Is something wrong with Seagate Exos 16TB disks?

danb35

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Looking for a pair of 16TB disks for a backup build, and the usual candidates (Reds, Golds, Ironwolves (Ironwolfs?)) are at US$500+ ea. Yuck. But the Seagate Exos (ST16000NM001G) are a much more attractive US$319 each. A quick Google says none of the Exos disks are SMR. I wouldn't normally worry about enterprise drives, but that much of a price difference makes me suspicious--are there known issues with these? Obviously burn-in and testing need to be done with any disk, but assuming they test OK, any reason I shouldn't put these in a pool?
 

rvassar

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NugentS

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I am using 12TB Exos without any noticeable issue. Scrubs perform just fine. ReSilver also fine
 
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I'm looking at the ST16000NM001G as well a quick search on here showed someone had a firmware issue with them this year which required them to update them. That was the last thing i remember hearing about this particular model.
 

ChrisRJ

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I have been running 8 of them in a RAIDZ2 vdev for about a year now. Relative to the questions I have not seen any questionable behavior. On the other hand, in the last 4 months 3 of those drives have died on me. RMA handling was smooth, but I have never had such a failure rate before. Toshiba capacity drives are in the same price range here, perhaps they are worth a look as well.
 

demon

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FWIW, I also have 8 Exos 16TB drives in my NAS, and it's been in service (as my home NAS) since early 2020, with no drive failures (they're currently hanging off an LSI 9211-8i SAS HBA flashed with P20 IT firmware).

Edit: I've updated the firmware on the drives once, from SN02 to SN03. Mine are the ST16000NM001G model.
 

Mariska

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Any new experiences with the exos drives (16/ 18 tb)? I'm considering buying them as well, so very interested!
[edit]: extra question: and what's the difference between ST16000NM001G (X16 series) and ST16000NM000J (X18 series)
 
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ChrisRJ

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You may want to disable the automatic parking of the heads (or increase the timeout), if your system has sufficient time of inactitivity
 

danb35

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As of now, the load cycle count on those drives is about 65. But the .system dataset is on that pool, so that should keep them from parking in most cases, I'd think.
 

diskdiddler

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I see a lot of experienced folk in here, can anyone shed any light on this issue with the 16TB Seagates?


Is this simply not a problem?
 

danb35

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I'm not seeing that noted behavior in the 16 TB Exos X16s in my parents' NAS. Currently at ~6500 power-on hours, with a load cycle count of 304.
 

firesyde424

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There's an issue with the X12 12TB Seagate Exos drives, but I've not seen an issue with the X16 models.
 

demon

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I haven't seen that either. Other than one drive I had replaced under warranty, the rest of the drives in my array have Load_Cycle_Count values around 1300 with over 21000 power-on hours.

Edit: For what it's worth, the actual values I see:

root@europa[~]# for dev in /dev/da? ; do smartctl -a --json ${dev} | jq -r '[.device.name, (.ata_smart_attributes.table[] | select(.name == "Power_On_Hours") | .raw.value), (.ata_smart_attributes.table[] | select(.name == "Load_Cycle_Count") | .raw.value)] | @csv' ; done "/dev/da0",808,45 "/dev/da1",21517,1294 "/dev/da2",21517,1304 "/dev/da3",21517,1296 "/dev/da4",21517,1293 "/dev/da5",21517,1301 "/dev/da6",21518,1306 "/dev/da7",21517,1296
 
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NugentS

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There's an issue with the X12 12TB Seagate Exos drives, but I've not seen an issue with the X16 models.
Given that thats the ones I have - what issue?
 

firesyde424

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Given that thats the ones I have - what issue?

There are more examples but read that article, especially the comments. Our personal experience is with a 60 bay JBOD that was ordered with those drives. They were all built on the same day at the same plant. Over the course of nearly 3 years, more than half have failed and been replaced under warranty. About 2 years ago, Seagate started sending us X16 Exos drives to replace the X12. Compare that with the nearly 1,000 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives that are 5+ years old. We see a few failures a year.
 

diskdiddler

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There are more examples but read that article, especially the comments. Our personal experience is with a 60 bay JBOD that was ordered with those drives. They were all built on the same day at the same plant. Over the course of nearly 3 years, more than half have failed and been replaced under warranty. About 2 years ago, Seagate started sending us X16 Exos drives to replace the X12. Compare that with the nearly 1,000 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives that are 5+ years old. We see a few failures a year.
Thanks for the feedback, you've alleviated some of my fears buying "Refurbished" 16s
(Translation- used hard drives, very basically tested)
 
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