It depends. They're simply the most annoying drives out there because Seagate on their wisdom decided to remove half of the SMART data from reports and they won't let you change the power settings like other drives. Those drives will never spin down, they'll even report to the system they're spun down while in fact they'll be still running at a lower speed. They also make a LOT of noise.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
44 points (92.3% liked)
Selfhosted
46672 readers
214 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Aren’t they meant to go in data centers? You wouldn’t want a drive in a data center to spin down. That introduces latency in getting the data off of them.
That should be a choice of the OS / controller card not of the drive itself. Also what datacenter wants to run drives that don't report half of the SMART data just because they felt like it?
I have an Exos x16 and x18 drive and they both spin down fine in Debian using hdparm. I use them for cold storage and they're perfectly adequate.
Care you share your hdparm config then?
It's really boring, Debian 12: /dev/disk/by-uuid/8f041da5-6f7a-4ff5-befa-2d3cc61a382c { spindown_time = 241 write_cache = off }
Tried that and doesn't seem to work. :(
Relevant documentation for others about -S / spindown_time:
Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes.
It's just the cheapest type of drive there is. The use case is in large scale RAIDs where one disk failing isn't a big issue. They tend to have decent warranty but under heavy load they're not expected to last multiple years. Personally I use drives like this but I make sure to have them in a RAID and with backup, anything else would be foolish. Do also note that expensive NAS drives aren't guaranteed to last either so a RAID is always recommended.
To support this: Backblaze consistently reports much higher failure rates for Seagate drives than all others. I personally don't trust them. All my failed drives are Seagate, but that's anecdotal. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/ the by manufacturer graph.
That tracks with my experience as well. Literally every single Seagate drive I've owned has died, while I have decade old WDs that are still trucking along with zero errors. I decided a while back that I was never touching Seagate again.
For sure higher but still not high, we're talking single digit percentage failed drives per year with a massive sample size. TCO (total cost of ownership) might still come out ahead for Seagate being that they are many times quite a bit cheaper. Still drives failures are a part of the bargain when you're running your own NAS so plan for it no matter what drive you end up buying. Which means have cash on hand to buy a new one so you can get up to full integrity as fast as possible. (Best is of course to always have a spare on hand but that isn't feasible for a lot of us.).
Ok cool, I plan on using them in RAID Z1
Hell of a deal. i started using refurb drives, still 5 year warranty, because I was going through so many. Sometimes you get them half off.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #383 for this sub, first seen 29th Dec 2023, 10:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]