Do not use raid 5 on hdd more than 4-6 tb. It may be used raid 6 or raid10. Because of during rebuild it will be raid0! And any fault on working disk will kill the raid.
First off, thank you for this great in depth review. Secondly, I'd definitely lodge a complaint with Seagate over their packaging. Unless manufacturers receive clear and loud complaints over such issues from respected reviewers, things don't change. It's no good having a great drive if it's going to be trashed in transit because Seagate want to save a few pennies on inferior packaging.
Noticed synology cameras are hard to buy - new models coming? Seems also they are dragging feet on 1824+ (scrapped so they can changed plans? More AI focused chips?…)
Regarding the physical shape of the drives: recently I wanted to buy two 20TB Ironwolf Pro drives for a DS723+. 5 separate orders of 2 drives. From two separate retailers. And in the end only 3 drives where without dents or dings in the top metal cover. That metal cover on these Seagates is super soft. The moment any bell end takes them out of the big box the retailer got them in and starts stacking them on top of each other only in their ESD bag they end up with dings. Honestly, at this point I wonder why manufacturers don't package these individually in some small cardboard boxes to prevent this. On a side note: if you check a teardown of any of these Seagates with these soft metal cowers you will find out that it is only meant to be a seal. Under it is another cower, which looks more like traditional hard drives looked like. So really many of the dents unless they happened with some real drop are just cosmetic.
This is one thing a lot of people don't factor in when buying large drives, Rebuild time being ~30 hours for a single drive is less than 1TB/hour. Personally I'd rather get a drive shelf and do more 12TB drives, the rebuild time should be well under 24H
That's not acceptable packaging. It's dead simple to design and fabricate a paper box for extra protection. They should be ashamed of shipping the drives like that.
To be fair to them, that was not Seagate who sent it in that packaging, it was a marketing agency and perhaps not as aware of the fragility of the items involved. On a positive note, it DID mean I could include this segment on the drives being pretty durable! Silver linings!
There must be hundreds of thousands, nay millions, of the plastic 3 1/2" Hard Drive packing cases could Seagate not rise to sending samples out to Media in one of these at the very least. Piss poor PR if you ask me, and thank you for commenting on this.
I think that taking only a little over a day to rebuild is actually very impressive for such a huge array. I remember builds taking that long back in the day using SCSI drives and the pool was gigabytes not terabytes.
I've had the same experience with seagate drives, ordered 4 20tb exos and all just came in separate LETTERS!! no packaging apart from the anti static foil. They all worked but went back immediately and reordered them, wen through that process a total of 4 times and not a single one of the 16 drives was undamaged. But all worked.. 😅 but also all were returned, they might work now, but who knwos how long...
Seagate also likes to start warranty on the date they shipped them to the retailer, so you are always a few months short on warranty. You can contact support and supply receipt and get it correct, but it is frequently a hassle. WD on the other hand uses date of purchase automatically. Too bad WD keeps attempting to annoy their customers in other ways.
12:15 My father ordered 2 12 TB Ironwolfs, and one of them had a big dent in it. He works at a factory and said that he's sure that it's not a problem, that he knew how those dents happen and he was not worried at all. He didn't want to send it back and it works fine for over a year now.
Yes, I on the other hand would not purchase a new car (or refrigerator, or anything else) with dents. I expect new equipment to be in new condition (and have a new full warranty). Seagate likes to start their warranty when they ship the drive to a retailer. I have always gone through the painful process of contacting support and getting the warranty extended from the purchase date. 8 Exos 16tb drives purchased at different times from different vendors (to attempt to get different lots) and sometimes it's quick and easy, other times it's slow and painful. So far I haven't needed to use the warranty. Western Digital on the other hand automatically uses the date of order.
Question. I have a Synology 923+ with 4-8Tb drives. All setup in a single Synology Hybrid pool. Can I expand my storage by removing one drive at a time and “rebuilding” the pool with progressively larger drives or should I be looking into one of the extra add-on storage boxes (517?)
The factory renewed drives I ordered before are much more securely packaged than those using high quality bubble wraps anti-static bags all around them. 😅
Can you do a test of RAID 0 with all four 24TB drives and pull a drive out mid data transfer multiple times to see if the drive become too corrupted to use? I plan on running my NAS setup in said RAID configuration since I have a slew of 10TB drives and I'm going for maximum capacity instead of redundancy in my setup. I figure 4 10TB drives in RAID 0 coupled with another 4 10TB drives set aside to my drive dock for data backup plus 2 10TB drives as cold spares is more than sufficient for my needs.
If you don't care about your data, you COULD do that. However, it would make far more sense to use the cold spares as parity drives (switch from 4 drive RAID 0 to 5 drive RAID 5). RAID 0 is unable to tolerate any fault by itself, and may times corruption occurs without any knowledge to the user until it's too late. I'd rather rebuild a RAID 5 than restore from backup.
