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Looks like a good deal. You’ll have to deal direct with Eastdigital over the 3 years.
Seagate EXOS X16 16TB ST16000NM001G SATA 3.5" Enterprise HDD OEM US$217.79 (~A$334.83) Delivered @ Eastdigital HK eBay
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Hey what's the difference between these two?
I have two of these, very nice. 16TB is a great size. I store all our media, photos etc on my PC, and periodically xcopy the increments across to a small NAS. Then occasionally I archive to a 16TB USB external drive and store at the outlaws house.
I consider this a far safer procedure than using RAID for a few reasons, and in any case, these or the Ultrastar enterprise disks have a very high mtbf - mean time between failure :)
I have had 3 out of 18 fail within 3 years.
Properly mounted and cooled and spin down disabled.
Luck of the draw I suppose.Are these drives even new?
Or chia mined, then SMART erased drives….
Those drives come from China. I wouldn't risk it as returning them and getting a refund may be impossible.
@vrsac: Today all HDDs are manufactured in only six Asian countries by the remaining producers: Hitachi GST (acquired by WD) in China, Thailand and Singapore. Seagate in China, South Korea (acquired Samsung HDD for a small quantity) and Thailand. Some Samsung SSD are still made in STH Korea, a lot are made in China. I guess it depends on the model.
Not sure how recent all this info is. It’s the newest I can find and if it’s talking about HGST it’s more than two or three years old as WD bought HGST to be able to get the tech to make the higher end drives as well as Ultrastar.
WD were manufacturing some drives in Thailand with final assembly in China. Looks like Seagate are mostly China for everything, but I checked the EXOS data sheet, there is not a thing on on the page where they are manufactured.
I know most of the high end WD were being made 100% in Thailand. That may have changed, some lower end drives were being assembled in China from Parts supplied from Thailand.
You don’t mine with mech drives, far too slow. Mech drives are used to store plots.
@cycloneaussie: Yes we know that, but they are on 24/7 used as an index for lookups to see if you have matching entries in the plot.
Either way, who knows what these drives have been through or whether they are brand new.
I'd rather wait for an Seagate expansion and shuck it, if your not gonna get warranty anyway.
@slam: There's literally no difference between "Chia mined" hard drives that have been running 24x7 and hard drives running 24x7 doing any other thing. People hear "crypto mining" (it's farming in this case, by the way, not the same thing) and go "ooh, spooky" and it's dumb.
@Zorlin: Well either its brand new with 0 hours run time.
Or its been run 24/7 in whatever setting.
If theres been reports of SMART tampered drives coming out of China. Then buyer beware.
@slam: Oh yeah, it's dodgy as hell to wipe the SMART data and pretend it's new. That part is evil.
Just don't think Chia farming is some spooky thing that chews up drives, because that rumour is old and ridiculous.
@Zorlin: You can't hide a bad drive by erasing SMART data. Fire up Seagate Seatools and run the disk on extended Long Test, SMART will be refilled with all the errors if the disk is bad.
I ordered 20tb from east digital and they showed up on seagates warranty check with exactly 30 days from when they shipped. I also ordered some from the usa slightly cheaper and they had the full (us based) warranty on seagates checker.
So unless seagate is in on some refurb chia scam…
@skillet: advertised as new oem, no laser marking, everything checks out. The 1 month warranty thing is probably the minimum OEM warranty for DOA. It was bang on 30 days so not just whatever warranty was left.
Just saying they are legit. Better paying under $500ea vs $800-900 locally.
Server Part Deals were technically cheaper but the warranty is US restricted, so any claims would have to go back there. Also they ship UPS which means you are guaranteed to be hit with duty. Package from HK came through customs via Fedex and wasn't hit with duty.
I'm interested in hearing why you feel doing that is safer than a parity protected RAID array with external backups + offsite backups.
Sorta sounds like manual handling of files a bit at a time.
I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to do that with my 24 drives in my rackmount case.
Good question. If you use RAID in addition to the above i.e. regular backups, and offsite, then that would be even better.
However some people rely mainly on RAID only, and this can be a false sense of security because they pay less attention to other risks such as corruption, deletion, viruses, ransom etc that will be duplicated inside your array. Or if someone stole your nas and walked away, it wouldn't help you much.
I wish we could get consumer level glass storage so we dont have to worry about HDDs stored in cupboards working in 5 or 10 years time.
Tape or blueray discs are a great way if you're looking to archive data
Raid is not a backup but a parity raid will still keep your data available while you replace the drive
How do you disable spindown, and why is this a good idea?
You don't need to on an enterprise drive. if you're running a NAS, then, you don't want it to spin down. Constant spin down/up reduces motor life.
Its not anymore. There used to be a risk when the heads didnt have such precision parking areas. You risked head colision when the air pocket went away. But nowadays, spindown is fine.
Youll sometimes hear people worry about the platter motor, but while its spinning, the head motor is working and is much more delicate.
In my career ive had many more head failues (click of death) than I have no-spin failures.
anyone dealt with these guys for returns?
I'd like to know too… whats the catch?
Isnt warranty on these 5 years ? No way a china based company would honor it. Will prob have to take it to segate but then seagate might deny it because its not bought l8cally.
You can check peoples warranty experience with eastdigital by looking at the previous group buys before Neology started handling it locally.
They have IMO always done the right thing in the past, including having paid for return shipping.
If you need any clarifications message them.
As for the 5 year local warranty, you aren't getting it when paying nearly 50% of the local price so you can factor that into whether you want to pay for local stock or not.
Eastdigital… The natural competitors of WesternDigital ;-)
Copying what I typed yesterday:
A problem with seagate oem drives afaik is a lot of them are older and have dates that are pre 2022 and those ones are probably mining drives with the smart data cleared, it’s a big issue in Chinese forums.
If you get a 2021 or earlier drive it’s almost certainly a mining drive with its smart data wiped. Which doesn’t mean it won’t work fine but might as well buy a used drive at that point and save a few extra dollarsPrice of 16tb exos drives with their smart data cleared in China: ~A$200, price of an oem exos drive from an authorised distributor ~A$330, these numbers are without gst and shipping prices to Australia.
yeah you are right, it's definitely not completely new
Are you saying these drives are not new? Even though the eBay listing says Brand New.
They might be they might not be, if it’s made pre 2022, it’s very likely to be a mining drive with its smart data wiped, it is trivial to do on a seagate drive.
I found they selling 16TB HC550 drives used for $270~ exc postage. Do you think it is a good buy??
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/285472460920?hash=item42777c1078…
"Near New" , they say 2021?
Yeah, used cerca 2021. Does that mean it's bad? what do you think? I am thinking to get 3units.
I would give it a miss-
“ Used，Super Clean Server Pulls Grade-A Cosmetically Perfec Near New”
Is it that bad?? you reckon??
$20.92 AUD per TB; that's the lowest storage has been for at least a month.
WARRANTY
3YR EastDigital Warranty [Not a Seagate Warranty?]Postage:
Free Standard Shipping from Greater China to worldwide. See detailsfor delivery
International delivery of items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges.
Located in: Hong Kong, Hong KongThought I'd save someone a click.
Good luck to anyone buying this….so…..what does that mean?
not a good deal……?
Obviously at this price these aren't Australian retail stock - if you want those things then feel free to pay Australian retail prices 🤷🏼♂️
WARRANTY
3YR EastDigital WarrantyGood Luck
You don't need luck. Check the previous GB threads before they started sending Neology the stock to handle it locally, and were sending it direct to people via Fedex with peoples warranty experience. As I said in the past they have even offered to pay return postage.
As Nom mentioned above, if you are concerned and want a local 5 year Australian warranty you are free to purchase locally at nearly double the cost.
Even when purchasing from Amazon US/UK etc you aren't getting a locally warranty but are relying on Amazon to help you out if you have an issue down the track. YMMV.
I just wanna know if this is brand spanking new, or some dodgy shite……?
You cannot tell, when they wipe the smart data it shows as new, and they obviously reseal it, best way to tell is if it’s 2021 and earlier for dom it’s most likely a mining drive, which isn’t a bad thing but it’s not exactly new, but you can get these kind of “new” drives for ~A$200 in China
This is the same supplier in the past for the past 5 Group Buys. Feel free to check out those threads. Everyone whom has purchased AFAIK have received new drives. If they were wiped I'm sure with the hundreds, upon hundreds of drives pushed through the GB people would have had there pitchforks out.
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/736571/comments?page=1, if you take a read basically all the drives being sold there have been made 2021 and earlier (I wonder what kind of OEM still had brand new 2019 drives as of last year), hard to prove if something is a wiped drive, to double check I am not crazy for thinking so, I checked a few of my drives that I source from an official distributor (I sell OEM hard drives from time to time too) and the earliest drive I have sold this year was made in 2022 september, with the vast majority being made in 2023, which should be the case when you source from a distributor and not a miner.
Bought a few of these 16TBs from this seller last year as part of a GB run by OzB member neology (who now runs his own online HDD store from Melbourne). The drives I received were brand new in original packing that are all currently part of a raid in my home NAS. No complaints here. Only a bit noisy when they run together.
That's a lot of pr0n
Don't think I've ever claimed warranty on a drive, just punch a hole in it and bin.
I thought all the high end Seagate and WD drives manufactured in Thailand maybe assembled in China - haven’t looked at a bare drive for a while but maybe I need to go back to read comments.
There is a site that does server refurbished drives, they sell mostly Seagate EXOS - 2 years warranty - manufacturer refurbished out of the USA - they have manufacture recertified, seller recertified and new. 18TB seems the flavour of the month atm.
serverpartdeals
No links, no deals I get nothing, just saying with USD fallen so far recently pays to kept an eye open everywhere, but world of mouth means everything, so if ppl have bought from these guys before then trust factor has to be worth something.
These drives might be coming from that site or there might be more than one that sells manufacture refurbed server parts.
Worth keeping an eye on that site, stock levels vary wildly - I stumbled on it looking for Refurb 16TB.
Some older gear might not work with 18TB/20TB/22TB drives. At least that’s what I’ve been told. I could be wrong.
And in case ppl haven’t read/heard on howtogeek website, there is a story about WD splitting off their SSD back under SanDisk brand name and WD will be spinning disks only.
Due to happen some time in 2024.
Can only imagine it might have had something to do with a recent failed merger with Japanese SSD manufacturer.
I’m sure you can Google it.
Just grabbed a couple of these used 16TB for $269.00 each w/ebay+, thought I'd share here in case anyone interested.
WD Ultrastar HC550 16TB 3.5" Enterprise SATA HDD WUH721816ALE6L4
*Used for around 2 years. 2.5 million hours MTBF rating.
Tested, wiped, well packed. 3 months return to base warranty.I've been out of the loop for a while. Are they supposed to be better than Seagate?
Hoping to just have a drive to store videos on for the network…That's all I'm using them for.
As far as I'm aware, SG & WD are comparable.
Personal opinion, Anything is good, until it isn't.Are they supposed to be better than Seagate?
Drives are drives, doesn't matter who makes them. There's no big difference in reliability between the major brands - always assume your drives can fail, and make sure your backups are good !
Yes no major difference between the two big brands when compared across same class.
Enterprise class drives with 5 years warranty generally last longer than desktop drives.
Purchased the Seagate 12TB Exos X16 512E for $161 USD ($250 AUD) for my DreamMachine SE cameras.
Will post back when it arrives :)Arrived today (30th) so overall 12 days Delivery to WA is pretty good.
Well packaged, lots of foam and sealed.Manufacturer Date: August 2022.
Trying to use Seagate's warranty check but it just says refer to vendor.Happy with the drive, it's in the system and running well. (NVR usage in DreamMachine SE)
Bit louder then the old WD Green, but its tucked away in cupboard.
Also 12TB
ST12000NM0008 Seagate 12TB Exos X14 -$304.40 landed
ST12000NM001G Seagate 12TB Exos X16 512E 3.5" SATA 6Gb/s- $253.67 landed from them