These HDD are on sales again, even cheaper than the last deal.
Got 2 last deal, 1 replaced under east digital warranty- the experience is not bad at all.
Hopefully its new as it says.
Seagate EXOS HDD OEM SATA 16TB (New) $256 Each (Minimum 2) Delivered @ East Digital HK
630
Polaremail on 10/07/2024 - 00:30 east-digital.myshopify.com (3416 clicks)
Last edited 10/07/2024 - 01:09
Last edited 10/07/2024 - 01:09
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s/me/new/ I assume?
What he sed
Yep, sorry swipe mistype
what?
tf are you talking about?
main character complex
I think "me" = "new"
Yes "new"… apologies, swype fail.
Thank you to those people with the cognitive sense to understand what I was saying…
And to those that understood, but still felt the need to make fun :p to you!
cognitive sense and the overpowering desire to feel ''better'' than someone else are usually mutually exclusive.
Been looking for nas HDD deals for a while, but drive prices sadly seen to be going up compared to previous years. Anyone have any experience with these? What are the chances that these are actually new?
Also minimum purchase quantity is 2, might be useful to have in the description.
I bought 8 of the 18TB. A couple were DOA and replaced, it took about a month.
They all are packaged and look/smell as if they’re new and have no SMART data, though it’s possible to fake that. The serial numbers show as “check your dealer” which means they’re not eligible for Seagate’s warranty.
Still, for half or less than the normal price what can you do.
Are they as noisy as the rumours say? For a desktop PC sitting nearby? Are they noisy when the PC is on or only while reading/writing?
Two folds:
- If you already use a desktop external drive from the same brand in higher capacity, they uses the same body as enterprise drives (with helium) so you'll get a similar noise profile
- Enterprise drives runs at 7.2k rpm which is higher than most consumer models so the noise could be more noticableBut when you have them in an array, it's going to be loud so really makes no difference. (and I would always use these drives in an array for redundancy).
@xmagic: Since when are consumer drives no longer 7.2k rpm?
Enterprise drives used to be 10k / 15k rpm.@gamerkonks: Most consumer drives are 5400rpm (or some weird 5.xk rpm) now for eco-friendly consideration. 3.5" enterprise drives are mostly 7200rpm. 10k/15k needs smaller platters to spin that fast so you only see them on 2.5" SAS drives now.
@gamerkonks: So the high speed, spinning rust segment is going because SSD has become cheap, and cloud based/pooled storage is far more mature.
At the other end, systems can now easily scale out to hundreds of slow, cheap drives. You mirror for redundancy, stripe for speed, and have overall lower heat/power requirements.
The middle ground, ie ye olde WD Velociraptor, has no niche any more.
One of the last places for it at the consumer level was laptops. Many new laptops can't even fit a 2.5" drive.
I don’t feel they’re especially noisy.
How many DOA? If you have received 4 as DOA,that's 50% and is def way high for commercial grade HDDs.
3 out of 8 failed. One more developed one retired sector.
It's quite unlikely helium drives from both Seagate and WD can have their SMART data reset by a third party. Their FW are encrypted and even PC3000 can't debug with some newer models. OEM drives are sold in bulk thus Seagate won't do warranty on them individually like retail ones, which is fully expected.
Normally for 8 drives with RAID6 there's good enough amount of redundancy. Plus a cold spare, the system would be practically invincible.
Having multiple drives DOA sounds scary, probably the packaging got thrown around like a beach ball during shipping. I feel you mate.
They just swap PCBs. The rest of the drive is likely old.
I have had 5 new WD drives shipped from the UK by Amazon, with the box bouncing around a 2nd large box, no bubblewrap, no peanuts. Yet, none of them were DOA, and it has been 6 years since then, and all 5 of them are still working great!I don't think the high DOA of these Seagate drives can be explained by shipping alone. I am thinking that they are old drives and we can't tell if they were previously used, factory seconds or some other tiered product in order to achieve the lower selling price. Buyer beware if your data is valuable to you.
@Sleepycat3: For the price and the seemingly really high failure rate for such a drive, 100% you’re right and they’re probably old drives being reused.
They just swap PCBs. The rest of the drive is likely old.
How do they get the new PCB with all the right firmware? Where do they get the old drive from? The housing looks brand-new; how do they replace that?
@Sleepycat3: I doubt you can actually do that as control board's EEPROM is paired with calibration data on the platter on modern drives, where SMART data is also stored on platter. Simply swapping PCBs won't clear SMART data but rather rendering the drive unusable.
My work as a lot of used drives and that's called re-paving but we need to use the manufacturers machine to do that which also tests them etc.
Can you please let us know how the DOA hard drives are handled? I assume they were posted back to HK??
Postage for these back to HK will be very expensive. Did East Digital HK pay for your return postage costs??
You email a guy in Australia and ship it over east. Once they receive it they sent a return. You each pay your part of the postage.
How did you determine as DOA, I just got 6 of them and one of them has been found with 1 bad block so far during the badblock test on truenas. Wondering if I should warranty the one?
They wouldn’t spin up when plugged in.
The serial numbers show as “check your dealer” which means they’re not eligible for Seagate’s warranty.
This doesn't matter. You go to the retailer, who are required to furnish one.
minimum purchase quantity is 2
i was able to order 1 drive by using the Shop pay purchase option… order confirmed and already received the tracking number.
I think we have enough ozbargainer anecdotes from the last time this was posted to ring the "too good to be true" alarms.
DOA rates for real "NEW" drives aren't anywhere near double digits. Even QC-ing in factory adds traces of usage activity to the SMART data. No genuine "NEW" drives have absolute 0.
These are NOT "NEW".
You are just paying ~$15 over historical prices for the same thing. Granted, they also provide great support within the 3 years. If you need cheap drivers urgently, fair dinkum.
I don't get why Ozbargain seems to very preferentially remember positive reviews from members, while the negative ones get ignored/downvoted.
DOA rates for real "NEW" drives aren't anywhere near double digits.
Seagate 14TB enters the chat…
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202…
That's not to say I wouldn't buy a couple of this model if I needed NAS storage…
I've had plenty of DOA Seagate drives.
So you don't think that the manufacturer has a way after the QC testing is done to reset the SMART data to 0 hours used. So buyers don't freak out thinking they've received a used product. I mean they are the manufacturer and would have that ability to do that. So every new hard drive comes as 0 hours used in the SMART data.
DOA rates for real "NEW" drives aren't anywhere near double digits.
The problem with anecdotes is you're only hearing from the people who got faulty drives. The users who got perfectly working drives are just using their drives and not bothering to go to a forum and start a post simply saying "My drive works".
Yeah, no, one user getting 4 out of 8 faulty is more than a single drives isolated anecdote.
How do you know the delivery person for that one user didn't drop the package or toss it into the delivery van?
I think we have enough ozbargainer anecdotes from the last time this was posted to ring the "too good to be true" alarms.
DOA rates for real "NEW" drives aren't anywhere near double digits.
Huh, these deals had thousands of clicks - why do you think the DOA rates were anywhere close to double digits ?
The posters who had received a dead drive were a tiny proportion of the total 🤷🏼♂️
I don't get why Ozbargain seems to very preferentially remember positive reviews from members, while the negative ones get ignored/downvoted.
Because almost all the reviews were positive, and there were barely any negatives.
If 99% of the experiences are good, then why do you care about the 1% that were not ?
just sharing my experience
i just checked my drives
they were all official packed and came up zero hours
Lol pretty easy for them to update firmware/smart data… and pretty easy for them to repack them.
No. It isn't that easy considering that there is pairing. Someone else has talked about it up here somewhere.
What's the exact process? What equipment and software tools are required?
i've bought six so far to replace my white label WD 12TB Easystore's… none DOA and working well in unraid. fingers crossed they still work a month out from now. i've made sure to preclear the drives beforehand (~48 hours total read/writing) to try and find any early failures.
Which app did you use?
it's a plugin that's available on Unraid that effectively writes 0's on all the blocks. theres HD Tune for Windows and badblocks on Linux you could use, but i'm unfamiliar with them.
Ive been running my 16TB Exos from east digotal in unraid for over 5 months 24/7 no spin down. Still running great. As allways have a backup offline just in case it dies.
may I ask how you manage the offline backup for such size disk please? Are you using tape, cloud cold storage or just another disk?
I have anpther 16TB exos, onpy gets powered on when i do a mojor copy. Anything important transfered, i use Terracopy on windows. Yes its slow takes about 10-12hrs. Verify with terra copy is really fast. I couod probally directly plug it in and use the unraid itself. But i gavent looked thwt fsr into it. App backups are quite small, ans i skip over existing media files that allready were copied from last backup.
Because i skip over media allready backed up its quicker than the first backup
- and too add, critical things like photos, i have 4 places. Better my chances of not loosing them 😃
2xHDD
1xNvme
And the phone SD card
- and too add, critical things like photos, i have 4 places. Better my chances of not loosing them 😃
Got 2 Seagate 12TB from these guys a few weeks ago. Haven’t had any issues with mine running in a custom NAS but I appreciate the apprehension of buyers. They seem to honour their warranty for those who have had DOA units. For me, ordering from ED is likely worth the risk, perceived or actual. You could easily buy new from a local store and have a heap of issues trying to return a defective unit. If returning a DOA/faulty unit isn’t the end of the world and acquiring a fully functional HDD for a low price is a priority, I’d say these are a good option.
What is their return process like? Do they expect you to pay return postage beforehand?
They usually pay return shipping. Warranty support going by peoples experiences is pretty good.
Just communicate by email. They have responded to all my emails and online enquiries. I send them a audio record of the faulty hard drive which making continuous mechanical sounds. They provided paid postage and return to a PO box in VIC. When that's been delivered - they send a new one.
Really easy from my exp.Your HDD worked (at least for as long as you used it) but had mechanical sounds and they replaced it? Good info to know.
It's odd… Even on idle. It will make regular mechanical sounds like a train-every 30s non stop. And next day it stopped working.
I had same issue, setup new NAS with 2x 12TB EXOS x16 drives, and disks started making constant mechanical sound every 30 sec. was so annoying that I got up at 3:30 am and removed the disk and put old 3tb disks in NAS. Note: very fast delivery and packaging is exceptional as well.
What's the shipping time like from this seller?
3 business days usually. But mine took a week as there wasn't enough is Aus. Mine was shipped from Sydney
Thank you, will know for next time there’s availability
Sold out currently it seems :(
Wait. You saying you bought 2 and of 2, 1 was faulty? 50% failure rate.. I dunno if i could trust putting my data on that.
Yeah but so is reliable WD NAS drives :) DOA isn't very good.
RAID isn't a backup
I did some research on this buyer and I found out the same address of a mobile game company.
https://east-digital.myshopify.com/blogs/news/about-us
—-RM 1902 EASEY COMM BLDG 253-261 HENNESSY ROAD WANCHAI HONG KONGhttps://hk.dartou.com/contact.html
bottom of the page: Rm.1902, Easey Comm. Bldg., 253-261 Hennessy Road,Wanchai, Hong Kong.Is it a problem?
kind of Co-working space? Won't surprise especially in HK
Your research must have been extremely unthorough.
I found 34 individual, completely unrelated industry businesses listing this 'room' as their address, and I just gave up counting. Probably more.
must be a big room.
Those buildings along Nathan & Hennesy Road and all over Kowloon have many dozens of different companies inside.
Got a couple last deal and threw it into the case. Boy these are loud, occasionally clicks and makes grinding sounds when loading.
Thats why there is a picture of a jetfighter on the top
I came to ozb tonight to find a replacement drive as I bought one from east digital. They are reasonable to deal with but I have to send my failing drive back before they send a replacement. In a raid array without a hot spare, this isnt great. Especially if they know they have extremely high failure rates.
Has anyone experienced more than one return in 3 years? Is it a single return in that time, or if it fails soon after purchase will you still be covered at 2.5yrs?
https://east-digital.myshopify.com/products/st12000nm0007-se…
Found this in the store as well. Good bang for your buck if you need storage for your NAS.
these are not new if they are 3+ years old, they are refurbs with a firmware tampering
My bad drive reported no errors. I wonder if the tampering/wiping has blocked the drives' ability to report smart errors. Curious to hear if other owners have experienced similar.
I’ve got 9 of the 20tb model that have been running fine for a year. Half were from east digital and half from a reputable store in the us. Very similar pricing from both. US drives have us region warranty and east digital had 30day oem Asia region warranty. I’ll take the east digital 3yr “warranty” over shipping the others back to the us…
Just got a 16TB X18 from these guys. Shipping was quick, got to my door in about 3 days. Packed properly with plenty of packing foam and in an antistatic bag, sealed. Zero power on hours, about to finish running a PreClear on the disk - not done yet but at 96% done (19 hour clear) and there’s no bad sectors or other reported smart errors. I’ll probably end up buying more from these guys :)
Same here. I ended up getting 2 x 16TB X18 as Stage 1 of upgrading the storage in my Synology DS920 that's been running with 4x4TB Seagate Ironwolf since new in 2020. Ordered Sunday, arrived Wed lunchtime. Superb packaging with foam and more foam.
Deployed the first drive into the array yesterday, replacing 1x4TB, rebuilding the raid-array overnight.
Added the second 16TB this morning and it's rebuilding the array again with a couple hours to go.Planning to grab two more of the same units next month. Happy with my East Digital experience. So far.
Now just working out what to do with the 4x4TB :D
Pls DM me, I might be interested in buying if you want to sell :)
Anyone in Sydney wants one? Minimum order is two but I only need one.
Went to have a squizz now and seem to be back
Purchased 2.Thanks OP
received product, how could I find invoice for the product and also contact other then email ?
Been running x4 of these for almost 2 years now without issues. They were from the same seller through a group buy on ozbargain.
Purchased one as a backup drive (got around paywall for min 2 by going direct to PP), sounds like this is going to be noisy but for the price it’s a good backup drive that will occasionally get used.
OoS
Anyone know what exos 10/12/14/16/18 etc means what is the different,? I couldn't find much info on what spec difference if comparing the same size of HDD
Pretty sure it has something to do with the amount of heads in the drive. The number is the maximum capacity that specific design will go up to, so 16tb for the x16. The only benefit of getting say a 16tb version of the x18 for example is for slightly faster speeds thanks to greater density, but the higher speed is more or less negligible and doesn't really matter in the real world.
This is back again at $259 atm. Like some other ppl have been commenting, using shopPay instead of normal checkout you can bypass the minimum of 2 hehe
@Polaremail back in stock.
Thanks again for posting, picked up 3 now.
Anyone worried about noise, you can hear the drive during writes, it's audible but not as bad as people say, under my desk it doesn't bother me as it's only writing during daily backups
Back in stock again ;)
Eating some more stock
wisc on 10/07/2024 - 00:32 Comment score below threshold.