Not many external drive deals posted on here atm so I thought I'd put this one up
On the fence about getting this tbh, want to add some storage to my ghetto NAS (orange pi) but heard that these are SMR drives and not barracudas, i have enough trouble switching from WD to Seagate, anyone have any experience with these smrs? suppose to be quite bad
you're right, smr dirves are fit for purpose im my case, looks like i'll be springing for this deal after all, cheers
This is a better deal imo, I wouldn't bother with SMR drives.
I shucked my 8TB WD Elements drives and they are helium based EMAZ drives inside. Got in touch with WD and they Fedex'd a couple of AU power adapters to me for free.
call me paranoid but i hate the idea of shipping mechanical drives, individual units from overseas just feels like a bad idea
national delivery is as far as my paranoia will allow
think i'll just hold out until i see a local deal for a WD
I agree. I would go one further and say I recently decided on moving on to SSD (solid-state) for future purchase as they will be fine being thrown around in the mail room.
I ordered an 8tb WD red from amazon AU this week, it turned up in a padded auspost satchel. Very annoyed, drive media test ok. But still, not happy..,
utterly ridiculous, at least with externals you'll get some protection with the retail package… can't believe they sent out an internal drive like that
Did you contact Amazon via live chat about this? I've contacted them in the past about poorly packaged items and they usually offer a pretty sizeable partial refund because of it.
You realise they are all made in Asian countries then shipped all over the world… Some in small batches anywhere from a couple to a few thousand depending on the store. If it's from eBay then good luck as it might have been all over the world before getting to the seller.
if you stick with high volume retailers who make their profit on volume based here in australia it's unlikely to match the scenario you put out
but shipping an individual unit from overseas you are kind of asking for a reduced life, especially if its a smaller retailer who's trying to move some old stock, suddenly your scenario starts to become a reality
I've got one of these since 07/18 and use it for saving not important data, no problem until now.
I have bought LaCie before and all are still running without any problems.
Yes I was going to type something similar.
Had good experience with LaCie external HDD in the past (reliable with long-life, still works to this day), although it was bought was years ago.
I wonder if the newer ones are just as good.
thanks for the feedback, in the end for what i am going to use this for i think it'll be alright
I picked up the 6GB version which was posted recently for $150. Its a Barracuda Compute inside, model spec says its a TGMR drive, which depending on what you read can be either PMR or SMR? I did do a test fully filling it up, then deleting 50GB at various points and recopying 50GB data. Can't say I noticed any performance drop. Peaked at 150MB/s and averaged at 130MB/s.
did you try and test the drive with seatools? seagates own hhd diag software, mine just crashes when it's scanning usb drives, think the software is dodgy, tested on 2 difference systems and same end result
also the drive seems to be running really hot, 45+ degrees, ambient has to be around 12 degrees at the moment, another bad sign.. or are these cases really so poorly designed, find such extreme temps in the middle of a winter night unlikely
I’ve bought 2 of these in the past, they weren’t SMR drives. Tested 7.5TB to one drive on USB and was sitting at around 130MB/sec for the transfer. I’ve now got them RAID 0 in a 2 bay Synology and sustained 10Tb at 107MB/sec for the whole copy (gigabit NIC limit).
Edit: not promising these aren’t SMR, just that the two I bought at different times were not
well i went for it and im already having trouble… i've tried a number of hard drive checking tools and they almost all crash, seatools even crashes when it's scanning usb drives, it's possible that my motherboard has issues with usb3 so im going to try on another system and see if it's stable
checking smart data and plenty of seek and read errors, in fact just checking the smart info registers more seek and read errors.. but i think im just reading the smart data wrong or seagate uses these values for something other than errors, like actual seek/read attempts rather than errors
one thing thats weird is when the drive first powers up it actually sounds like the predator, i doubt yours does this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SGJDrVJzMI
think it might be fubar'd, shopping express/futu certainly didn't help with the packaging, place it in an oversized box so it was probably rattling around with each turn
btw looks like a barracuda as well, 5400rpm rather than 5900rpm smr
ok so the seek and read errors are actually a combination of seek/read errors + seek/read attempts, encoded in hexidecimal, so they are actually all good
the temps are a bit scary though, 45 degrees on a sub 10 degrees night
Depends on how you intend to use it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8e7zfg/smr_dri…