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Refurb: 12TB HGST Ultrastar HC520 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Expired
$80
$90.00
+ Free Shipping
goHardDrive via eBay has 12TB HGST Ultrastar HC520 7.2K RPM 6Gb/s SATA 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (Certified Refurbished, HUH721212ALE601) + 5-Year Seller Warranty on sale for $79.99. Shipping is free.
Thanks to Community Member xrossastrike for finding this deal
Thanks to Community Member xrossastrike for finding this deal
- Note: Includes a 1-Year Allstate Warranty + a 5-Year Warranty from the Reseller.
- 12TB Internal Capacity
- 3.5" Form Factor
- SATA 6Gb/s Interface
- 256MB Cache
- 7.2K RPM Spindle Speed
Original Post
Written by
Edited March 28, 2024
at 03:48 PM
Like past deals on this drive it is back at 79.99 on Ebay from goharddrive.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/156046813385
https://www.ebay.com/itm/156046813385
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Last Edited by KarateB0b
March 30, 2024
at
05:39 PM
Heavily used drives
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6 of one, a half dozen of the other.
If you're doing drive imaging backups of something like a system drive under Windows, I'd recommend Macrium Reflect.
If you're just doing a basic sync, I like FreeFileSync personally.
If you can, I like to buy slightly different models or try to buy from a different vendor to differentiate model numbers or at least HDD batch numbers. Just in case a firmware bug or some other unexpected flaw for that particular model or batch eats one of my drives. At least the other one (or other set) will likely survive. Just a thought.
Also don't forget to do a full surface test, which will likely take more than a day at these drive sizes. You can use something as simple as WD Data Lifeguard for this.
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You said you had two drives that wouldn't initialize. Did you do anything to test them? Ideally, tests like HDDScan and Victoria should be run on uninitialized drives. Once they have been initialized (a partition table created), Windows will restrict some of the abilities of these programs (mainly their ability to directly write to the drive). That said, them failing to initialize is cause for concern.
What program showed a yellow caution warning? Do you know the details of the SMART report? The lack of industry standardization makes SMART values a nightmare to interpret. Many programs (and users) incorrectly interpret SMART information, especially on less common drives. However, these particular drives likely do have good support. If you have the actual SMART report, I'd be happy to take a look and give you my opinion. If you were using an updated version of CrystalDiskInfo, on a drive like this, a caution warning likely is cause for concern.
I think you're misunderstanding what a "timeout" is. That is likely the point at which it will give up on a sector and move on. The ones that are getting results of ~8000-9000ms are ultimately being read successfully, just very slowly. That's why it's reporting them as "warnings" and not "errors." This is an important distinction. I believe a better term for what you're referring to as "timeout" would be "access time."
Yes, it is definitely better to use a native SATA port, rather than a SATA-USB bridge. I strongly suspect the reason the test is taking so long is because yours is currently linked at USB 2.0 speeds. No portion of that drive should have sequential speeds anywhere near 27MB/s. It should be in the ballpark of 250-100MB/s.
Those 8-9 second delays are kind of weird. That is a long time. I wonder if the drive may be going to sleep and waking back up. That is a long enough delay that, if it was the drive struggling to read, a drive with TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) enabled may timeout and throw an error. I've seen default TLER timeouts of 7-10 seconds. That would also depend on the feature being available and enabled on the drive. Counterintuitively, I've seen it enabled on WD EasyStore drives and available but disabled on some Ultrastars.
Anyway, unless something suspicious shows up in SMART, I'd be inclined to believe those are erroneous delays. They're single blocks, spaced apart. With actual surface damage, it's common to see clumps in LBAs that are close together. If you run any further tests and have to use the USB adapter, try to make sure it's linked at USB 3 speeds. The beginning of that drive should be able to hit 200MB/s, if not more.
I stopped that test and plugged the drive and 3 more drives in the USB 3 port of two other i5 laptops. Each test was done on only one drive with an external enclosure per laptop at a time.
Much better tests than before with both the Victoria and the HDDScan utilities.
Took care not to touch the Windows 11 laptop so not to cause any erroneous results.
Ran the tests with a 4096 block, not the 2048 in Victoria or 1024 in HDDScan, all other settings were left at default in both utilities.
In the two 10Tb drives the HDDScan showed all as less 50ms, nothing above.
In the Victoria test most were less than 45 ms, and none above 450 ms.
Both of these drives had about 5.5 years of 24/7 on time.
In the two 12Tb drives the HDDScan showed most as less 50ms, and only several hundred less than 500 ms. Both of these drives had only one more than 500ms.
In the Victoria test most were less than 45 ms, and none above 450 ms.
Both of these drives had only about 3.5 years of 24/7 on time.
Also, it looks as the drive tested passes the 50%-70% space tested, the ms time increases to almost double.
In these 4 drives, age/power on hours doesn't seem to indicate a less reliable drive.
It seems that the HDDScan test is marking more with higher ms delays.
That may have something to do with the ms setting of 51 ms in the HDDScan and of the 10,000 ms setting in the Victoria??? Or not.
The two 10Tb drives were previously formatted with NTFS 4096 blocks, and also had CHKDSK /f /r /b run with NO bad blocks; while the two 12TB were as they came when tested, not yet initialized and formatted.
Each of these tests takes about 12-14 hours.
Perhaps if these tests were run on a PC with a SATA III interface, and NOT on a USB 3 enclosure, these tests may have ms readings of all blocks at less than 50 ms.
It's been stated online in other HDD sites that SATA III testing is the preferred testing and is more reliable.
You mentioned that you bought ServerPartsDeals and I bought 8 of their 14TB manufacture refurbs, and they passed all the tests, no problems since I bought them. All of them initalized and smart looks good.
I bought 4 of the 12TB of the drives in this thead from GoHardrive over a week ago, and they all initailized fine and smart was good. It was my first dealings with GoHardrive and I was happy. So I bought another 4 12TB after that and it these ones where I had the bad experience that I shared in a few other posts.
I have sent them back to GoHardrive.
If ServerpartsDeals would not initalized or gave smart problems I would have sent them back too.
The Gohardrive THREAD in this room say in big red letters in WIKI or first page of this thread, ...
Community Wiki
Heavily used drives
The drive reports being powered on for a bit over 3.5 years. It reports well over 2PB (PETAbytes) of both reads and writes. That's over 1PB per power-on year, over double the drive's rated 550TB/year. Since hard drives don't wear the same way SSDs, it's not the end of the world but that is a stunning number (if accurate). "Heavily used" is certainly right.
I stopped that test and plugged the drive and 3 more drives in the USB 3 port of two other i5 laptops. Each test was done on only one drive with an external enclosure per laptop at a time.
Much better tests than before with both the Victoria and the HDDScan utilities.
Took care not to touch the Windows 11 laptop so not to cause any erroneous results.
Ran the tests with a 4096 block, not the 2048 in Victoria or 1024 in HDDScan, all other settings were left at default in both utilities.
In the two 10Tb drives the HDDScan showed all as less 50ms, nothing above.
In the Victoria test most were less than 45 ms, and none above 450 ms.
Both of these drives had about 5.5 years of 24/7 on time.
In the two 12Tb drives the HDDScan showed most as less 50ms, and only several hundred less than 500 ms. Both of these drives had only one more than 500ms.
In the Victoria test most were less than 45 ms, and none above 450 ms.
Both of these drives had only about 3.5 years of 24/7 on time.
Also, it looks as the drive tested passes the 50%-70% space tested, the ms time increases to almost double.
In these 4 drives, age/power on hours doesn't seem to indicate a less reliable drive.
It seems that the HDDScan test is marking more with higher ms delays.
That may have something to do with the ms setting of 51 ms in the HDDScan and of the 10,000 ms setting in the Victoria??? Or not.
The two 10Tb drives were previously formatted with NTFS 4096 blocks, and also had CHKDSK /f /r /b run with NO bad blocks; while the two 12TB were as they came when tested, not yet initialized and formatted.
Each of these tests takes about 12-14 hours.
Perhaps if these tests were run on a PC with a SATA III interface, and NOT on a USB 3 enclosure, these tests may have ms readings of all blocks at less than 50 ms.
It's been stated online in other HDD sites that SATA III testing is the preferred testing and is more reliable.
It's perfectly normal for the speed to decrease as the test progresses. Transfer rates drop the closer you get to the end of the drive (the inner portion of the platters). By the end, it will generally be less than half of where it started.
You're conflating the settings on HDDScan and Victoria. By default, HDDScan logs blocks with an access time >51ms. You can use the slider to adjust the number. IMO, 51ms is too low and will give many false-positives. I'd increase it to more like 250ms. As I mentioned before, the "timeout" setting in Victoria is something completely different. By default, Victoria will log blocks that fall in its "orange" or "red" range. You can toggle which "colors" it logs, in the program's settings (not the "timeout" setting). This is why you're getting a larger list of delays in HDDScan.
If any of the drives logged delays of more than a couple hundred ms, I'd check the log of the other program and see if it also reported a delay, at a similar LBA. If so, that may warrant further investigation.
.
32700 (=3.7yr) Power on hours. HDDscan SMART extended self-test after running 20 hrs revealed no errors.
Does it mean that there are no bad sectors?
HOWEVER, one of the drives only showed 936GB available. I think someone accidentally slapped a 12TB label on a 10TB drive. I've already emailed for an RMA.
And if there's 900ish GB free on a new drive, I'm guessing you meant it was a 1TB, not 10TB. But yes, that's a bit suspicious.
32700 (=3.7yr) Power on hours. HDDscan SMART extended self-test after running 20 hrs revealed no errors.
Does it mean that there are no bad sectors?
In HDDScan <50 is best and that will be most, but there may be several hundred <500, it's when you get >500 that's a cause for concern, but there may be one or two of those only.
Still they are slow/weak blocks with high ms timeouts but can be read.
IF there are bads they'll be indicated with the BLUE color.
In the Victoria utility probably most all will be less than 45, with maybe a couple of thousands less than 180 and probably none at less than 450 but may be a couple.
Like HDDScan, IF there are bads they'll be indicated with the BLUE color.
Now, IF you run CHKDSK X: /F /R /B in the Windows command prompt as an administrator it'll show the number of bad sectors at the end, but chances are there won't be any on these hard drives. (Where X is the assigned letter in your PC, and the drive should be formatted).
The HDDScan and Victoria hard drive utilities will show the weak/slow blocks that may go bad in the future but as long as they are in the less than <500 range the drive is fine.
High ms numbers may indicate that Windows was trying to access the hard drive by itself causing these high ms block numbers, in which case these are unreliable numbers.
Read MWink's posts here about changing the default HDDScan ms timeout from 51 to 250 for more reliable results. Similarly in Victoria, but its setting is 10,000, that's 10 seconds, which is probably the equivalent of thousands or millions of years in the human time scale!
MWink's posts here have much more useful info on these hard drives and their tests.
The drive reports being powered on for a bit over 3.5 years. It reports well over 2PB (PETAbytes) of both reads and writes. That's over 1PB per power-on year, over double the drive's rated 550TB/year. Since hard drives don't wear the same way SSDs, it's not the end of the world but that is a stunning number (if accurate). "Heavily used" is certainly right.
Also, quick Q to make sure we're doing the same calculation for lifetime bytes read/write. I took the reported Total LBAs Written and Total LBAs Read values as 512 byte counts, and multiplied out to TB.
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And if there's 900ish GB free on a new drive, I'm guessing you meant it was a 1TB, not 10TB. But yes, that's a bit suspicious.
tl;dr: It's all good now. 100% user error on my part.
tl;dr: It's all good now. 100% user error on my part.
The drive reports being powered on for a bit over 3.5 years. It reports well over 2PB (PETAbytes) of both reads and writes. That's over 1PB per power-on year, over double the drive's rated 550TB/year. Since hard drives don't wear the same way SSDs, it's not the end of the world but that is a stunning number (if accurate). "Heavily used" is certainly right.
...................
Did you see them somewhere in the HDDScan or Victoria hard disk utilities tests, or did you use another utility, or did you calculate them indirectly by using other numbers provided by these utilities?
On the ms number setting, 51 ms (HDDScan) or 10,000 ms (Victoria) of these two programs, I'll try to run them again with the 250 ms number, you and other HD web sites recommend, to see IF the high number of slow/weak blocks/sectors drops to close to or less than 50 ms with none above that number.
The problem with Windows accessing the drives by itself during these tests and causing high numbers of <500 ms or >500 ms can not be avoided, so probably 1 or 2 or 3 instances of numbers < or > 500 ms is probably caused by this Windows access.
Now, IF there are hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or more of these slow/weak block instances that is probably a cause of concern.
Of course, in my case, I'm running these tests on USB external enclosures instead of directly on the SATA III interface, as I only have laptops, so this may be a factor as well, as some web sites recommend that these tests be run on the SATA III interface directly for best and accurate results.
So, in my case, there are already 2 handicaps, so to speak, the Windows OS and the USB interface.
On the firmware of the two 12Tb dives, it is LEGL0002 for both, it looks like non-standard FW. Would it be the same in the drive you received?
The two 10Tb drives I got seem to have standard FW, LHGNT21D for both, which is also listed in the Synology NAS compatibility web site page for certain of its NASs.
The Synology compatibility web page lists a LEGNT3D0 firmware for these 12Tb drives, and LHGNT21D and LHGNT384 for these 10Tb drives.
So, LEGL0002 for these 12Tb drives looks like a non-standard FW.
Maybe LEGL stands for Limited Edition GOOGLE, and the 0002 number for the server farm's location???
These 10Tb and 12Tb drives looks like they are NOT compatible with many of the Synology NASs, especially the 22, 23, and 24 model years as indicated by the last two numbers of its NAS models.
But they may be, and one must try to be sure.
The Synology Compatibility lists on its recent model years NASs, 2022, 2023, 2024, do not include older hard drives as these are, 7-9 years old.
Synology does NOT test its recent model years NASs with older hard drives, so say, these HGST Enterprise hard drives may be compatible with, say, the recent Synology DS224+ NAS model or other recent models. It's just that Synology tech support will not be able to help in case of trouble IF the hard drives used are not on its compatibility list.
See this:
https://www.synology.co
Also, quick Q to make sure we're doing the same calculation for lifetime bytes read/write. I took the reported Total LBAs Written and Total LBAs Read values as 512 byte counts, and multiplied out to TB.
Did you see them somewhere in the HDDScan or Victoria hard disk utilities tests, or did you use another utility, or did you calculate them indirectly by using other numbers provided by these utilities?
On the firmware of the two 12Tb dives, it is LEGL0002 for both, it looks like non-standard FW. Would it be the same in the drive you received?
The two 10Tb drives I got seem to have standard FW, LHGNT21D for both, which is also listed in the Synology NAS compatibility web site page for certain of its NASs.
The Synology compatibility web page lists a LEGNT3D0 firmware for these 12Tb drives, and LHGNT21D and LHGNT384 for these 10Tb drives.
So, LEGL0002 for these 12Tb drives looks like a non-standard FW.
Maybe LEGL stands for Limited Edition GOOGLE, and the 0002 number for the server farm's location???
All the other firmwares you mentioned have a vendor code of "GN," which stands for Generic. These are regular WDC/HGST drives and firmware is readily available for them.
The 12TB drives, with the LEGL0002 firmware seem to report Total LBAs Read/Written in their SMART data. You can use the instructions above to calculate the values. Not all drives have SMART attributes for these but most modern drives do store this data in the GPL. This is most easily accessed using gsmartcontrol. It's in the "statistics" tab.
If you want to mess with something even more advanced, you can try Seagate's SeaChest utilities. It can potentially spit out the values in GB/TB/PB read/written and annual workload. Note that it will display slightly different values, compared to if you used the above numbers, because it reports in GB/TB/PB, not GiB/TiB/PiB. If you're only going to use it for this, it may be easier to use one of the more user-friendly utilities. SeaChest is a command-line utility. Even though it's from Seagate, many of its features work on drives from other brands. Also, don't confuse SeaChest with SeaTools.