[walrus01]

It is very common these days to buy the WD 8TB, 10TB and 12TB external USB3 hard drives and remove their cases, and put them in some sort of home built file server or NAS. There's a technique to put a thin section of kapton tape on one of the SATA pins so that they will power up from ordinary PC/ATX type power supplies with regular SATA power connectors.

https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Fix-the-33V-Pin-Issu...

In large ZFS arrays, many people are using them with great success, at no greater or lesser annual failure rate than the expensive enterprise hard drives.

[jonah-archive]

> at no greater or lesser annual failure rate than the expensive enterprise hard drives.

I've read these reports as well, but I can say that it's not my experience (we've gone through a few rounds of shucking at the Internet Archive, for economy and in one case necessity after the 2011 Thailand floods pinched the supply chain). Our raw failure rates on shucked drives are significantly higher, and the drives themselves are typically non-performant for high-throughput workloads (often being SMR disks/etc, though hopefully the move away from drive-managed SMR will finally kill that product category off).

[morsch]

I'm apparently out of the loop w.r.t. non-solid state storage. For people in the same boat:

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity ... The overlapping-tracks architecture may slow down the writing process since writing to one track overwrites adjacent tracks, and requires them to be rewritten as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

[walrus01]

From reddit.com/r/datahoarder I don't believe I've seen a single instance of 8, 10 or 12TB consumer USB3 drives coming out of the plastic case as a model that is shingled recording. The average consumer trying to copy many dozens of GB onto an external drive would not tolerate SMR write performance.

[jonah-archive]

Some of the disks in the market over the last few years were not well-labeled in terms of revealing their SMR internals, and use larger media caches to disguise write performance issues (at least, until they don't). For example, the Seagate STGY8000400 is an external 8TB SMR drive. But the industry as a whole is moving to host-managed SMR, so hopefully that specific issue with external disks will soon go away.

[Tepix]

Could you publish some statistics?