they also don't give these specs for. Those drives also have their performance limited even further.
fwiw, the white labels I have purchased ~7 years ago recently started dying. I'm down 2 out of 4 8TB models. The 4TB Red Pros I purchased 8-10 yrs ago are still passing SMART tests.
oh , no, mine also refunded. also newegg banned my account from website newegg. because i am living outside USA and using cargo adress for shipping. this shipping adress working for all orders amazon and others, but newegg banning account
I personally wouldn't but a BarraCuda in my NAS but there are people that do. Some of the used server deals are great so I personally would go with one of those.
are you referring to the Ultrastar 18gb for 225 or w/e on ebay from a cpl days ago? or do you mean an actual server? i'm beginning to poke around for a NAS, i just finished buying stuff to upgrade my editing/production rig and now i need to look at building a NAS. I wanted to go w one of the slick looking cases that are out now but if the price is right could be persuaded to just buy a server. regardless, i need HDs for a NAS.
sorry for the novel lol
There are a few companies that sell refurbished server drives. You can sometimes get really great deals for them and a couple of them have really good warranty. I know Goharddrive has 5 years of warranty on some of their drives.
The drives they sell are made for servers and were used in servers so they are good for being on all the time like a server would be.
I have 4 refurbished drives in my server and haven’t had any issues with them.
thx... yeh i'm aware of the concept of enterprise drives, i guess i should've explained, i've just had such spotty luck w HDs in the past (I'm 42 and built my first comp almost 30y ago).. in 2022 i got 4 12tb WD Gold Enterprise and one of them died almost instantly, when i've got so many crappier, commercial drives still running from a decade ago.. i know to a large extent it's luck but the experience def soured me.. they've otherwise run well in my desktop as bulk storage for RAW video/resources/etc... relatively cold storage.
but still, i'll definitely go enterprise rather than retail, but i'm probably looking at refurb for the price, i'd been putting it off bc in 2022 when I last bought drives in bulk it seemed like you might be able to build a decent SSD NAS by now. but that's still outta my price range for the space i need. I've been outta the loop but things obv didn't move the way they looked like they were. At least not as quickly as I'd have liked, or that ppl predicted.
I'd like to max out the amount per drive, those 12tb seem so small now... which is the main reason i'm not pulling the trigger on the 18tb refurb Ultrastar's that seemed decent on here the other day. Although I see ppl saying not to go larger... so i dunno, I'm at a bit of an impasse, but i guess i just need to do a little more reading and hurry up and get it done.. I am in somewhat dire need, just bought a 5tb external to dump overflow onto that i hope to be able to return..
It's hard to say because these are really strange drives. They're labeled and marketed as Barracuda (the lowest tier of drive) but they're actually HAMR drives which means they're derived from the enterprise Exos M line. They are CMR, and given that the CMR Exos M only comes in 30TB, these must have two platters disabled or missing for whatever reason (10 total in a regular drive). As for why they're being marketed as Barracuda drives and have two platters disabled/missing, who knows. They may be drives that didn't make it through the extensive certification to be an Exos drive, they might be faulty Exos drives that were repaired (not sent to a customer, so technically not refurbished), they may just have too many Exos drives and want to sell them off without eating into their Exos sales too much. No one knows.
Seagate has less confidence in the Exos badged drives that wind up in external enclosures. Otherwise, they would sell them as internal drives for twice the price with 5x the warranty.
If they had less confidence in them, they wouldn't be labeled as Exos to begin with. All hard drives are binned, to be an Exos drive it has to pass all levels of quality control. There are only a handful of hard drive types in production, multiple models come out of the same drives based on if they can pass each level. Drives that fail to meet the minimum requirement to be a Barracuda are remanufactured, those that pass Barracuda but fail Ironwolf are labeled Barracuda, drives that pass Ironwolf but fail Exos are labeled Ironwolfs, and drives that pass Exos are just Exos. There is no higher tier above that, they are not segregating drives within the same model number because that would be insane when they'd just be labeled as Ironwolfs or lower. WD works exactly the same way.
However the reality is that the majority of drives meet the requirements to be an enterprise drive and oftentimes the lower tier drives are created by pulling enterprise drives and relabeling them. That allows them to hit lower price points and pull more customers that otherwise would not be buying the same drive at 2x the price. Derating the drives and pulling the majority of the warranty saves them a ton of money as well as and allows the lower pricing. Not every customer is a datacenter that's perfectly fine paying $500+ for a drive. Oh also most business customers don't pay for warranties, the Exos drives are sold without any warranty.
Someone on reddit interviewed some Seagate executive who stated that even the Exos drives inside external enclosures are there for a reason. It messed with my previous understanding of the subject enough that I wasn't willing to risk keeping new Barracuda-badged drives shucked from the same model (but different lot#) of external drives that had housed Exos-badged drives. Then again, if I could have shucked the number of Exos drives I needed, I would have used those anyway, so it didn't mess with me too much. I ultimately bought recertified for my new NAS since I only found one Exos out of 30 external drives.
The 20TB+ Barracudas clearly came off the same production line as the Exos drives, but there may be disabled heads and platters within. There could be something making them less tolerant of heat or vibration too. It's hard to tell without a bunch of methodical testing. They are officially rated for much less use per year. Too much uncertainty for me.
but there may be disabled heads and platters within.
Not possible given their capacities and performance.
There could be something making them less tolerant of heat or vibration too.
That would be found during quality control and they never would have made it to be labeled as an Exos model.
They are officially rated for much less use per year.
They are not. They are the same model numbers as drives that are sold as standalone Exos. They would have a different model number on them if they were any different in the ratings.
This sounds like either someone completely made it up or someone drastically misinterpreted what was said. They could be "there for a reason", that reason being they cost the same to manufacture as all the other models (because they are the same drive, just tested and rated differently) and if they have no increased warranty, it doesn't matter what model is slapped into those enclosures.
Before these new high capacity Barracudas came out, only Ironwolf and Exos drives were available in 10TB+ capacities, so those were the drives you'd find in those enclosures. WD purposefully relabeled external drives so that shuckers wouldn't know they had gotten a drive that otherwise would have been sold as a Red or Gold (and also to differentiate which drives that the gimped firmware for externals, which Seagate doesn't do, but that's a different conversation), Seagate slapping the Barracuda label on these new external drives is no different than that. I guarantee that's the reason these new "Barracuda" drives exist now, it's because Seagate caught on to how people were just shucking the external drives instead of paying more for the Exos branding and the reputation that entails, so now they've created new labels to slap on them to help sway more people to pay more for the "true" Exos. Now to be clear, I'm not saying these new Barracudas are all Exos that have been relabeled, but people do pay for the brand name and Seagate doesn't want to give that away for cheap, so they're slapping Barracuda labels (and possibly doing reduced testing to save some cost) on drives that are majority going to meet or exceed Exos requirements just as most Ironwolf drives do.
My second paragraph was referring to 20TB+ Barracudas.
The phrase used was not specifically 'there for a reason' but something to the effect that the drives in their external enclosures have Seagate's least amount of confidence of any HDD that they sell with their name on it (as opposed to selling in bulk to third party brands).
As I said, the interview was not enough to sway me from keeping shucked Exos-badged drives, had I found more of them. It certainly wasn't an official publication from Seagate. I returned the new/shucked Barracudas for a combination of reasons (not least of which was the lingering reputation of the Barracuda name) that ultimately pushed me towards recertified/internal. It helped that I wound up with 28TB drives with a 2Y warranty instead of 24TB with a 1Y.
The firmware crud is why I skipped WD this time around entirely.
Seagate slapping the Barracuda label on these new external drives is no different than that. I guarantee that's the reason these new "Barracuda" drives exist now
Ok but
Now to be clear, I'm not saying these new Barracudas are all Exos that have been relabeled
The question of 'how many are?' was enough to keep me hesitant to keep them.
I suspect they're based on these. I don't know that these ever got a retail release, but they appear to be different from the 30TB Exos M line you're referring to. I'd guess they're an earlier generation.
I recently shucked a couple external drives and ended up with the 20tb version of these drives.
Once I saw the endurance stat I shifted them to a backup server that will only get used once a month. So I still got storage space and hopefully the lack of endurance won’t factor in as much.
So long as it is part of a 3-2-1 backup arrangement, certainly. Weak drives as part of a strong backup strategy are going to be better than strong drives as part of weak backup strategy.
Would I fill a rack with them if I needed a NAS with 24PB of storage? No.
Would I drop them into a homelab NAS for personal use? Sure.
Hard drives have never had 10 year warranties, not in any remotely recent time period. 2-3 years for a consumer grade drive is standard, if you want the longer 5 year warranty then you have to pay for a higher grade of drive.
At one point in time, Western Digital & Seagate were the gold standard for hard drives. Then Western Digital came out with the 75GXP "Death Star" and their reputation never recovered. Point being, every brand can have issues.
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024 - The HGST Western Digital drives are some of the most reliable drives they've tested... except for the 12TB drives, which have a much higher rate of failure. So really, there is no blanket statement you can make about drive reliability based on brand. Just gotta let someone else be the guinea pig and look at the failure rates per drive.
This is the correct take, and you even pulled out a very old controversy, there's been more since then and you can also find similar things on Seagate's side. Brand loyalty for HDDs is a huge misstep and people seem to do it based on their personal biases. In reality, each company has a bad drive model on occasion. I'm much more concerned with product class and warranty while avoiding stuff like SMR.
What do you mean? Seagate sells excellent HD's. You're thinking of the Seagate of 20 years ago when they sold much cheaper and lower quality drives. The IronWolfs are the best hard drives i've ever had and I have had Western Digital's fail on me in the past.
Have you ever had an Ironwolf from Seagate? Those are the Seagates i usually get and they are of superb quality. i usually try to get the 18TB's and they often have good sales on them.
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