Unlimited storage on Amazon cloud drive for $5

Hi William,

My comment was just a heads up so other developer’s don’t get take a hit like I did. Just look at your disk SMART data and you will be surprised by the number of errors on those disks. Here is an example of SMART info from one of my 4TB WD disks I use with TimeMachine. As you can see, 0 errors in the log. On my development system, I use 1TB Seagate SSD drives and they work great.

Last Checked : November 29, 2015 2:25:14 PM PST
Last Checked (ISO 8601 format) : 2015-11-29T14:25:14

Advanced SMART Status : OK
Overall Health Rating : GOOD 89.9%
Overall Performance Rating : GOOD 89.9%
Issues found : 0

Serial Number : WD-WCC4E0HHFLY1
WWN Id : 5 0014ee 260fbf0bd
Volumes : TimeMachine1
Device Path : /dev/disk4
Total Capacity : 4.0 TB (4,000,787,030,016 Bytes)
Model Family : Western Digital Red
Model : WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0
Firmware Version : 82.00A82
Drive Type : HDD 5400 rpm

Power On Time : 5,078 hours (7 months 1 days 14 hours)
Power Cycles Count : 54
Current Power Cycle Time : 22.1 hours

=== DEVICE CAPABILITIES ===
S.M.A.R.T. support enabled : yes
DriveDx Active Diagnostic Config : Base config [hdd.default]
Sector Logical Size : 512
Sector Physical Size : 4096
Physical Interconnect : SATA
Removable : no
Ejectable : no
ATA Version : ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version : SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Bay # : 1
I/O Path : IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/PEG1@1,1/IOPP/UPSB@0/IOPP/DSB2@4/IOPP/UPS0@0/IOPP/pci-bridge@3/IOPP/pci1b21,612@0/AppleAHCI/PRT0@0/IOAHCIDevice@0/AppleAHCIDiskDriver/IOAHCIBlockStorageDevice
Attributes Data Structure Revision : 16
SMART Command Transport (SCT) flags : 0x703d
SCT Status supported : yes
SCT Feature Control supported : yes
SCT Data Table supported : yes
Error logging capabilities : 0x1
Self-tests supported : yes
Offline Data Collection capabilities : 0x7b
Offline Data Collection status : 0x0
Auto Offline Data Collection flags : 0x0
[Known device ]: yes
[Drive State Flags ]: 0x0

=== CURRENT POWER CYCLE STATISTICS ===
Data Read : 2.2 GB
Data Written : 3.5 GB
Data Read/Write Ratio : 0.62
Average Throughput (Read) : 1.2 MB/s
Average Throughput (Write) : 932.4 KB/s

Operations (Read) : 175,372
Operations (Write) : 153,554
Operations Read/Write Ratio : 1
Throughput per operation (Read) : 12.9 KB/Op
Throughput per operation (Write) : 23.6 KB/Op

Latency Time (Read) : 0 ns
Latency Time (Write) : 0 ns
Retries (Read) : 0
Retries (Write) : 0
Errors (Read) : 0
Errors (Write) : 0

=== PROBLEMS SUMMARY ===
Failed Indicators (life-span / pre-fail) : 0 (0 / 0)
Failing Indicators (life-span / pre-fail) : 0 (0 / 0)
Warnings (life-span / pre-fail) : 0 (0 / 0)
Recently failed Self-tests (Short / Full) : 0 (0 / 0)
I/O Errors Count : 0 (0 / 0)
Time in Under temperature : 0 minutes
Time in Over temperature : 0 minutes

=== IMPORTANT HEALTH INDICATORS ===
ID NAME RAW VALUE STATUS
5 Reallocated Sector Count 0 100% OK
197 Current Pending Sectors Count 0 100% OK
198 Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 100% OK
199 UDMA CRC Error Count 0 100% OK

=== TEMPERATURE INFORMATION (CELSIUS) ===
Current Temperature : 33
Power Cycle Min Temperature : 27
Power Cycle Max Temperature : 37
Lifetime Min Temperature : 23
Lifetime Max Temperature : 49
Recommended Min Temperature : 0
Recommended Max Temperature : 60
Temperature Min Limit : -41
Temperature Max Limit : 85

=== DRIVE HEALTH INDICATORS ===
ID | NAME | TYPE | UPDATE | RAW VALUE | VALUE | THRESHOLD | WORST | STATUS | LAST MODIFIED
1 Raw Read Error Rate Pre-fail online 0x0 200 51 200 100% OK 5/13/15 8:43 PM
3 Spin Up Time Pre-fail online 7,891 182 21 177 89.9% OK 11/29/15 2:25 PM
4 Start Stop Count Life-span online 4,129 96 0 96 96.0% OK 11/29/15 2:25 PM
5 Reallocated Sector Count Pre-fail online 0 200 140 200 100% OK -
7 Seek Error Rate Life-span online 0x0 200 0 200 100% OK -
9 Power On Hours Life-span online 5,078 94 0 94 94.0% OK 11/29/15 2:25 PM
10 Spin Retry Count Life-span online 0 100 0 100 100% OK -
11 Calibration Retry Count Life-span online 0 100 0 253 100% OK -
12 Power Cycle Count Life-span online 54 100 0 100 100% OK 11/28/15 4:19 PM
192 Power-Off Retract Count Life-span online 21 200 0 200 100% OK 11/12/15 2:02 PM
193 Load Cycle Count Life-span online 9,125 197 0 197 98.5% OK 11/29/15 2:25 PM
194 Temperature (Celsius) Life-span online 33 119 0 103 99.2% OK 11/29/15 2:25 PM
196 Reallocated Event Count Life-span online 0 200 0 200 100% OK -
197 Current Pending Sectors Count Life-span online 0 200 0 200 100% OK -
198 Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count Life-span offline 0 100 0 253 100% OK -
199 UDMA CRC Error Count Life-span online 0 200 0 200 100% OK -
200 Multi Zone Error Rate Life-span offline 0 100 0 253 100% OK -

=== DRIVE ERROR LOG ===
error log is empty

=== DRIVE SELF-TEST LOG ===
self-test log is empty

Regards,
John

One thing that is interesting is greyhole, https://www.greyhole.net/, it is a storage pool technology which leverages samba. You connect as many disparate sized drives as you like. When you copy a file into the pool it makes as many copies of the file across different disks as you have configured.

The nice thing is that it you can pull a drive out of the pool and plug it into another machine and just read the files from it unlike a drive from a raid array. There are some caveats, of course, the biggest ones being that greyhole doesn’t like lots of small files or rapidly changing files, so don’t have the download folder for torrent files in the greyhole pool.

Cheers
Lord Drachenblut

Sounds like something a savvy Unix user could do with a few drives and a bit of bash script. Then, possibly better.

Their front page says they use JBOD by the way . . . which technically is RAID. Even if it only means

“just a bunch of disks”

My ignorance of this stuff is very nearly 100%, but why does “Issues found : 0” equate to ‘Only’ “Overall Health Rating 89.9%” ?

Also, how do they get :

“Latency Time (Read) : 0 ns”
“Latency Time (Write) : 0 ns”

…unless this was programmed by the “rogue engineers” at Volkswagon? Surely it has latency > 0?

Real questions, not facetious, just curious.

My guess is that they are not measuring those parameters (Latency). Regarding Health rating, I believe that has to do with the number of starts and hours of service. More important to me are the read/write/seek/sector errors. On a few month old Seagate Barracuda drives, these numbers are large, so I don’t know at what point those numbers become too big and I have to replace the drive.

Regards,
John

@John,

So talking about all this reminds me of “back in the day”, when 320MB drives were large, and expensive. So at that time I had an 80MB Maxtor I believe it was, and it was nearly full. Knowing one of the local shop owners in the town I lived in ( Montgomery Alabama if memory serves ) I managed to get my hands on a used 320M Seagate that had known marked bad sectors. For a good price(very cheap of course ).

I used this drive for a couple years, and it was still functional when I stopped using it. Once in a while I did have to fire up spinrite, to fix things when the drive would lose it’s brains . . .

Anyway, all that health stuff does not really matter, until the drive starts failing, with known bad sectors. Even then, software can most of the time, fix these issues. With that said, this is not something a “normal” person expects to do when paying good money for new hardware.

I have one of the newer 5TB Seagate drives that comes in an USB 3.0 enclosure. It works great. The only problem I’ve had with it so far is that when copying file from itself, to itself, it makes that well known “bad” seek “clunk”. Every time I hear that noise it makes me cringe. . . needless to say, I do not copy paste files from it, to it. Which is easy to fix, just drag the file to the new location . . .

Perfect situation ? Well no, but the drive also cost 40%-50% less than what the competition was selling 4TB drives for, at that time.

Hi William,

You are way braver than me :wink:

Regards,
John

It’s not “brave” so much as understanding how not to treat a hard drive.