Seagate 18TB Hard Drive Exos X18 18TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 3.5" Manufacturer Recertified $245 Shipped

I'm going to do it even if I don't post it, lol. I was actually surprised that the deal wasn't cheaper. I though surely it would have broke into the 12s or 13s.
So many times a “deal” isn’t really a deal, but the math shows the way
 
So many times a “deal” isn’t really a deal, but the math shows the way
Still a deal since it's on par with the lowest prices per TV on shucks.top and has the same warranty. (y) To me a deal is getting a whole fully loaded DAS for $6/TB. :D
 
Who provides the refurb warranty, Seagate or the seller?
I searched their site for this, and it is unclear except that it is clear that these are refurbs by the manufacturer, not by the seller so I would assume the manufacturer. Also, if someone is looking for a better price per TB or a specific a model number with the same 2yr warranty, you can find that in other drive models like:
Seagage 10TB exos for $130 ($13/TB) :
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive

HGST 10TB for $135 ($13.50/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...mb-cache-3-5-sed-manufacturer-recertified-hdd

WD 10TB for $140 ($14/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...ower-disable-pin-manufacturer-recertified-hdd

Seagate 12TB for $158 ($13.17/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive

Seagate 12TB for $165 ($13.75/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...s-512e-256mb-3-5-manufacturer-recertified-hdd
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive

WD 12TB for $169 ($14.08/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...ower-disable-pin-manufacturer-recertified-hdd

HGST 12TB for $169 ($14.08/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...mb-cache-3-5-ise-manufacturer-recertified-hdd

Seagate 14TB for $195 ($13.93/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...b-3-5-fastformat-manufacturer-recertified-hdd
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive

WD 14TB for $195 ($13.93/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...pm-sata-6gb-s-512e-3-5-recertified-hard-drive

Seagate 16TB for $225 ($14.06/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...b-3-5-fastformat-manufacturer-recertified-hdd

Seagate 16TB for $230 ($14.38/TB):
https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...-2k-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-recertified-hard-drive
 
Can you help me understand what is a manufacture certified HDD? Something that was used and they ran a test and if it passed, then they call it manufacturer certified? That's what I think it means.
 
If it states Manufacturer Recertified, would mean the manufacturer of said drive, has repaired/tested it, aka a refurbished product, and being resold with said warranty applied. If it states Seller recertified, it would mean the seller of said hard drives has had the drive serviced, not knowing by whom. If it stated Authorized Serviced, it would mean a company that is on the approval list from the manufacturer to handle repairs. So Manufacturer recertified is good. Honestly, decent price for the seagate, but it's a seagate....My personal experience has always been terrible with seagate drives over the past decade. However my hitachi drives, which I have more than 10, and some of them still going strong passing smart with over 50,000 hours of use, are still kickin butt. Would definitely recommend the HGST helio drives, as they were hitachi manufactured. Or large capacity white label drives from WD, as they tend to be made from Hitachi's plants (who is now owned by WD).

But also considering how often WD has been selling their enterprise 16tb drives on sale for just under 300 brand new, would be hard pressed on a choice to buy one of these, or wait for those deals again.
 
If it states Manufacturer Recertified, would mean the manufacturer of said drive, has repaired/tested it, aka a refurbished product, and being resold with said warranty applied. If it states Seller recertified, it would mean the seller of said hard drives has had the drive serviced, not knowing by whom. If it stated Authorized Serviced, it would mean a company that is on the approval list from the manufacturer to handle repairs. So Manufacturer recertified is good. Honestly, decent price for the seagate, but it's a seagate....My personal experience has always been terrible with seagate drives over the past decade. However my hitachi drives, which I have more than 10, and some of them still going strong passing smart with over 50,000 hours of use, are still kickin butt. Would definitely recommend the HGST helio drives, as they were hitachi manufactured. Or large capacity white label drives from WD, as they tend to be made from Hitachi's plants (who is now owned by WD).

But also considering how often WD has been selling their enterprise 16tb drives on sale for just under 300 brand new, would be hard pressed on a choice to buy one of these, or wait for those deals again.
So to give another data point, I bought the Seagate 16TB Exos when they came out a few years back and have several of the HGST/WD enterprise drives as well. These Exos have been built to challenge the domination of HGST/WD in the enterprise sata space and remind me of the Seagate drives of old where they were the best of the best. They are pretty much the Seagate version of the HGST/WD with similar if not same characteristics in terms of speed, weight, and noise. And since Seagate is pretty much the dominant manufacturer of enterprise SAS drives, my guess is that they just pulled their knowledge from these reliable disks and put them into the Exos line.

While I personally shy away from any refurbed drives, if one is looking at shucking consumer wanna-be enterprise drives versus these refurbs, it's no contest in my mind--I'd get one of these versus a shucked one since these have the true design intent of being a real enterprise drive vs a wanna-be.

Oh, and the deal just got sweeter--it's down to $245 now, so $13.61/TB. (y)
 
Or just wait a bit and buy them brand spanking new, with the 5 year warranty, for $290 each? I had them priced below $300 at both B&H and Amazon early last month.

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So to give another data point, I bought the Seagate 16TB Exos when they came out a few years back and have several of the HGST/WD enterprise drives as well. These Exos have been built to challenge the domination of HGST/WD in the enterprise sata space and remind me of the Seagate drives of old where they were the best of the best. They are pretty much the Seagate version of the HGST/WD with similar if not same characteristics in terms of speed, weight, and noise. And since Seagate is pretty much the dominant manufacturer of enterprise SAS drives, my guess is that they just pulled their knowledge from these reliable disks and put them into the Exos line.

That's good to know. It's always good to have more choices. Like others I've had bad results with Seagate over the years. When I look at my box of dead hard drives, about 80% of them are Seagate. The idea of trusting 18TB of info to a Seagate drive seems like something only a masochist would do. But when competition keeps prices down, everyone wins. Unfortunately we won't actually know how reliable these drives are until years later. I have 4 Hitachi drives right now with over 100k power-on hours and these things just keep going.
 
I bought eight of the 14TB versions of this and four of them failed so far after less than a year. Seagate's warranty has been fast and good but it's super fucking annoying to have to keep rebuilding the array.
 
That's good to know. It's always good to have more choices. Like others I've had bad results with Seagate over the years. When I look at my box of dead hard drives, about 80% of them are Seagate. The idea of trusting 18TB of info to a Seagate drive seems like something only a masochist would do. But when competition keeps prices down, everyone wins. Unfortunately we won't actually know how reliable these drives are until years later. I have 4 Hitachi drives right now with over 100k power-on hours and these things just keep going.
So while mind don't have 100k POH (and honestly you should post those drives to the POH thread: https://hardforum.com/threads/post-your-hard-drive-power-on-hours.1915865/), mine do have over 14k/ea in two different nas units.
 
I bought eight of the 14TB versions of this and four of them failed so far after less than a year. Seagate's warranty has been fast and good but it's super fucking annoying to have to keep rebuilding the array.
For that many failures, it's either that the drives were damaged in shipping/installation or aren't being cooled sufficiently. These aren't consumer drives that are designed to be whisper quiet and cool to the touch--these are enterprise drives that have heft that you can hear and will burn your hand if you torture it without cooling. It's why I always keep all my fan 100% in anything that has a speed-adjustable fan--because hot electronics are cooking their life away...
 
For that many failures, it's either that the drives were damaged in shipping/installation or aren't being cooled sufficiently. These aren't consumer drives that are designed to be whisper quiet and cool to the touch--these are enterprise drives that have heft that you can hear and will burn your hand if you torture it without cooling. It's why I always keep all my fan 100% in anything that has a speed-adjustable fan--because hot electronics are cooking their life away...

They are in a Synology NAS in a 42u rack in a climate controlled room and plenty of airflow. FWIW Backblaze also found a high failure rate on this series I think.
 
I've built my own PC's for 30+ years, and have had 3 drives fail. All 3 were Seagate. I have not bought Seagate HD's for 15 years.

Has their quality improved to the point they are actually trusted suppliers now?
 
They are in a Synology NAS in a 42u rack in a climate controlled room and plenty of airflow. FWIW Backblaze also found a high failure rate on this series I think.
What is the fan setting on the synology? If it's anything other than 100%, that would be my suspect since a unit that dense needs more internal airflow.

Backblaze's finding were only on consumer class drives because they were (foolishly) thinking they could build robust data centers using consumer hardware. What've they've continuously been doing in each iteration of their storage enclosures is introducing more and more enterprise components to reduce the overall maintenance and failures. Another 'disrupter' idea that missed it's mark by the usual 50%...
 
Dang! This is awesome. Just wish I had the cash to invest in drives/home server.
I think prices like this are going to become more normal as factories seem to be nearly done making the shift to these sized drives. And all you need is a single drive and share it if you want to have a home server. It's just that it's risky unless you have proper backups.
 
I've built my own PC's for 30+ years, and have had 3 drives fail. All 3 were Seagate. I have not bought Seagate HD's for 15 years.

Has their quality improved to the point they are actually trusted suppliers now?
Interesting as I've been doing it as long as you have. I guess you never used any of Segate's SCSI drives back in the day as they were as fine a drive as possible at the time.

There was a point where Seagate lost their direction after they ousted founder Mr. Shugart (one of the inventors of the hard drive) and they were chasing the consumer market as a bunch of other players did during that era like Maxtor and Quantum (which Seagate later acquired). And it was only recently that this Exos line came out with what seemed like a revamped focus on their previous core drive philosophy--quality. And while the consumer side of Seagate had its share of issues over the decades, it seems their enterprise side has quietly become stable and is 'known' to be quality as both HP and Dell servers come with their SAS drives, and these SAS drives are pretty much bulletproof. I think they took a page out of the playbook from yesterday and simply made SATA interfaces available on their SAS drives as there are SAS Exos as well.

Every drive manufacturer will have failures. And every drive ever made will fail. The question is only when and under what circumstances.
 
Has their quality improved to the point they are actually trusted suppliers now?

The problem is that it's impossible to know exactly how well new drives will hold up over the years because you can't truly test longevity without allowing time to pass, and these new drives simply haven't been around long enough yet. They could have a 90% failure rate after 5 years and we wouldn't know it yet. Then again these might end up being some of the most reliable drives ever made.

The only other real metric available is the past history of each company, and in that respect Seagate is clearly the worst. I'd love to believe that Seagate has finally gotten better, but I'm also content to let others play the guinea pig while I stick with WD (HGST based drives preferably).
 
I think prices like this are going to become more normal as factories seem to be nearly done making the shift to these sized drives. And all you need is a single drive and share it if you want to have a home server. It's just that it's risky unless you have proper backups.
It's not like that for me. Storage and speed is a constant concern. My work is creating photo and video content for myself and clients. Single shoots can easily be a TB (most of the time for short-form commercial content using compressed formats I can get away with a few 100GB's or so). If I was shooting in RAW, basically every hour of video shot would be 1 TB (but I currently am not working with clients where that is necessary. However as you go up the commercial chain, eventually that will be a concern).
I buy all my drives in pairs right now for redundancy (and I'm currently doing everything the old school way and using Chronosync to manage my duplicates), but I'm hoping in the relatively near term future I can invest in something like a QNAP using either Thunderbolt in DAS or 10GBe in NAS. And it will likely have to be 8 bays minimum and ideally 12+ bays (+slots for NVME drives and/or SSDs to help move things along). Basically single drives are "workable" but they aren't ideal. They are definitely acting as a bottleneck.

Both speed a size are a priority. It just sucks that right now my budgets are squeezed. I know ideally what I'd like to have though.
 
If you're addressing me personally, then it likely will never have access to the internet.
I'm not a sys-admin, so my options are limited. I DO NOT want to have anything I basically have to manage AT ALL. So, I have zero interest in using something like FreeNAS. And when it comes time to do it, it will be worth paying the premium (for me) for QNAP's hardware so that I don't have to manage things.
Synology tends to have too many features cut, features that matter to me for the money (things like not having 10GBe standard, no NVME slots, Thunderbolt, etc unless you buy certain expansions or tier levels. They tend to be a more 'budget' friendly and are looking to be 'enough' rather than fully featured). And they're basically the only other competitor that I know of in this segment.
 
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What is the fan setting on the synology? If it's anything other than 100%, that would be my suspect since a unit that dense needs more internal airflow.

Backblaze's finding were only on consumer class drives because they were (foolishly) thinking they could build robust data centers using consumer hardware. What've they've continuously been doing in each iteration of their storage enclosures is introducing more and more enterprise components to reduce the overall maintenance and failures. Another 'disrupter' idea that missed it's mark by the usual 50%...

The fans is at 100%, it's in a small biz environment so noise is not an issue and the synology fans aren't even the loudest thing in the rack. The hard drives sit in the mid 30C range.

Regardless of what you think of Backblaze, they have published the largest reliability data that is publicly available to consumers and Seagate is clearly, clearly the worst manufacturer and it's been consistent for several years.
 
The problem is that it's impossible to know exactly how well new drives will hold up over the years because you can't truly test longevity without allowing time to pass, and these new drives simply haven't been around long enough yet. They could have a 90% failure rate after 5 years and we wouldn't know it yet. Then again these might end up being some of the most reliable drives ever made.

The only other real metric available is the past history of each company, and in that respect Seagate is clearly the worst. I'd love to believe that Seagate has finally gotten better, but I'm also content to let others play the guinea pig while I stick with WD (HGST based drives preferably).
Yep, except that there's probably already been a 5yr point to a lot of the earlier drives and not real stink about them online.

It's sad that people only seem to remember the last 20 years of Seagate versus the full history. I still remember the days when Seagate was basically like Cisco when it was 'you can't get fired for buying Cisco'. And the newer drives definitely feel like the Seagate of old and not that chinsy crap that most people have seen, which was a lot of maxtor's and quantum's crappy consumer lines that were integrated into seagate.

As the saying goes though--whatever works for you. (y) WD/HGST have solid product lines too. It will remember when WD was known to be the chinsy crappy drive back in the day, lol.
 
It's not like that for me. Storage and speed is a constant concern. My work is creating photo and video content for myself and clients. Single shoots can easily be a TB (most of the time for short-form commercial content using compressed formats I can get away with a few 100GB's or so). If I was shooting in RAW, basically every hour of video shot would be 1 TB (but I currently am not working with clients where that is necessary. However as you go up the commercial chain, eventually that will be a concern).
I buy all my drives in pairs right now for redundancy (and I'm currently doing everything the old school way and using Chronosync to manage my duplicates), but I'm hoping in the relatively near term future I can invest in something like a QNAP using either Thunderbolt in DAS or 10GBe in NAS. And it will likely have to be 8 bays minimum and ideally 12+ bays (+slots for NVME drives and/or SSDs to help move things along). Basically single drives are "workable" but they aren't ideal. They are definitely acting as a bottleneck.

Both speed a size are a priority. It just sucks that right now my budgets are squeezed. I know ideally what I'd like to have though.
Whole different scenario than the 'just wish I could have a home server' post I was replying to.

I know your pain as I used to shoot thousands of images weekly and even had to have 3x cable modems and a multi-wan router just to upload in under 12hrs. Speed is definitely what you need during the creation process but like most professionals in your field, after the creation process it's more about storage reliability vs raw speed. I think the combination of NVME DAS and 10Gb NAS will definitely do well for you except it doesn't address the invisible elephant in the room when you get to this number of bits--bit rot. Because once you approach the 1x10^15 (or 16 or 17 for sdds) error rate, you'll have silent errors that nothing short of a zfs pool will be able to detect and correct. I manually dealt with this by keep 3x sets of the data and comparing them regularly and it was pretty easy to see which was the 'wrong' file when 2 others compared correctly and one didn't. But it's a huge operation to scale once you have TB and TB of data. Then you need to start thinking enterprise level stuff--SAS, servers that are built for data integrity, etc. And of course costs go up.

Luckily if you look for the stuff you're needing in the used market, it does pop up. In fact a qnap similar to what you're describing just went for $450 on reddit homlabsales about a week ago. From what I recall, it was 5 drive, 4 ssd, with 10Gb and maybe the ssds included too. Most of what I've picked up has come by the way of used and honestly I don't think I'll be looking new unless I have to because on the quality stuff a few years of use doesn't affect it in any place other than the drastic reduction in price. Something to consider.
 
If you're addressing me personally, then it likely will never have access to the internet.
I'm not a sys-admin, so my options are limited. I DO NOT want to have anything I basically have to manage AT ALL. So, I have zero interest in using something like FreeNAS. And when it comes time to do it, it will be worth paying the premium (for me) for QNAP's hardware so that I don't have to manage things.
Synology tends to have too many features cut, features that matter to me for the money (things like not having 10GBe standard, no NVME slots, Thunderbolt, etc unless you buy certain expansions or tier levels. They tend to be a more 'budget' friendly and are looking to be 'enough' rather than fully featured). And they're basically the only other competitor that I know of in this segment.
Yep, that's the way to go for sure. And freenas the like can be set up the same way as they're basically the same thing except free. For basic nas duties almost any of the free variants out there are just as good as the commercial stuff.

The bigger synology units have all the same features qnap does. In fact, as both scale up to rack mount chassis, they actually start making less sense than going with a server and one of the free variants which are better designed to run on servers.
 
The fans is at 100%, it's in a small biz environment so noise is not an issue and the synology fans aren't even the loudest thing in the rack. The hard drives sit in the mid 30C range.

Regardless of what you think of Backblaze, they have published the largest reliability data that is publicly available to consumers and Seagate is clearly, clearly the worst manufacturer and it's been consistent for several years.
Mid 30c is about right so it's not heat. The only other thing would be vibration then. Vibration during operation will also kill drives.

Regardless of how much faith you put in Backblaze and their ratings on consumer drives, these drives are not the same animal; and a whole manufacturer shouldn't be written off because of drives made a decade ago for crappy consumer use. But you're welcome to avoid deals like this if you wish--more for the rest of us. (y)
 
QNAP is fine as long as you follow sensible security practices and don't rely on their (perpetually beta testing) apps for sketchy things like remote access. QNAP has a bad rap on account of them being the cheaper option vs Synology (most of time), hence QNAP ends up with most of the budget consumers who are knowledgeable enough to want a cheap, full-featured NAS but not savvy enough to block unused services, apply updates / security patches, etc, etc. Basically these are the folks at greatest risk of bad things happening and I think they are disproportionately running QNAPs. Besides that, QNAPs developers also have a bad record of releasing buggy or insecure apps for QTS and then marketing these new apps/features to the same less-knowledgeable consumers.

you're addressing me personally, then it likely will never have access to the internet.
I'm not a sys-admin, so my options are limited. I DO NOT want to have anything I basically have to manage AT ALL. So, I have zero interest in using something like FreeNAS. And when it comes time to do it, it will be worth paying the premium (for me) for QNAP's hardware so that I don't have to manage things.
Synology tends to have too many features cut, features that matter to me for the money (things like not having 10GBe standard, no NVME slots, Thunderbolt, etc unless you buy certain expansions or tier levels. They tend to be a more 'budget' friendly and are looking to be 'enough' rather than fully featured). And they're basically the only other competitor that I know of in this segment.
QNAP is a good choice based on what you're describing, though you'll still pay for the privilege of 10GbE, NVMe, and Thunderbolt on one box, more if you want 8+ bays. I think the cheapest Intel QNAP with 6/8 bays, all of these features (including Thunderbolt) is something like $2000 or more.

I recently picked up a TS-873A and I'm happy with the purchase so far. It's an 8 bay for around $1000. It has an embedded Ryzen and comes with 8gb DDR4, with empty memory slot, and 2x available M.2. The downside: "only" 2.5GbE native on the unit and low bandwidth on the (PCIe 3x1) on the M.2 slots built-in... BUT it does have two full size PCIe 3x4 slots for expansion cards. I've currently got a Quadro and an older intel X540-T2 10GbE card installed - both work great and they were plug-and-play, no bullshit involved. The Quadro really surprised me, after installing in the QNAP, it prompted me to install the drivers, I told it yes and it just worked.
 
If you're addressing me personally, then it likely will never have access to the internet.
I'm not a sys-admin, so my options are limited. I DO NOT want to have anything I basically have to manage AT ALL. So, I have zero interest in using something like FreeNAS. And when it comes time to do it, it will be worth paying the premium (for me) for QNAP's hardware so that I don't have to manage things.
Synology tends to have too many features cut, features that matter to me for the money (things like not having 10GBe standard, no NVME slots, Thunderbolt, etc unless you buy certain expansions or tier levels. They tend to be a more 'budget' friendly and are looking to be 'enough' rather than fully featured). And they're basically the only other competitor that I know of in this segment.
synology has tons of vulnerabilities too and their support sucks too lol, can't win with these companies. I've run into a bunch of synology devices with bitcoin miners running on them lol. Not sticking them on the internet is a great step 1 for sure. My boss likes them so we keep putting them in but I'm not a super huge fan.
 
QNAP is a good choice based on what you're describing, though you'll still pay for the privilege of 10GbE, NVMe, and Thunderbolt on one box, more if you want 8+ bays. I think the cheapest Intel QNAP with 6/8 bays, all of these features (including Thunderbolt) is something like $2000 or more.
They are ($2000) indeed. But again, I think it's worth it to bite that bullet even though I'm "overpaying" for the hardware, just to have access to their software. Also, for me it's "either/or" on Thunderbolt and 10GbE. I haven't decided which would be nicer to have. 10GBe would be better if my business grows to the point where multiple people are working on footage at once, whereas if I'm mostly a one man band, then the Thunderbolt will always be faster. Well that and noise. 10GbE is the better option to deal with noise for sure. Of course most of the units could have 10GbE added after the fact via a PCI-E card, making potentially Thunderbolt units more flexible, but they cost $2000-$3500.
I recently picked up a TS-873A and I'm happy with the purchase so far. It's an 8 bay for around $1000. It has an embedded Ryzen and comes with 8gb DDR4, with empty memory slot, and 2x available M.2. The downside: "only" 2.5GbE native on the unit and low bandwidth on the (PCIe 3x1) on the M.2 slots built-in... BUT it does have two full size PCIe 3x4 slots for expansion cards. I've currently got a Quadro and an older intel X540-T2 10GbE card installed - both work great and they were plug-and-play, no bullshit involved. The Quadro really surprised me, after installing in the QNAP, it prompted me to install the drivers, I told it yes and it just worked.
That could work. Sounds like a nice system. I am not at all opposed to buying used, I'm generally for it. Maybe I've been looking in the wrong places (mostly CL/eBay) but it seems like it's generally hard to get new-ish DAS/NAS units that should be relatively not-beaten on. Especially empty ones. As for me, I'd probably like to hop on a deal like this thread and just immediately load it with 16 or 18TB drives immediately.


synology has tons of vulnerabilities too and their support sucks too lol, can't win with these companies. I've run into a bunch of synology devices with bitcoin miners running on them lol. Not sticking them on the internet is a great step 1 for sure. My boss likes them so we keep putting them in but I'm not a super huge fan.
Based on my casual searches, Synology seems worse in general.
 
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