I am looking to expand the storage in my SFF server so I ordered 2 Seagate 5TB 2.5" Expansion external HDDs on eBay that were listed as " Open box: An item in excellent, NEW condition with NO WEAR." and “1 year Manufacturer Warranty”. I received 2 drives in their original packaging (matching SNs and I will note the packaging was damaged, so I thought they must’ve opened them to inspect/test the drives before reselling) but when I connected them to my computer and opened CrystalDiskInfo they both have over 20,000 Power on hours! I am currently running them through SeaTools and one has a SMART flag for Air Flow Temperature “Failed in the past”. Seagate’s site lists both as warranty expired in mid 2022. The seller does not accept returns, but since this is an inaccurate listing, I’ve reached out to them to see if they will make it right (they have 100% positive feedback).
“New” Drives I ordered on eBay have 20,000 Power on Hours and questionable SMART status
Now onto the question, the drives inside both are ST5000LM000 (according the CrystalDiskInfo), which has been out for a while now. What kind of life are people getting out of these disks? Are these drives failing at the 30k POH mark or are these a 50k+ POH drive? I will be running the disks in ZFS and the data probably wont be super crucial (Linux ISOs mostly) but I don’t want to have to deal with a bad drive in the near future.
I’m not sure what you’re expecting, the 2.5" drives are generally stuck in the past and underdeveloped, and all the large ones (and even the small-ish ones if they aren’t old) are SMR, and their SMR is more perverse than the usual (or they generally just lack oomph and would crunch much longer and worse than their bigger cousins) and you want to use them with ZFS, and they’ve been already used a lot, and out of warranty.
Like the song says “I fought tougher men but I really can’t remember when”, it might be possible to be worse but I can’t remember how (except maybe for the disks already throwing out errors).