German Seagate customers say their 'new' hard drives were actually used – resold HDDs reportedly used for tens of thousands of hours

[orangenkuchen@lemmy.world]

There are programs that can check such things as runtime, wear (...).

[blackmist@feddit.uk]

I had to send a Barracuda drive back recently.

"It's fine" said Seagate's SMART analysis tools.

"Clunk clunk clunk clonk" said the HDD.

I know which of those results I trusted more.

[boonhet@lemm.ee]

There are several programs that can check for disk info (S.M.A.R.T), so I'll lay out some options for you

CrystalDiskInfo is free to use on Windows

For Linux, you can choose something from the list here depending on preferences like your current desktop environment

For MacOS (where realistically you'd be doing this for an external drive as I believe they don't show you much or anything at all on modern internal drives) you can get a free trial of DriveDX. There are probably other programs you can use for free, but if you only need to do it once, just get that because it does a really good job of letting you know what's up. Just visualizes things in an easily newbie-understandable way.

[spacecadet@feddit.nl]

Barracudas are SMR garbage nowadays, they're coasting on their reputation of many years ago when they were actually decent hard drives for the price.

[blackmist@feddit.uk]

I only wanted it for a Jellyfin drive. The one thing it could have been useful for and it even failed at that.

Seems like you need to pay the extra for an Ironwolf drive to get an actual "just like the good old days" HDD.

[anunusualrelic@lemmy.world]

It may depend on the level of "refurbishing" that's been done, but I don't believe that's a very good idea.

[mongostein@lemmy.ca]

Landlord just got me a new washing machine. I’ve been burning it in since Sunday.

[jasondj@lemmy.zip]

I can tell your lieing, because your pants are on fire.

[fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com]

Since the other answer is desktop use, if in Linux your best bet is smartctl.

[chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net]

Just don’t buy Seagate. Their drives consistently have the highest annualized failure rate on Backblaze reports ( https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/6-AFR-by-Manufacturer.png ), and is consistent with my experience in small anecdotal sample of roughly 30 drives. This results in a ripple effect where the failed drive adds more work to the other drives (array rebuild after replacement), thereby increasing their risk of failing, too.