HGST UltraStar warranties & models?

[dsc106]

I notice that for any given HGST Ultrastar there seems to be a variety of model number variations, and often with different price points. What are the differences?

Also, is the warranty 5 years? Why does this one on Serverparts say 2 years?

https://www.serverpartdeals.com/hgs...b-7200-rpm-sata-6gb-s-3-5-256mb-internal-hdd/

Or is that just the seller warranty in addition to manufacturer warranty?

Thanks for the help.

 

[bigboxes]

Not sure. Sounds like that is the seller's warranty, which is good. I would call them and make sure you have the full 5 year manufacture warranty. Great price.

 

[sdifox]

Yeah no, do not buy those drives.

 

[dark zero]

Yeah no, do not buy those drives.

Still far better than Seagate ones.

 

[sdifox]

Still far better than Seagate ones.

Two year seller warranty means it was shucked. You don't get the five year warranty from HGST

 

[dark zero]

Two year seller warranty means it was shucked. You don't get the five year warranty from HGST

Oh, I see then, so is refurbished? If that so, is as bad as Seagate ones.

 

[sdifox]

Oh, I see then, so is refurbished? If that so, is as bad as Seagate ones.

No it is probably new, but what they did is to buy an external drive, take the drive out and seal it in static bag.

 

[bryanl]

Almost all HGST drives sold ad new by lesser known dealers are used, grey market, or pulls from storage farms.

 

[Steve Cox]

I've bought 10 of these drives so far. The 7 I've bought from other vendors all check out on HGST's warranty webpage fine but the 3 I bought most recently came from serverpartdeals.com and all come back "The drive is not valid for warranty through HGST. Please return product to your point of purchase." The drives from them all looked new (and even had HGST labels on the anti-static bags), were packaged very well, and have all worked fine but I guess you get what you pay for since they were much cheaper than the previous drives I've bought. If any of them die before 5 years and neither HGST nor serverpartdeals will replace it then I'll definitely be complaining to Amazon. At least that's better than the Amazon affiliate snapdealz who sent me a different 8TB drive entirely.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Here's a story I heard about some Hitachi 3TB UltraStar drives I recently acquired -- "Enterprise" drives for $50 each.

Note that these show 0 (zero) power-on-hours for each and every drive I purchased. I wouldn't know whether it's possible to reset this SMART indicator, as someone might change the odometer reading on a used car, and anyone is encouraged to reply to that as a question here.

The story: some corporate IT departments bought stocks of the drives to have on hand if a unit in a server-farm went bad. They then decided to replace a large quantity of the server drives with larger models, and offered the surplus IT assets for sale to a reseller or asset-manager company similar to Ascendtech. But they couldn't pass on the 5-year-warranty on the drives, as they'd held them for some period of time and Hitachi or HGST would not honor such a warranty anyway. The reseller instead offered a one-year replacement warranty on the disks.

Anyone want to poke holes in this "intelligence?" Is it possible to roll back the "power-on hours" attribute of a drive's SMART features?

 

[sdifox]

Here's a story I heard about some Hitachi 3TB UltraStar drives I recently acquired -- "Enterprise" drives for $50 each.

Note that these show 0 (zero) power-on-hours for each and every drive I purchased. I wouldn't know whether it's possible to reset this SMART indicator, as someone might change the odometer reading on a used car, and anyone is encouraged to reply to that as a question here.

The story: some corporate IT departments bought stocks of the drives to have on hand if a unit in a server-farm went bad. They then decided to replace a large quantity of the server drives with larger models, and offered the surplus IT assets for sale to a reseller or asset-manager company similar to Ascendtech. But they couldn't pass on the 5-year-warranty on the drives, as they'd held them for some period of time and Hitachi or HGST would not honor such a warranty anyway. The reseller instead offered a one-year replacement warranty on the disks.

Anyone want to poke holes in this "intelligence?" Is it possible to roll back the "power-on hours" attribute of a drive's SMART features?

yes, smart can be overwritten. No one is dumb enough to buy a whole skid load of hdd as spare.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Ultrastars are Enterprise class drives and I have never seen an example of a commercial external hard drive product using Enterprise drives. The class, use cases, interface limitations, and price points make putting a designated Enterprise Class Drive inside extremely unprofitable. So it's unlikely they were shucked drives.

That stated, more than likely these are retired Storage Arrays. End of Life NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, etc Arrays that have reached end of support (or reached the 5 year point where continuing support contracts cost as much or more as a new Storage Array) are often taken out by compucyclers, parted out, and their components sold. As already noted, the Smart Data can definitely be overwritten. A couple places to look are in the SMART Logs, as a lot of outfits will fail to erase this data when resetting everything else. If you run smartctl -a to pull all attributes and under SMART Self-Test Log you see big numbers, those are the hours that the drive was powered on for when the test ran. I've seen drives with "0 hours" show over 10,000 hours under the Self-Test Log. This isn't as good as it used to be because of several of the big outfits like goharddrive have gotten *much* more thorough to ensure they're wiping *all* of the SMART data, but there is still use marks and the below that make it very clear the drive is not new, but tampered with.

A really simple evaluation is to look if someone's went and erased the Manufacture Date at the top right of the drive label. If this has been erased, scratched off, whatever, the drive is tampered with, 100% of the time. They do that because many customers won't even look for it, but when they see the drive was manufactured in 2010 or something they'll wonder if the drive is truly new.

More than likely, like almost all these used Enterprise Drives, they're simply drives with 1,000s of hours from a retired Storage Array.

You will have better luck in my opinion buying an openly used drive that may have only been gently used (perhaps a cold spare, or used shortly before an array's retirement), vs. buying "New". If it's "New" and "Cheap" just use your head and remember nothing is free. If it sounds like it's too good to be true, it usually is.

 

[rchunter]

You are way more likely to get a new drive buying a 12TB drive as opposed to say a 2TB drive. Just saying...
Also look at the drive manufacture date. Make sure it's fairly recent. If not send it back. Serverpartsdeals sells new OEM HGST drives with 2 year warranty. I know because I've bought one from him a while back.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, it looks and performs well enough. I've put each drive under diagnostic testing, done enough benchmarks. Either I paid for what I got, or I got what I paid for. $50 each seemed too good to pass up if I were deliberately looking for 3TB or larger disks to replace smaller.

UPDATE: I ran the SMARTCTL monitoring tools against one of the drives so far, and the explanation someone gave about power-on hours equal to end-of-warranty seems likely. Whether I got more for my money or less, I cannot be absolutely sure. But the customer reviews on these drives shows a great deal of satisfaction with the bargain.. They allow me to create an array size with the number of drives I want to run at between half and one-third what I'd spend on "brand new" drives of same capacity and enterprise class. For now, that's good enough for me.

I suppose if one of them goes down, I have a replacement in the wings, and I'll continue to handle it that way.

 

[XavierMace]

yes, smart can be overwritten. No one is dumb enough to buy a whole skid load of hdd as spare.

Some places will absolutely keep a stock of spare drives on hand.

 

[sdifox]

Some places will absolutely keep a stock of spare drives on hand.

sure, you have x numbers for hot swap, but you don't buy a full skid and let it sit there. Unless you are Backblaze or something of that scale.

 

[XavierMace]

sure, you have x numbers for hot swap, but you don't buy a full skid and let it sit there. Unless you are Backblaze or something of that scale.

Which could be the case here, we don't know where the drives came from. Large operations ewaste stuff just like small ones and the explanation of phasing out the smaller drives including unused spares is certainly reasonable. I'd have to check how many spares we have in our two DC's, but it's at least a couple of hundred.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Given all the speculation including my own, we only have some uncertainty that our $50 per drive experience netted us a drive or drives more likely to fail over another cycle of the expired warranty period, or the warranty period we didn't get when we bought them.

I've seen comments where people complained they were slightly noisy; maybe a couple where the user received a DOA or a drive that went south in a month or so -- nothing you wouldn't see in the statistical sample of user reviews from verifiably factory-new disks of higher quality.

But like I said -- I could spend two or three times my price on new drives, while these still enable me to have an array of 12TB. Temperatures are all below 38C now; the drives work just fine. I don't hear any noise, but then -- I take pains to isolate metal from metal.