Expanding capacity...

[Ericloewe]

Publicly admitting retail fraud.....

It is profoundly reprehensible and probably outright fraud.

 

[BigDave]

It is profoundly reprehensible and probably outright fraud.

+1

@Asimov1973
You sir, have the distinction of being the first person I have added to my ignore list...
The cost of this type of fraudulent transaction is added in to the prices I pay. *sarcasm> Thanks for this! <sarcasm*

 

[nojohnny101]

@Asimov1973
yikes. glad most people on this forum at quite the opposite; respectable and honest.

 

[jgreco]

@Asimov1973
yikes. glad most people on this forum at quite the opposite; respectable and honest.

Quietly decides not to discuss a drive shucking operation....

 

[Bidule0hm]

I always wondered what happen when you ignore someone on the forum; you don't see his posts anymore?

 

[BigDave]

Quietly decides not to discuss a drive shucking operation....

Again, I have to say it. You crack me up man.

I always wondered what happen when you ignore someone on the forum; you don't see his posts anymore?

The members posts are hidden from your view, but there will be a notation in the thread where their post is located.
You can click on the notation and read the post if you choose to do so.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Ok, thanks for the details :)

 

[jgreco]

Again, I have to say it. You crack me up man.

I am trying very hard not to crack anything at this point. I've cleaned out Best Buy on WD My Book 8TB units for a 50 mile radius (now have qty 5).

Turns out the units they have in stock are the famous HGST Enterprise He8 8TB drives, or so it appears to be, since my HD Tune curve looks exactly like the one quoted, and not the Red model. For $250/ea, wow. I needed to upgrade the NFS server that runs backups here. Keeps getting too full.

But since opening them will void the warranty, I'm now contemplating maybe leaving them in their shells and putting them through their paces via USB for a month. I only have one spare.

 

[BigDave]

I am trying very hard not to crack anything at this point. I've cleaned out Best Buy on WD My Book 8TB units for a 50 mile radius (now have qty 5).

Turns out the units they have in stock are the famous HGST Enterprise He8 8TB drives, or so it appears to be, since my HD Tune curve looks exactly like the one quoted, and not the Red model. For $250/ea, wow. I needed to upgrade the NFS server that runs backups here. Keeps getting too full.

But since opening them will void the warranty, I'm now contemplating maybe leaving them in their shells and putting them through their paces via USB for a month. I only have one spare.

My over active imagination strikes again... I won't even mention what I was thinking
Why would you risk an early drive failure (without warranty), would not a couple of
those quickly negate the savings of buying the externals?

 

[jgreco]

My over active imagination strikes again... I won't even mention what I was thinking
Why would you risk an early drive failure (without warranty), would not a couple of
those quickly negate the savings of buying the externals?

Well, see, the math's pretty straightforward.

8TB SMR drives are about $200. But SMR is unsuitable for rewrite applications because "slow".

8TB Red drives are about $350 and are probably suitable for the application. Normally I might be looking there. Four of them runs me $1400.

Shucked drives are a losing game if RMA turns into a problem. Since (if you follow that link) it's pretty clear that HGST will not appreciate shuckers. Take a look at the labels in one of those linked articles. The bare drives are OEM locked and won't be accepted by HGST for RMA (try it in their warranty tool).

But the HGST drives have really been on the "very good" side of reliability in recent years, which is one big reason it was so disappointing to see WD buy them.

http://arstechnica.com/information-...uper-reliable-seagates-have-greatly-improved/

The Backblaze guys apparently got a bunch of the 8TB He8's for one of their pods and they show a "5%" failure rate over 10 months, but that seems really like two of 45 disks or something like that. Plus there's a reasonable chance that those were infant mortality.

So given that the acquisition price was ~$265 each for the WD My Books, that's $1325, which gives me one spare drive, at a cost less than four 8TB Reds with warranty.

Further, the He8 disks are 7200RPM enterprise class drives, with better performance characteristics for a backup server.

So if I can get past the infant mortality phase with my warranty intact, I've probably got a good chance of having a usable set of spinners with a spare, from a manufacturer whose failure rates have been very low in recent times, and since it is very likely they're still coming off the same HGST production line, and not some WD production line and being relabeled, well, ... I'm likely to come out in a good position here.

Then you go and look at the price of the He8 8TB drive. At almost $500 each. I could have bought two or three spares and still come out ahead!

 

[BigDave]

Well hear's hoping that banging on the drives while still intact in their enclosures
will expose the rotten apples (if there are any) and you can avoid the loss of
RMA return.
I can now see how the almost 47% "$discount$" would be really hard to lose out on

 

[jgreco]

Well hear's hoping that banging on the drives while still intact in their enclosures
will expose the rotten apples (if there are any) and you can avoid the loss of
RMA return.
I can now see how the almost 47% "$discount$" would be really hard to lose out on

Perhaps I should go annoy Cyberjock by showcasing a 40TB USB ZFS pool.

 

[cyberjock]

Perhaps I should go annoy Cyberjock by showcasing a 40TB USB ZFS pool.

I've already seen an 80TB USB ZFS pool. It had about 65TB of data, no backup, and was a total loss to the company involved. Whoops!

 

[jgreco]

I've already seen an 80TB USB ZFS pool. It had about 65TB of data, no backup, and was a total loss to the company involved. Whoops!

So crap I guess I gotta try harder huh. At 5 drives I'm outta USB2 ports.

 

[Ericloewe]

So crap I guess I gotta try harder huh. At 5 drives I'm outta USB2 ports.

We all knew from the beginning you'd need hubs for maximum effect. ;)

Embrace the dark side and cringe-worthy acting by a bunch of Sun engineers. (No, the German version isn't any less bad than the clumsily-dubbed English version, I just don't have the time/patience to find that one...)

Edit: I'd never noticed the last times I watched this thing, but it's hilarious how the pool is already showing checksum errors even though it's barely been used - on the non-removed drives.

 

[jgreco]

We all knew from the beginning you'd need hubs for maximum effect. ;)

Embrace the dark side and cringe-worthy acting by a bunch of Sun engineers. (No, the German version isn't any less bad than the clumsily-dubbed English version, I just don't have the time/patience to find that one...)

Edit: I'd never noticed the last times I watched this thing, but it's hilarious how the pool is already showing checksum errors even though it's barely been used - on the non-removed drives.

Wow that's stupid. Heh.

Here's mine.

Code:

[jgreco@storage2] /# df /mnt/usbfun
Filesystem  1K-blocks  Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
usbfun  37706787620 6905635360 30801152260  18%  /mnt/usbfun
[jgreco@storage2] /# zpool list usbfun
NAME  SIZE  ALLOC  FREE  EXPANDSZ  FRAG  CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
usbfun  36.2T  6.43T  29.8T  -  10%  17%  1.00x  ONLINE  /mnt
[jgreco@storage2] /# zpool status usbfun
  pool: usbfun
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

  NAME  STATE  READ WRITE CKSUM
  usbfun  ONLINE  0  0  0
  gptid/6a437453-fb41-11e5-9d4a-984be106bf17  ONLINE  0  0  0
  gptid/6bdfed5a-fb41-11e5-9d4a-984be106bf17  ONLINE  0  0  0
  gptid/6d7c510d-fb41-11e5-9d4a-984be106bf17  ONLINE  0  0  0
  gptid/6f330b74-fb41-11e5-9d4a-984be106bf17  ONLINE  0  0  0
  gptid/70f3d2d1-fb41-11e5-9d4a-984be106bf17  ONLINE  0  0  0

errors: No known data errors
[jgreco@storage2] /#

See, if you're going to do it, do it right, 8TB USB3 drives on USB2 ports on an HP N40L, writing to the pool at a leisurely 38MBytes/sec.

 

[ttabbal]

I am simultaneously impressed and appalled at the stupidity of that pool.

 

[gpsguy]

Blasphemy - that thing has an AMD CPU In it ...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[pclausen]

@jgreco, any update on your My Book tests?

Also, do the cases have seals on them that you break when opening them up? I'm starting to see these for as low at $185 on eBay. Pretty nuts for a ~$500 drive!

 

[jgreco]

Sorry, I've got a client on fire and been very busy. The drives exhibit errors when spinning up or down but otherwise seem fine. Once I pull them from the USB enclosures I expect they'll be fine, but I haven't pulled any yet so I don't know.