I had to send a Barracuda drive back recently.
"It's fine" said Seagate's SMART analysis tools.
"Clunk clunk clunk clonk" said the HDD.
I know which of those results I trusted more.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Barracudas are SMR garbage nowadays, they're coasting on their reputation of many years ago when they were actually decent hard drives for the price.
I only wanted it for a Jellyfin drive. The one thing it could have been useful for and it even failed at that.
Seems like you need to pay the extra for an Ironwolf drive to get an actual "just like the good old days" HDD.
Exos are typically still good drives though if you're going for storage.
How does one test for this?
There are several programs that can check for disk info (S.M.A.R.T), so I'll lay out some options for you
CrystalDiskInfo is free to use on Windows
For MacOS (where realistically you'd be doing this for an external drive as I believe they don't show you much or anything at all on modern internal drives) you can get a free trial of DriveDX. There are probably other programs you can use for free, but if you only need to do it once, just get that because it does a really good job of letting you know what's up. Just visualizes things in an easily newbie-understandable way.
There are programs that can check such things as runtime, wear (...).
PSA to always run a full length SMART check for any drives you buy, even from OEM. The short test and log are not enough, I have bought faulty drives that someone had reset the logs and power on hours.
All passed short SMART test, but failed long SMART test after only a few minutes. Found just one drive that the skrub forgot to wipe and the log showed 6 continuous years of power on usage.
Even from OEM, you will at least know if the hardware is DOA which you can then RMA.
Probably performs a good burn-in for them too.
Do people still do that? Used to be common practice to power on equipment and let it sit, either idle or full-tilt, for a couple days before even starting to configure it. Let the factory bugs scatter out.
Landlord just got me a new washing machine. I’ve been burning it in since Sunday.
Accoirding to TFA these drives all passed SMART tests.
Secondary PSA Seagate use some godawful numbering scheme on their SMART results, if you're not aware of the fact you need a calculator understand the raw error count it will freak you the fuck out.
"lightly fucked"
what do we call this scandal? seagate? seagate...gate?
Sea(gate)^2
Seagate’s not the one responsible for this, though. It was the work of shady retailers.
yeah but where's the pun in that
“Shady German Retailers Spin Refurbished Drives As New”
Shady German Retailers Spin Refurbished Drives As New gate
Seetor-gate. Because it's German
Der Meertor-Skandal
Seems strange as its from several different retailers but seagate confirmed they where refurbished so seems a bit bait and switch but why would so many be doing it?
Either Seagate is doing it or all the retailers get them from the same source (which may not be Seagate) that is doing it or is contaminated by fulfillment pooling
The wholesaler where these are shipped from may have bought a large amount of hard drives from China and Co mingled the stock. Most logical explanation.
Because they can get away with it due to the fact that most people don’t know how to view the “hours powered on” information or other SMART diagnostic output.
actually the article mentions the smart metrics did not show it. The guy had to use something deeper.
SMART data is reset by a lot of refurbished HDDs, but then you usually KNOW that they are refurbished
It may depend on the level of "refurbishing" that's been done, but I don't believe that's a very good idea.
they confirmed they were refurbished, as well as the drives were OEM drives (meaning different warranty) so the problem is that someone 100% has a mixed assortment of storage. whether that was on Seagates end or the retailers end (more likely imo to be on the retailers end, as Seagate has their own refurbished drive market they run, and would only be a seagate problem if someone mistakingly shipped a bunch to a retailer) as they are their own source and is not affected by other sources.
The Retailers source the drives, and aren't paying particularly too much attention, they're not opening what seemingly looks like oem secured retail packaging, and simply having them dropshipped from the wholesaler