Buy Lemons, Get Lemonade - Seagate Constellation ES.2 3TB Drives 

Am I the only one that caught that error right before he flipped it over to just the facecam? Was hoping that would lead into a "oh wait a minute" moment but it didn't lol.

13:36 The Error cliffhanger

That Error @ 13:35 was the perfect way to end an episode where "you have good luck when it comes to hardware reliability!"

Anyone else notice that one of the replication tasks errored out?

My primary backup system is a pair of 6TB drives on USB adapters, one plugged in and in use and the other unplugged and kept in another building. Every couple of weeks I swap them over. Secondary backup is off site using iDrive. This is on my extra low power OMV server - 3x2TB NVME for main data, 0.5TB SSD for security cameras + 6TB hard drive for backups from other computers + 6TB USB backup hard drive. With the drives spun down total power drawn from the wall is 32W and this includes the VDSL router, network switch etc. I need low power consumption as I can get long power cuts and need 8+ hours of battery backup. Just to add a bit to the complexity the router has it's own battery backup and is connected via a fibre optic link instead of copper. Last year I had a lightning strike that vaporized the router, traveled down the Ethernet cable and took out the server as well. If this happens again at least I'll only lose the router.

I’ve been using HGST enterprise drives way before WD Purchased the division from Hitachi. They have always been rock solid and my first choice. I hope the quality doesn’t go down with WD owning/making them. I just recently bought 12 refurb HGST 4tb drives for my synology’s.

Oh, I am so sorry you had to deal with those. When they first came out, I was working as a sysadmin in the test lab of a storage company. We had 96 of the Constellation ES.2 3TB drives come in for a couple prototype units of our backup to disk line, in NetApp RAID trays. In the 2 months after they came in, every single one of those 96 failed during our testing. Every. Single. One. We got replacements for them quickly enough, but the first shipment was entirely bad. (For the prototyping process, we had to keep track of every drive as they came in and went out.) Even the replacements didn't last long. After 4 months, we ended up replacing the whole bunch with HGST 4TB Ultrastar drives. Those Constellation 3TB drives were just horrible when they first came out. I heard later that they were replaced not just for the failure rate, but also because they were bad performers with our dedup software as well. Seagate claimed to have fixed the reliability issues with a firmware update.

I Have 3 HGST 4TB Driver - SATA non SAS - So far I am very pleased with them - Started with 1 but as my data storage requirements grew I added another and finally decided to setup a raid 5 and added a 3 HGST drive

I'd be a little concerned with the Craft-NCC-74201 backup dataset having no child datasets (when the main pool did), along with being read-only. Also, fat-fingering the ship ID (74210 rather than 74201) is a cosmetic niggle. And the error cliffhanger is real *chefkiss*

I knew those 3TB drives were too good to be true at $20 a pop lol. Great vid!

“Not flat, we checked” 100% best troll in a video ever. 😂😂😂😂

Almost got a few ofthis I'm glad I watch this before I purchased them, thank you sir.

07:45 office assistant quietly leaves after realizing all of the beer is gone

I always went with Western Digital. My dad was using one two that I had purchased sometime in the mid 2000s. I finally replaced them with an SSD a few months ago. I left them in there for backup in case the SSD fails.

*Gasps in Spanish*

I have a WD blue 3tb with almost 24/7 power on hours since 2016 with no issues. No smart problems.

don't know if this will ever be seen but will there be a follow up for the proxmox cluster on those 3 blue dual xeon servers you have? Really liked that setup and the video doesn't really have an end...

I have to admit, that beer fridge is gorgeous.

You're going to love my backup: a 4 drive RAID5 NAS with a cold spare (~14TB usable space). Seriously, though, I have a "backup hierarchy" to keep my backup costs reasonable. Lowest level: everything goes on the RAID5 data vault, which includes a lot of stuff that would suck if lost but I'd get over it. Middle tier: system backups and my most important stuff go on a 4TB external drive that's rsync-ed with the same backups on the RAID5 NAS. Highest importance: stuff that I absolutely never want to lose is saved on the cloud, in addition to on the 4TB drive, in addition to on the NAS.

Me: chuckles nervously while glancing at my server full of these Seagate drives...

I'm glad you use the snapshots like I do. I also have clients running snapshot replication over the internet via vpn for offsite storage. Great video!

I unfortunately bought a bunch of these for servers at work back in the day, and for the same reason a lot of enterprise had, they were the highest capacity at the time at a reasonable cost. That 40% failure rate is completely accurate, never had so many drives fail since certain models of the old Quantum Fireball which had 100% failure rate within 5 years (even IBM Deathstars were more reliable than both of those by an order of magnitude). ES.2 were failing in our systems at about one a month. Eventually of the around 30 of them we had, 12ish were left. Those got relegated to a 3rd tier backup in raid 10 with 4 hot spares. That server ran for 4 years after that with zero failures. Seems like once the defective drives were weened out by being under actual work loads for a long period, the only ones left were actually good. Over 2 years ago I move those drives over to a 2nd tier backup for the testing network and they are still running now. I think only 1 or 2 have failed, and at this point it was likely from age if anything. My guess is these "refurbs" were pulled early from production when the model was found less than ideal and the bad ones were never sused out. Either that or a shady seller took already known bad drives and repaired them by clearing the bad sectors.

god I love that coffee mug

I have been having good luck with those 4TB HGST drives. Hopefully this will fix your Seagate blues.

I didn't even need to start watching the video to know there was an issue when you said Seagate and three terabyte hard drives those things are known to be f****** garbage

Hey Jeff, I love this sort of content. just the general up-keep and showing how to deal with problems and practical setups. I was planning on making a smaller and far less impressive NAS and backup server and had a important question. < If I buy only a few drives at-a-time can expand data pools across more drives without having to offload the data and recreate the pools? Are there easier ways of adding drives to the array/pool? > I've never actually installed proxmox outside of a VM because I don't have spare drives to test it on Hope someone can help me, Super glad I found this channel

Great video, and actually a good sponsor spot.

as soon as I saw the 3TB drives that you bought used I KNEW this video was coming. ALWAYS LIST TO BACKBLAZE.

I have 10 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives that have operated 24/7 without issue for half a decade. But I also bought all these new.

I wish you luck with the new hardware, but I'm sure you will have (you never had bad luck with hardware, I've heard). I like your tool, the "D'k tahg" knife, you used for exchange the HDDs from the hot swap trays. You are a real Star Trek nerd. Love it! 😄

“Not flat, we checked” 👍👍👍👍👍

About 6months ago built myself a NAS, so like yourself went on an ebay spree. i brought 8 Constellation ES.3 drives, 4 each of 4tb and 3tb versions. The 4tb drives have been fine so far. but the 3tb drives, 2x arrived DOA (one making the horrendous screeching noises of a crashed head), the seller sent me 2 more to replace those, but one of those replacements was DOA too. one of the 'working' 3tb drives has a few read errors showing up in unraid but otherwise still working. So yeah, i haven't been keeping anything super important on the 3tb drives as i don't really trust them...

I really need to build a NAS. Been trying the whole RU-vid thing for almost 2 years now, so I think it's safe to say that I'm not going to give up anytime soon. My external storage solution is 3 WD Elements taped together. 🤦‍♂️ I was an early adopter of Windows Home Server but that was more than a decade ago.

@Craft Computing = we are thinking the same thing on our setups with the exception that I downsized and got rid of my half rack. I home built 2 identical systems with the following config: Cases are Silverstone CS280B (hard-drives are hot-swapable if so desired), MB is ASRock Rack C3758D4I-4L ITX with 8 Core SOC and 32GB of Non-ECC memory from Corsair (yeah I know Non-ECC), MB supports 13 drives with 8 Spit on 2 Mini SAS HD Connectors, Hard-drives are Seagate 5TB 2.5 (Shucked drives from Costco), PS is Silverstone SST-SX650-G650W SFX. I am using a SATA-DOM drive for my main OS drive that plugs into one of the Sata connectors on the MB. I am running all of my replication and rsync tasks from the main server instead of from the DR server (like you are). I also run 3 custom FreeBSD Jails (not plugins, too many issues with the plugins) for CouchPotato, SickGear and NZBGet. My Plex server is on another box (that is about the same size as these two servers) from Silverstone and I Rsync that to my Primary box that get replicated to the DR server. My reasoning for running all the replication jobs on the primary server is, all I have to do is select Restore to get the data back (correct me if I am wrong). No fat fingering a new job to run. :) Anyway glad to see that someone else has the same idea for Truenas that I do. Oh and my servers are connected to the same switch at its location so my backup and restores stay local on that switch.....Cheers. Oh and they run real quiet....

I was also tempted with cheap 3TB Seagate drives, but went with 3TB HGST drives. Didn't realize they were _that_ unreliable.

this vid probably saved me a lot of money

I have to say HGST has been the best-used enterprise hard drives I have used, so far the worse has been the WD yellow enterprise drives. I still have 1TB HGST from 2008 going strong in a 24/7 TrueNAS Server

I had a 3tb constellation, It lasted many years, however it is the one of only 2 hard drives I have ever had fail, the other was a 750gb hitachi.

My backup needs are fairly simple, I just have a 4Tb external USB drive and I use good old Synctoy to take a copy of my important files to that when I log in to the machine.

I got caught with the st3000dm001 drives (the ones backblaze used) in my last freeNAS build. I was very lucky to not lose data even with raidz2. Been running Toshiba for years now, no failures yet (touch wood) on raidz3.

It's a little finicky but I've been pretty happy with my Intel Server Board S3420GP 1 x Xeon x3430 2.4 ghz and 32gb of ddr3 ECC. For around $250 all in (not including drives) it works great for me.

Yeah, I went with the Toshiba 3TB drives back 7 years ago because I heard the WD and Seagate 3TB drives had high failure rates. They don't fail in quite such a short time and for the £70each back then, it "was" really cheap. Found it better to segment the platters into sets rather than the disks as a whole, so as to save the read/write heads from being yanked too much.

Love the knife! :)

I know those drives, mate of mine had 7 fail in his 6 bay NAS 🤣 whereas my 4TB ST4000DM000 desktop drives were fine, never had a single failure.

I’ve gotta say. I am so freaking glad that I didn’t jump the gun and buy those suckers. I’ve seen tons of 3tb seagate hdds for insane prices. Like where you could get 4-5x the amount of space if you were willing to have a slower and larger server. Had no idea they were that bad. I wonder what it is about 3tb that just sucks?

Yeah boy. After reading that backblaze piece, I opted for 2TB, to 4TB, to 8. Can't wait till SSDs are affordable enough to run an all flash array.

I bought 10 3tb constellation sas drives about 2 months ago, I paid ~$5/TB to my door. Its not mission critical, but at least I learned some stuff sas card in IT mode, hba expander ect.

I worked on a freenas server that wasn't properly maintained. All spare drives were dead, one more and full loss without backups. Plugged in two 12TB USB 2.0 drives and backed up the data over 5 days. When I went to reboot the server three more Seagate drives failed. Ended up replacing all of them with WD Red SSDs and restored the backup. However, this time I installed a USB 3 card.

I bought 10 x 3tb drives last year for a new NAS. I also bought enterprise refurbs and had a 100% failure rate. I only found this out as the drives were dying in my NAS as fast as I could replace them. Good thing I had 2x drive redundancy.

This is not limited to the 3TB drives... I managed a server with the 1TB versions... had a double drive failure on the same day. Replaced the entire array with WD RE drives and not only are they still working (this was 4 years ago) but both reads and writes are faster.

Idea for another video. show SMART results for the failed drives. be cool to see that info. What is your backup appraoch ? 3:2:1? and do you archive to tape?

I know I'm tempting fate here but I have a Seagate 3TB desktop drive in my Synology NAS that has a bit over 62000 hours on it. I had a bad run with those early on but later ones have been really reliable. As they fail they got changed out for 4TB NAS drives.

Shuckin' Drive man!

Funny thing when you started saying how many 3TB failures you have had, my original guess was 8 - looks like I was right. I learned back in '15/'16 to stay away from any brand's 3TB drives, I do need to build a storage server so I can move my Plex media off my main rig as of right now it is spanning across multiple WD RE 2TB drives (around 14 total) I was fortunate to work for a electronics recycler and that aided my drive hoarding addiction. Wondering if you have had a chance to try 3 Taverns Craft Brewery's Rapturous? IMO it's a great ale for hot summer days by the pool - it's a Raspberry Sour Ale and is very delicious (3 Taverns is a Atlanta based brewery - so not sure if it's made it's way to OR).

I like the error that popped up right as he cut away

If anything I would expect a lower failure rate on refurbished HDDs, the ones with manufacturing defects should have died in enterprise use already. Your own high failure rate seems to imply its something wear related or completely random which is interesting.

Hmmm you learn something new everyday. Didn’t know how hilariously unreliable 3tb hard drives are in general. I was planning a small plex build with some.

The ES.2 drives keep me awake in a cold sweat at night... almost done replacing most of them at my workplace.

My backup "NAS" is two 4TB HGST DeskstarNAS drives I got new from Frys (RIP) back in 2018 when I used to work there. Those drives are attached to a Sabrent two bay drive cloner that has a usb 3.0 cable plugged into the back of my router. I make regular monthly backups from my computer and keep a steam backup image incase I need to reinstall my entire library after a clean windows install. I also keep other stuff like movies/shows, backed up software, old games, disc images of old PS2 games I have that I use on emulators or use via a SSD inside of my actual PS2's expansion bay so I don't ruin my old game discs. I also keep system images for easily getting a new system setup and running the way I'd like it to be whenever I sell a pc. All I really need to do after that is update any older drivers and update windows. Its not redundant but I'd like it to be at some point and I have a old HP Proliant ML350 G6 I plan on setting up as a proper NAS with redundant drives. There's some old HGST enterprise 8TB SAS drives I found on ebay for about $90 that seem like they'd make great backup drives.

I'm currently setting up my backup system... got a LTO library. so it's Live>Storage>Hot backup on Optical> cold backup on LTO

I bought used 2tb seagate sas drives for $16 a piece. When i got them no OS could initialize any of the drives. come to find out they were 520bit sector drives. I had to format each one to 512bit sectors. which took about 24 hours to do. But they been running fine in my truenas now for 4 or 5 months going strong. Knock on wood.

If you restore replicate that way, will it use the same storage encryption on both sides, re encrypt it or is it not stored encrypted? (The “no Encryption” comment was geared towards ssh, right?)

This is why I tend to avoid Seagate. I've had so many failures from them - it gets ridiculous when every drive you've bought from them fails within 6 months to a year of normal use. Meanwhile I've got WDs still running at over 7-10 years. Wild.

From work experience with hgst + Seagate Constellation ES.2 drives (I usually have more than 100 drives spinning 24/7/365) I would say this is a good choice switching to hgst. hgst has been by far the least problematic drive in my 24 years on the job. I am sad to see the brand disappear.

WHATS IN THE BOX...? AWW...WHATS IN THE BOX...?

I've been holding off on building a server, but I would still like to do so. I have a giant case to build it in and a graphics card that I wouldn't mind using (Radeon R7 270X). I have about 2 TB of files to start off with. Any suggestions for the rest of the system?

I bought 8 of these as well. 3 were immediately dead after initializing, 1 failed the next day. The 2nd day I sent them all back lol.

What do your 3 servers do? Do you have 1 main one and 2 back ups?

Do the drives have to go back in the same order if putting hard drives back in place - e.g. does the computer recognise the drives or the cable/MB slot the drive is plugged into?

So, what are these Seagate drives good for? Easy, secondary offline backups. Only used when attached to copy the backups, then stored in a cupboard.

This will be very helpful for me in the future. Thank you for the video. I do hate the music though.

Critical Data (Tier1) is hosted on VMDK drives on a virtual file server, backed up locally, replicated locally, and lastly backed up in the cloud, by a Veeam Cloud Connect service provider. As for Linux ISOs and less critical data, it'S replicated on a secondary offsite TrueNAS server with long snapshot config (1 month), so if a human error or cryptolock happens, there is mitigation in place.

I had a 4tb 5 disk setup and went through 8 drives in 3 months idk if its truenas doing it or what went to windows server and havent had an issue yet.

I just started watching your channel a few months back, and was surprised to see you using the Seagate 3TB drives - especially refurbed ones 😮 As a long time home labber, I to am a victim of the 1.5 TB (late 2000’s), AND the 3TB drives (early-mid 2010’s). In total I believe I have 25-30 of these drives - all purchased brand new! These things are the biggest pieces of shit i’ve ever owned with most never reaching their 3-year warranty life - unless they’ve been sitting on the shelf as a backup. I still have the box of them sitting on a shelf as a reminder to never EVER buy a Seagate drive again. I know all hardware fails eventually, but I still have 3TB & 4TB Western Digital 7200rpm drives (purchased before the ‘Black’ naming convention) spinning full time going on at least 6+ years

We all saw one of the recovering jobs erroring out..... 😂😂😂🙈🤷‍♂️

I'm using 3TB Seagates right now, a mix of barracudas and constellations. Live hard, die young.

Has a Daqtagh in it: SUBSCRIBED!

I used a dozen of these in a home server and not single failure yet and they were all used refurb etc the same as yours what test(s) did you do before using the drives????

I go for Dell Branded ES.3 3TB drives and use the latest Dell firmware. They seem to run fine and have 128K cache vs 64K on the ES.2. The Dell firmware seems to have corrected the ES.3 issues. Caveat... I have had an ST3000DM001 drive that I owned before I knew better that died suddenly losing all my data. (Years before I used the ES.3)

So I have a question. Why didn't you just offline-replace-resilver 1 drive at a time which would have kept the data, and grown the pool at the end of the process? I get that restoring the back up can happen over night so your time can be spent on other tasks, not sure which one would have been quicker. I've always just replaced one drive at a time when I'm swapping for life cycle replacement, or growing a pool.

wait whats wrong now, the poolname NCC-74201 or the backupname NCC-74210 🤔

@07:10 mmmm little audio sync problem?

I'm a big fan of using stablebit drivepool

Also lost a RAID6 of 3TB Seagates, 3/8 failed in a year. Expensive way to test your backups.

Well.... You just saved me Jeff.. thank you..

all good to go! > Truenas errors out: "Hold my beer"

My main nas is a dell powereade r240 with one 10tb one 4tb one 1tb all enteprise seagte or dell. Runing on unraid and The nas is backup to jottacloud

What's your opinion on amazon glacier?

More like the NCC-1764 pool considering the failure rate of those drives.

Nice Klingon dagger.

Do you pre-clear the new Disks? And how many times?

My current back up system is a windows 10 pro media server with an AMD a10-5800K, 22GB of RAM, (3x2TB WD REDs [side note the models that I have have been giving me problems interacting with any other drive but them since I purchased the drives] in a Windows Storage Space for max capacity, and a Single 4TB Seagate Ironwolf). I know the system is not perfect. I run a Plex server off of this thing, and I once in a while will host a game server. But I am getting to the point it is time to retire the CPU and ram. But my problem is I do not know if I should get a new CPU, mobo, and Ram, and then run TrueNas? Or should I get a NAS? OR should I get a NAS to act as my main Plex system and then use this machine as a back of the NAS? Also the case I am using is the very nice and spacious Fractal Design Node 804.

Yeah I once had a dozen or so mostly Seagate USB drives hooked up to my system and went out of my way to buy Seagate. I have exactly 1 Seagate left. The rest have died and been replaced by Western Digital. I have had exactly 2 WD drives fail over the last 5 or 6 years and now have more than 12 drives. I've been buying 10TB drives for the last couple of years when adding or replacing drives. I couldn't afford to do that with proper NAS.

Back in 1992 we were using Seagate 300MB (no, that isn't a typo) hard drives in our "system alarm" monitoring servers. All of those Seagate drives would run for a couple of weeks then start failing with them sounding like someone was dropping marbles on the spinning platters (yes, the heads were bouncing off the platters). Data loss just got worse until we had to replace the drives. Seagate completely denied any responsibility for these failures. Now I avoid Seagate hard drives at all costs. 29 years and I have never bought another Seagate drive.

i use borg backup which does deduplication. I have 201TB backed up taking up 8.93TB of actual disk. I back up my server to stand alone hdd. I keep the data that cannot die on 3 systems plus pcloud.

Nice 😘👍 video info ☺️. Do vaccum the floor of the work space,n see how'd much dropped haires is there's after such an episode 🤠

audio desync around minute 7?

The trade coffee says promotion invalid. So I guess 100 people have already used it.

I like how God cat 🐈 needs to double check your work 😂

i run a freenas pc as my home server, with cloud backups to both onedive and dropbox every couple of hours. I then have a home backup, comprising of a synology backup drive, which currently pulls backups from the onedrive cloud every day. The reason i do it this way is because i cannot work out how to get freenas to backup to the synology drive directly.....which is a little annoying as the data has to go in a massive circle just so i can have a home backup - ANY OF YOU GUYS GOT ANY IDEAS??...