this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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I am looking to expand the storage in my SFF server so I ordered 2 Seagate 5TB 2.5" Expansion external HDDs on eBay that were listed as " Open box: An item in excellent, NEW condition with NO WEAR." and "1 year Manufacturer Warranty". I received 2 drives in their original packaging (matching SNs and I will note the packaging was damaged, so I thought they must've opened them to inspect/test the drives before reselling) but when I connected them to my computer and opened CrystalDiskInfo they both have over 20,000 Power on hours! I am currently running them through SeaTools and one has a SMART flag for Air Flow Temperature "Failed in the past". Seagate's site lists both as warranty expired in mid 2022. The seller does not accept returns, but since this is an inaccurate listing, I've reached out to them to see if they will make it right (they have 100% positive feedback).

"New" Drives I ordered on eBay have 20,000 Power on Hours and questionable SMART status

Now onto the question, the drives inside both are ST5000LM000 (according the CrystalDiskInfo), which has been out for a while now. What kind of life are people getting out of these disks? Are these drives failing at the 30k POH mark or are these a 50k+ POH drive? I will be running the disks in ZFS and the data probably wont be super crucial (Linux ISOs mostly) but I don't want to have to deal with a bad drive in the near future.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I uses these in my home server, solely because you can fit tow of them sideways into a single 3.5" bay if you use right-angle power connectors. I screw them down to a piece of stiff plastic sheet and then use Velcro to hold that down. I run Proxmox and put them in a ZFS mirror. My VMs and containers run off a small NVMe or mirroed SSDs in the replication server.

That being said, these things work fine for a home file/backup server and don't use much power. Don't expect much more out of them and use solid state storage for your hot data.