26, 28TB consumer HAMR HDD now affordable but minimal warranty in the Americas

[NoPlex]

Good News,

• 20 TB to 28 TB consumer HAMR (Heat assisted Magnetic Recording) Hard Disk Drives are now generally available at reasonable prices.
• CMR drive tech with 10 platters, 20 heads.
• High performance HDD 250 MBps over USB3 and 2.5GbE if available

Bad news:

• The warranty is 1 year in the Americas but 2 to 3 years for the rest of the world with China, India and the rest of Asia having 3 years of warranty.
• Not Exos enterprise quality with modified EN03 firmware reducing performance.
• Noisy at startup which is also slow.

The warranty situation speaks volume of the lack of consumer rights and protection in the Americas where corporations have held advantage over individuals.

1 to 3 years warranty

how HAMR works

Closer view show that it is a laser assisted device with Class 1 laser warning on the label.

smartctl -l farm /dev/sdX and post the results (requires smartmontools 7.4)

https://pastebin.com/nAcQZcjs

                World Wide Name: 0x5000c500e90bc0b3
                Device Interface: SATA
                Device Capacity in Sectors: 50782535680
                Physical Sector Size: 4096
                Logical Sector Size: 512
                Device Buffer Size: 536870912
                Number of Heads: 20
                Device Form Factor: 3.5 inches
                Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm
                Firmware Rev: EN03
                ATA Security State (ID Word 128): 0x01621
                ATA Features Supported (ID Word 78): 0x016cc
                ATA Features Enabled (ID Word 79): 0x0000000000000000
                Power on Hours: 2
                Spindle Power on Hours: 2
                Head Flight Hours: 2
                Head Load Events: 15
                Power Cycle Count: 15
                Hardware Reset Count: 2
                Spin-up Time: 11 ms
                Time to ready of the last power cycle: 29149 ms
                Time drive is held in staggered spin: 0 ms
                Model Number: ST26000DM000-3Y8103
                Drive Recording Type: CMR
                Max Number of Available Sectors for Reassignment: 18204
                Assembly Date (YYWW): 4284
                Depopulation Head Mask: 0

[fzabkar]

It’s a Seagate drive …

:-?

[NoPlex]

@fzabkar

It’s a Sea**** drive …

:-?

Yes? I will mark that as a solution

• WD doesn’t make HAMR

• WD doesn’t make consumer 26, 28 TB USB backup HDD.

• My Cloud Home doesn’t care what brand of HDD is plugged into the USB for backup

• My Cloud Home is near the End of Life and it could use a USB backup.

  WDC no HAMR until 2026. It looked like WDC was caught unprepared for the HAMR transition and domination because the technology has been around for about 20 years. Instead, WDC kept on using slow and less reliable shingled hard drive technology to increase storage capacity.

[Vegan]

HAMR disks are not the problem design that is characteristic of SMR disks. The short warranty is more likely due to many not understanding that storage is not the problem inherent in Windows and motherboard chipsets etc.

SMR disks are very slow to write and for most consumer needs this may not be a big problem as media tends to be unchanging etc. SMR disks are fast as CMR disks for reading, writing is slow.