Got Some New Seagate Exos Drives, Not Sure About Them...

[Gerowen]

So for years my home server has been running Western Digital Gold 12TB drives in software RAID 5 (mdadm, Linux) and it has been great.  But, they were getting full so I decided to pick up some 18 TB Seagate Exos drives to upgrade to.  I updated my backup, replaced the drives, created the array and started restoring data from my backup to the new drives.  The ones I got came from a third party seller on Amazon selling some old stock white label drives, but they were indeed new and had 0 power on hours when I got them.  Honestly I kinda wish I had noticed the reviews mentioning this fact before I bought them, but I was on my phone and didn't go scrolling around the page too much beyond verifying they were the product I wanted and were listed as "new".  I have a couple odd observations though.

 

1) The array immediately entered a "degraded" state and appears to be resilvering one of the drives.  This "might" be normal, but I don't recall having this issue before with the Western Digitals.

 

2) Some of the SMART attributes on these drives is just wacky.  Certain attributes like "Raw_Read_Error_Rate" and "Seek_Error_Rate" have crazy high values that my WD drives didn't have, but they seem to be passing SMART tests.  I pulled one of the drives and installed Seagate's "Seatools" utility on my laptop thinking it might make more sense of those, but even that utility just displayed the same raw output.  The drives say "Passed" when I run SMART tests, and a few things I've found online state that Seagate stores these values differently than other manufacturers (stored as hex or something for some reason), so a high value isn't necessarily indicative of a problem, but I would think that Seatools at least would show the correct, human read-able value and it's not.  Also, they don't report their helium levels at all, unlike the WDs.

 

3) The array is still resilvering that one drive, but the read speeds are incredibly slow, like 1MB/s or less.  Write speeds seem fine.  I'm not sure what the reason is.  I'm restoring data to the array from my external backup drives still, plus it's resilvering that one drive, so I'm not expecting full speed, but it just seems odd.  I've moved data onto and off my old drives while they were resilvering and not had this issue.

 

I dunno, I'm gonna let the rebuild/resilver finish but these drives just don't seem to be acting right.  Even the resilvering on the WDs ran at over 100MB/s, this one runs at like 65MB/s even when I stop all other services that might be using the drives.  I had much better performance and much plainer SMART data on my old WD drives.  These seem to even take longer to spool up and become accessible.  When I shut the server down and put one in an external enclosure to run the tests on it, it takes a solid 20-30 seconds for it to show up.  If they don't start acting better after the resilver, I'm very seriously considering just sending them back for a refund and ponying up the extra cash for some WD Golds in 18-20 TB capacities.

 

[kokosnh]

you are right, now give us the SMART RAW value in HEX not dec as you just did, some of the value are composed of more then one, and you can only read it in hex, to dec.

 

Just wait for them to finish, when bulding RAID 5, it has to write it all first. I would have not restore the backup, till the HDD did not finish building the RAID5 anyway.

and performance, when it’s building the array will be just inconsistent at best. Why bother.

 

 

 

 

[OhioYJ]

14 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

but they were indeed new and had 0 power on hours when I got them.

There are several third party sellers, that have been "caught" modifying and messing with SMART values. I would not trust those drives, and not just because they are Seagate.

 

You had the "Gold" standard in drives honestly. I use the Gold drives in my regular machines. My NAS I'm just using the RED drives. If you are going to use Gold drives I'd sit back and wait for them to go on sale, from an authorized distributor (so you get an actual warranty). HGST drives are generally cheaper than Gold drives, might price those as well.

[Gerowen]

10 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

There are several third party sellers, that have been "caught" modifying and messing with SMART values. I would not trust those drives, and not just because they are Seagate.

 

You had the "Gold" standard in drives honestly. I use the Gold drives in my regular machines. My NAS I'm just using the RED drives. If you are going to use Gold drives I'd sit back and wait for them to go on sale, from an authorized distributor (so you get an actual warranty). HGST drives are generally cheaper than Gold drives, might price those as well.

I'm gonna let the resilver finish, but if their performance doesn't drastically improve afterwards I'll just return them and I guess I'll start looking for non essential data to remove from the old drives to tide me over until I find a good deal on my WDs. I haven't wiped my old drives yet and kept backup copies of the encryption keys, so I could literally go back to those in about two minutes.

[Kilrah]

1 hour ago, Gerowen said:

The ones I got came from a third party seller on Amazon selling some old stock white label drives, but they were indeed new and had 0 power on hours when I got them.

These refurbished drives get their hours cleared.

 

1 hour ago, Gerowen said:

Certain attributes like "Raw_Read_Error_Rate" and "Seek_Error_Rate" have crazy high values that my WD drives didn't have, but they seem to be passing SMART tests.

On Seagate drives these values have multiple fields, some bytes counting errors but others counting normal actuations. Normal to have high values there as long as the error fields are 0.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/86337-are-my-smart-reports-bad/#comment-800888

 

1 hour ago, Gerowen said:

I'm restoring data to the array from my external backup drives still

Don't do 2 things at once. Let the array build before you put anything on it.

 

I've got a bunch of Ironwolfs/Exos and they perform great. Always bought them either genuinely new or used from individuals though, not white label/refurbished/recertified.

[leclod]

55 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

The ones I got came from a third party seller on Amazon selling some old stock white label drives, but they were indeed new and had 0 power on hours when I got them.  Honestly I kinda wish I had noticed the reviews mentioning this fact before I bought them.

 

2) Some of the SMART attributes on these drives is just wacky. 

What do you mean, you wish you knew they were new ?

 

Whith smart tests, do you mean short self-test ?

 

I use HD Sentinel with my drives, I wonder if it shows something on your drives.

 

Edited August 13, 2023 by leclod

[Gerowen]

18 hours ago, leclod said:

What do you mean, you wish you knew they were new ?

 

Whith smart tests, do you mean short self-test ?

 

I use HD Sentinel with my drives, I wonder if it shows something on your drives.

 

They were listed as "new" on Amazon.

 

As far as the smart tests I ran short and conveyance tests both. After the resilver is finished in a couple hours I plan on running long ones.

 

I installed Seagate's own "Seatools" and connected one of the drives and Seatools reported the same crazy values, but when I ran smartctl with a flag to convert them from 48 bit hex, the values were normal.

 

I'm very seriously considering just returning all 3 and putting my old drives back in, ordering one more of them to upgrade with and calling it a day. Those WD drives report proper values in smart, they report their helium levels so you know if something has happened, they populate much faster so the whole system boots quicker and their read speeds don't tank during a resilver. Even on startup, 2 of the 3 Seagate drives take an unusually long time to spin up and start communicating. Whether it's my server or my laptop, when I connect one it's a good 30 seconds or more of the light flashing before the drives actually pop up and are ready to be accessed. This means that the server sits in the BIOS that whole time waiting on those drives to become responsive during POST.

[Kilrah]

Note that you might get slow spin-ups if you go with higher capacity WDs as well. Simple physics, these large capacity drives need so many platters that firstly the spindle has a lot of mass, and secondly the room available for the motor is reduced so putting a beefy thing isn't an option. So you get 10 seconds spin-up times as a result...

[leclod]

1 hour ago, Gerowen said:

I'm very seriously considering just returning all 3 and putting my old drives back in.

I wonder how this works though.

As a seller I'd think twice before taking back an HDD.

51 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Note that you might get slow spin-ups if you go with higher capacity WDs as well. Simple physics, these large capacity drives need so many platters that firstly the spindle has a lot of mass, and secondly the room available for the motor is reduced so putting a beefy thing isn't an option. So you get 10 seconds spin-up times as a result...

I disagree. I run two 16TB. They act normal, they don't take 10s to spin-up, maybe 3s.

Those big drives have hydrogen which might help with drag.

Edited August 14, 2023 by leclod

[Gerowen]

5 hours ago, leclod said:

I wonder how this works though.

As a seller I'd think twice before taking back an HDD.

I disagree. I run two 16TB. They act normal, they don't take 10s to spin-up, maybe 3s.

Those big drives have hydrogen which might help with drag.

I've only ever done it once; I ordered a drive that was listed as new, but when I got it SMART reported 20k hours of "power on hours".  They offered me either $100 off or return/refund.  It was a WD Gold and I wasn't desperate for the space at that time so I just returned it.  I'm starting to wish I had taken them up on the $100 discount and just kept that one.
 

The resilver finished this morning and benchmarking the filesystem that spans all 3 drives reports acceptable write speeds, but read speeds of like 40MB/s.  I logged into another system that is hardwired directly to the same router and tried transferring a file and it checks out, the read speeds would spike to ~50MB/s, then it would seem to hang for a second and drop back down into the 30s before leveling off around 40ish.

 

Here's the results of an iozone benchmark with a 512MB file.  I understand that there's going to be some loss in performance based on the fact that it's software RAID 5 and an encrypted partition on a decade old 6 core Phenom CPU, but so were my WDs that I was using and they would just about saturate my gigabit ethernet at 100ish MB/s; a little slower when I use SFTP since that adds another layer of encryption.

 

I'm going to bring it down, take out the SATA add-in card and connect the drives directly to the motherboard and see if that makes any difference.  Then, if it doesn't, I'm going to throw my WDs back in there and run the exact same benchmarks and see what they look like.

 

[leclod]

40 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

I've only ever done it once; I ordered a drive that was listed as new, but when I got it SMART reported 20k hours of "power on hours".  They offered me either $100 off or return/refund.  It was a WD Gold and I wasn't desperate for the space at that time so I just returned it.  I'm starting to wish I had taken them up on the $100 discount and just kept that one.

I was in a similar position recently. Got a new (I think) 16TB Red Pro instead of a refurbished cheap 18TB Gold. I decided to keep it.

40 minutes ago, Gerowen said:

I'm going to bring it down, take out the SATA add-in card and connect the drives directly to the motherboard and see if that makes any difference.  Then, if it doesn't, I'm going to throw my WDs back in there and run the exact same benchmarks and see what they look like.

If you do it, maybe have a go at the free version of HD Sentinel. I'd be interested to know if it finds something.

Edited August 14, 2023 by leclod

[Gerowen]

26 minutes ago, leclod said:

I was in a similar position recently. Got a new (I think) 16TB Red Pro instead of a refurbished cheap 18TB Gold. I decided to keep it.

If you do it, maybe have a go at the free version of HD Sentinel. I'd be interested to know if it finds something.

Made no difference being connected to the motherboard, so I put the WDs back in and they just picked up and worked.  POST time was back down to about 10 seconds total.  When I connected the Seagates directly to the motherboard, for some reason boot time skyrocketed.  Two of the three Seagates took a solid 30 seconds plus to appear in the device list during POST (the first one appeared instantly), and it still sat there for several minutes before continuing to the OS with the HDD LED staying pretty well solid.  When I swapped in the WDs it worked just fine.  Write and read speeds are back up where they're supposed to be.

[Gerowen]

Just filed for a return through Amazon and boxed the Seagates back up.

 

Edit: When transferring a test file between the internal boot SSD and the RAID array where the network wouldn't be the bottleneck, I was getting read/write speeds in the several hundreds of MB/s, instead of 40.

[Kilrah]

Seems you got offloaded some faulty drives. Definitely shouldn't take 30 seconds to populate (expecially since one doesnt) and typical R/W speed of these is 150-280MB/s.