Seagate Skyhawk Drives suck! Part 2

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 01:00:00 +0100

Last post was about the Seagate Skyhawk HDDs and how they seemed to die like flies. I replaced them with some Toshibas (which are noisier btw) but I wanted to be 100% sure if they were actually dying, so I put them in an external HDD caddy and read out the S.M.A.R.T values. Turns out there is nothing wrong with them??? I also used CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark and they seem to be fine.

So the next thing on the list is the RAM, it’s possible the RAM is faulty and makes the system do unexpected things. They are non ECC because I’m running consumer grade hardware but that shouldn’t be the issue, so now I loaded half of the sticks into my desktop and I’m running MemTest86 to see if I can find anything.

So now I have 3x 4TB drives extra, I can’t put them back into the system because they’re 5700RPM instead of the 7200 the others are running on. An alternative for them would be to use them as backup drives, I still have an old 2-bay Synology NAS and backing up the critical stuff shoulnd’t be even close to 4TB making it perfect to run them in mirror.

Seagate Skyhawk Drives suck!

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 20:00:00 +0100

The Seagate Skyhawk drives are advertised as “surveillance” drives, this basically means that its made for lots of write actions.

But let me give you some backstory, I currently run a TrueNAS Scale server with 8TB in total in one pool split among 3 mirrored vdevs. 2 of these vdevs are 2 mirrored 2TB Skyhawks, the other and most recent one is a 4TB mirrored Toshiba vdev.

In a timespan of 2 years this server has run (1.5 years on Proxmox), I had to replace 3 Seagate drives. 1 2TB and both the 4TB ones. I know these drives arent made for read/write but still, they tend do die pretty quick with my setup. And the temperatures arent extremely high either.

I’ll be testing the Toshiba 4TB drives to see if they keep up better since these are advertised as NAS drives.

So at the bottom line, I do NOT recommend Seagate Skyhawk drives as a cheap option for your server, get something else that’s a bit more expensive instead. It’ll be cheaper in the end ;)

P.S. The drives were advertised as 7200 RPM at tweakers.net but in reality they’re 5400 RPM. The drives in queston are the ST4000VX013 models. Turns out I had to do some more research before buying, but they are the cheapest (at time of writing).

harddrive on Kevin Heruer

Seagate Skyhawk Drives suck! Part 2

Seagate Skyhawk Drives suck!