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just brew it! wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Well I had a weak moment and bought a 8TB external WD Red drive for $150 at Best Buy. My plan now is to shuck the drive and put it in the NAS then move everything to that. I’ll then put one of the 2 current drives in as a duplication drive (probably going to use the “hybrid-raid” or whatever that is called). I’ll then put the other current drive in the external chassis and have that be a daily backup. We’ll see in 24-hours.
Also I’ll be able to plug in both surveillance cameras and play with that aspect right off the top.

What have people's experiences been with shucking externals? I've heard that some models have stopped using a separate USB-to-SATA converter (i.e. main logic board is native USB), so you can't use them as a standard SATA drive.

I haven't heard of this. But it's probably a good idea to check a teardown guide/video of the drive you're looking at from ifixit/youtube beforehand, and that would tell you if there's something fishy with the drive inside.

I've been using Seagate Expansion 8TB externals (the process is the same for the smaller capacities), the drives inside are ST8000DM004 5400 rpm drives with 256 MB of cache that are pretty quiet.

This particular WD has great reviews online for shucking. All the Seagates around were SMR’s and I’m trying to avoid hose.

Yeah, I have some Seagate 4TB desktop SMRs (ST4000DM004), and the performance ranges from roughly what you'd expect from 5400 RPM spinning rust, down to the rough equivalent of a floppy disk, depending on workload. Unless you know that random writes will represent a very small percentage of your I/O, you want to avoid these drives like the plague.

just brew it! wrote:

Avoid these drives like the plague.

...or like they're infected with shingles.

just brew it! wrote:

What have people's experiences been with shucking externals? I've heard that some models have stopped using a separate USB-to-SATA converter (i.e. main logic board is native USB), so you can't use them as a standard SATA drive.

I've not come across any 3.5" external drives with soldered USB plugs yet. Plenty of 2.5" drives are now USB-only.

Shucking is a gamble. I've done it a couple of dozen times in the last decade and whether it's just my luck, or a general trend, I find that shucked drives now tend to be bad ones, whilst back before the Thailand flooding about 7 years ago they were all decent. These days the externals I get seem to be poorly balanced and vibrate more than their retail internal drive counterparts. They also seem to be the bottom of the rung in terms of cache quantity and of course you lose the warranty by shucking. The data's worth 20x more than the warranty is worth, granted....

I read somewhere recently that the entire "Barracuda Compute" line is SMR. Not sure if that's 100% true, but it is the case with my drives.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Shucking is a gamble. I've done it a couple of dozen times in the last decade and whether it's just my luck, or a general trend, I find that shucked drives now tend to be bad ones, whilst back before the Thailand flooding about 7 years ago they were all decent. These days the externals I get seem to be poorly balanced and vibrate more than their retail internal drive counterparts. They also seem to be the bottom of the rung in terms of cache quantity and of course you lose the warranty by shucking. The data's worth 20x more than the warranty is worth, granted....

I've often wondered whether drive manufacturers tend to use their "bottom of the barrel" drives for the externals, on the expectation that they'll be used in undemanding applications and/or spend most of the time powered off because they're being used only for backups. Now that USB is fast enough to keep up with a mechanical HDD, and supports UASP (so features like command queueing work with USB drives now), those assumptions may not be valid any more even for people who don't shuck 'em.

Well, the "undemanding applications" part is still at least partially true, since demanding applications have moved to SSDs unless they require a lot of space and are also cost-constrained.

I've remember reading a post a few years back from a data recovery technician.

He said that every platter that comes off the manufacturing line has defects and that these defects are listed in the SMART attributes, but many USB bridges don't pass on much of the SMART info to the host.

I guess that really bad platters go into bad disks that can then be "hidden" in an external drive that won't reveal how bad it is because the host device can't get that SMART info in the first place. Maybe that explains why they feel badly balanced - because if they're binning the platters for quality, they're not going to be assembling and balancing the drives using B-grade platters to enterprise-level tolerances. Chances are they just get it working at the lowest cost possible and pack it into a crate ready to lose someone's family photos

Chrispy_ wrote:

I've remember reading a post a few years back from a data recovery technician.

He said that every platter that comes off the manufacturing line has defects and that these defects are listed in the SMART attributes, but many USB bridges don't pass on much of the SMART info to the host.

This info may be outdated. You can get full access to the SMART data if the bridge supports it. AFAIK most later USB 2.0 bridges and all (?) USB 3.0 bridges do.

On Linux, I've been able to pull SMART data through USB-to-SATA bridges for several years now, but until recent Linux kernels it would fail unless you manually told the smartctl command (with a command line switch) what type of USB bridge the enclosure was using. On newer kernels, it seems to "just work" (provided the bridge chip supports it).

Chrispy_ wrote:

I guess that really bad platters go into bad disks that can then be "hidden" in an external drive that won't reveal how bad it is because the host device can't get that SMART info in the first place. Maybe that explains why they feel badly balanced - because if they're binning the platters for quality, they're not going to be assembling and balancing the drives using B-grade platters to enterprise-level tolerances. Chances are they just get it working at the lowest cost possible and pack it into a crate ready to lose someone's family photos

I'm skeptical about the bad sector reporting thing. FWIW I don't think I've ever seen a drive made in the past couple of decades that reported bad sectors via SMART out of the box. (I've seen a few that developed bad sectors in the first few hours of use though... these typically die within a couple of days.)

I don't doubt that there are physical defects on the platters coming from the factory; but I don't think these are reported in the "reallocated sectors" SMART attribute. (I.e., they are hidden even if you're not behind a bridge chip.)

Historical note: Back in the day before drives had sophisticated firmware which could remap bad sectors on the fly, the OS was responsible for avoiding use of bad sectors. Drives came with a printed report giving the locations of all initial media defects. You could either enter these manually, or run a media test utility to let the OS find them.

just brew it! wrote:

Chrispy_ wrote:

I've remember reading a post a few years back from a data recovery technician.

He said that every platter that comes off the manufacturing line has defects and that these defects are listed in the SMART attributes, but many USB bridges don't pass on much of the SMART info to the host.

This info may be outdated. You can get full access to the SMART data if the bridge supports it. AFAIK most later USB 2.0 bridges and all (?) USB 3.0 bridges do.

Yep. Shizu-tan has no problems pulling SMART from a USB connection.

just brew it! wrote:

I read somewhere recently that the entire "Barracuda Compute" line is SMR. Not sure if that's 100% true, but it is the case with my drives.

The ones that aren't labeled as "Pro" drives do seem to be SMR. I don't know why Seagate can't just be freakin' transparent about this crap.

FYI - a decent deal on a 4 bay QNAP

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/contro ... 132&is=REG

Voldenuit wrote:

Yep. Shizu-tan has no problems pulling SMART from a USB connection.

There are a lot of zeros in that table in places where I wouldn't expect zeros.

Waco wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

I read somewhere recently that the entire "Barracuda Compute" line is SMR. Not sure if that's 100% true, but it is the case with my drives.

The ones that aren't labeled as "Pro" drives do seem to be SMR. I don't know why Seagate can't just be freakin' transparent about this crap.

It won't matter much longer. SSD capacities are growing much faster than HDD capacities and the cost per TB of SSDs is dropping at a similar rate. I reckon in something like five years there will be such a tiny market for mechanical drives (even at enterprise level) that the dinosaur vendors of spinning rust won't have much of a case to make them for consumers. They'll be the exclusive domain of data storage providers and content hosts.

Chrispy_ wrote:

It won't matter much longer. SSD capacities are growing much faster than HDD capacities and the cost per TB of SSDs is dropping at a similar rate. I reckon in something like five years there will be such a tiny market for mechanical drives (even at enterprise level) that the dinosaur vendors of spinning rust won't have much of a case to make them for consumers. They'll be the exclusive domain of data storage providers and content hosts.

There's nowhere near enough flash fab capacity in the world for that to happen in the next 5-10 years unless someone sinks an awful lot of billions into building fabs. HDD capacity shipments are far in excess of raw Flash production (something around 10X even today).

Chrispy_ wrote:

Voldenuit wrote:

Yep. Shizu-tan has no problems pulling SMART from a USB connection.

There are a lot of zeros in that table in places where I wouldn't expect zeros.

If you're wondering if the USB Dock is parsing incomplete SMART information, I don't think that's the case. It just happened to be a good drive. Here's one from a more iffy drive in the same dock.



Poor Shizu-tan! She looks so concerned!

SMART definitely passes through good USB hubs intact.

Chrispy_ wrote:

It won't matter much longer. SSD capacities are growing much faster than HDD capacities and the cost per TB of SSDs is dropping at a similar rate. I reckon in something like five years there will be such a tiny market for mechanical drives (even at enterprise level) that the dinosaur vendors of spinning rust won't have much of a case to make them for consumers. They'll be the exclusive domain of data storage providers and content hosts.

I don't know that I agree. SSD's have gotten cheaper, true. But spinning platter drives have as well. 8TB for $130 is crazy cheap.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Voldenuit wrote:

Yep. Shizu-tan has no problems pulling SMART from a USB connection.

There are a lot of zeros in that table in places where I wouldn't expect zeros.

If it was a Seagate drive, I'd agree. Seagate tends to split some of the fields, with the upper bits being an operation count and the lower bits being an error count. Not all vendors do that (i.e. they just store the error count in the entire field), in which case a "clean" drive would have zeroes in those fields.

Voldenuit wrote:

If you're wondering if the USB Dock is parsing incomplete SMART information, I don't think that's the case. It just happened to be a good drive. Here's one from a more iffy drive in the same dock.



Poor Shizu-tan! She looks so concerned!

Almost 1000 power cycles? Does that include drive power suspension?

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Voldenuit wrote:

If you're wondering if the USB Dock is parsing incomplete SMART information, I don't think that's the case. It just happened to be a good drive. Here's one from a more iffy drive in the same dock.



Poor Shizu-tan! She looks so concerned!

Almost 1000 power cycles? Does that include drive power suspension?

Not sure, the drive itself is probably 10 years old (the 7200.11 Barracudas came out in 2008, so feels about right), so I was moving all the files on it onto the NAS before retiring it.

To answer JBI's question on the 8TB Seagates after shucking: I've kept my four in a RAIDZ1 array, using it for backups- it's worked quite well for that. It's a Veeam (free edition) backup target for all machines, something I've actually had to use already, and I use rcopy on the FreeNAS VM to keep an updated copy of the mirrored Ironwolf 4x6TB array, which is quick over 10Gbit. 300MB/s-500MB/s sustained with low fragmentation. The SMR 8TB RAIDZ1 array sustains >100MB/s, and really, that's hard to complain about with >20TB of redundant drive space

Airmantharp wrote:

The SMR 8TB RAIDZ1 array sustains >100MB/s, and really, that's hard to complain about with >20TB of redundant drive space

There are a few pretty simple tweaks to get that sustained write speed up significantly if you care - when I get home tonight I can post my home configs if you'd like. I have a 7 drive RAIDZ2 array of those 8 TB SMR drives and it sustains north of 400 MB/s for streaming writes of hundreds of GB.

just brew it! wrote:

What have people's experiences been with shucking externals? I've heard that some models have stopped using a separate USB-to-SATA converter (i.e. main logic board is native USB), so you can't use them as a standard SATA drive.

Shucked five 8TB Seagate Expansion externals a few months back. All were regular Barracuda SATA drives. The drive models Seagate and WD shove into externals vary widely, they even used helium drives at one point when clearing out old stock. Pretty sure the big manufacturers find it more convenient to use externals to dump excess/old/low grade stock too much to convert more than a couple models to USB.

Chrispy_ wrote:

It won't matter much longer. SSD capacities are growing much faster than HDD capacities and the cost per TB of SSDs is dropping at a similar rate. I reckon in something like five years there will be such a tiny market for mechanical drives (even at enterprise level) that the dinosaur vendors of spinning rust won't have much of a case to make them for consumers. They'll be the exclusive domain of data storage providers and content hosts.

What about cold storage? SSDs are on track to keep getting worse at shelf life if anything, and optical and tape are nice in theory but a bit awkward in practice.

(How cheap can modern tape systems be, anyway?)

synthtel2 wrote:

Chrispy_ wrote:

It won't matter much longer. SSD capacities are growing much faster than HDD capacities and the cost per TB of SSDs is dropping at a similar rate. I reckon in something like five years there will be such a tiny market for mechanical drives (even at enterprise level) that the dinosaur vendors of spinning rust won't have much of a case to make them for consumers. They'll be the exclusive domain of data storage providers and content hosts.

What about cold storage? SSDs are on track to keep getting worse at shelf life if anything, and optical and tape are nice in theory but a bit awkward in practice.

(How cheap can modern tape systems be, anyway?)

The drives tend to be fairly expensive, but the media is competitive in cost per byte. For "write once, read maybe" applications where you're dealing with massive quantities of data and archival stability is important (e.g. long-term backup of critical data) they've still got a niche where they're cost-effective.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 000A-000D0 (single drive)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6840993078 (media)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 001M-000A1 (dual drive with 25-tape autoloader)

At a previous job I dealt with a couple of older LTO tape systems to back up a pair of servers. They were rock-solid. Just don't get the 1U rack mount autoloaders unless you're willing to wear hearing protection around them; the fans sound like a fighter jet taking off. I was sorely tempted to disassemble it just to see how they managed to automatically shuffle the tape cartridges in and out of the drive in a 1U form factor, given that the cartridges themselves are nearly 1U in thickness.

Kougar wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

What have people's experiences been with shucking externals? I've heard that some models have stopped using a separate USB-to-SATA converter (i.e. main logic board is native USB), so you can't use them as a standard SATA drive.

Shucked five 8TB Seagate Expansion externals a few months back. All were regular Barracuda SATA drives. The drive models Seagate and WD shove into externals vary widely, they even used helium drives at one point when clearing out old stock. Pretty sure the big manufacturers find it more convenient to use externals to dump excess/old/low grade stock too much to convert more than a couple models to USB.

You got SMR drives most likely.


As for tape, it's dirt cheap. I just bought a few big libraries at work and the media cost per PB was roughly $10k. That's $.01 per gigabyte. $10 a terabyte. HDDs even in bulk are at least 4-5X that cost.

Waco wrote:

As for tape, it's dirt cheap. I just bought a few big libraries at work and the media cost per PB was roughly $60k. That's $.006 per gigabyte. $6 a terabyte. HDDs even in bulk are at least 7X that cost.

Wouldn't $60k per PB = $60 per TB?

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Waco wrote:

As for tape, it's dirt cheap. I just bought a few big libraries at work and the media cost per PB was roughly $60k. That's $.006 per gigabyte. $6 a terabyte. HDDs even in bulk are at least 7X that cost.

Wouldn't $60k per PB = $60 per TB?

Ugh, math in the morning is bad. It wasn't even close to $60K per PB. It was roughly $10k per petabyte raw (pre-compression numbers). So $10 per terabyte, roughly. Disk comes in at 4-5 times that.

I should stop doing math before I have my morning coffee.

Voldenuit wrote:

* EDIT: My memory might be bad here. If Windows 10 doesn't natively support EXT3 (I can't tell because I've been using Ext2Fsd for a while), you can use Ext2Fsd.

After I put a few hundred gigs of data on the NAS, I want to take the drive out and mount it on my computer to see what it looks like just to prepare for that possibility. I'll give that utility a try. Thanks.

just brew it! wrote:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=2BM-000A-000D0 (single drive)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6840993078 (media)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 001M-000A1 (dual drive with 25-tape autoloader)

At a previous job I dealt with a couple of older LTO tape systems to back up a pair of servers. They were rock-solid. Just don't get the 1U rack mount autoloaders unless you're willing to wear hearing protection around them; the fans sound like a fighter jet taking off. I was sorely tempted to disassemble it just to see how they managed to automatically shuffle the tape cartridges in and out of the drive in a 1U form factor, given that the cartridges themselves are nearly 1U in thickness.

Waco wrote:

As for tape, it's dirt cheap. I just bought a few big libraries at work and the media cost per PB was roughly $10k. That's $.01 per gigabyte. $10 a terabyte. HDDs even in bulk are at least 4-5X that cost.

Whoa, $3600 for a drive is definitely more than I was expecting. Sounds great if you've got that kind of access pattern and 200+ TB of data to handle though.