Comment by hexagonwin
3 days ago
What exactly are these "white label drives"? Aren't these just normal seagate exos drives with SMART information wiped and labels removed? i.e. just a worse used drive.
3 days ago
What exactly are these "white label drives"? Aren't these just normal seagate exos drives with SMART information wiped and labels removed? i.e. just a worse used drive.
The "OS" on the drive stands for "off-spec". As far as I understand, here's where they come from:
1. A large company (think cloud storage provider or something) wanting to build out storage infrastructure buys a large amount of drives from Seagate.
2. When the company receives the drives from Seagate, they randomly sample from the lot to make sure the drives are fully functional and meet specifications.
3. The company identifies issues from the sampled drives. These can range from dents/dings in the casing or torn labels to firmware or reliability issues.
4. The company returns the entire lot to Seagate as defective. Seagate now doesn't want anything to do with these drives, so they relabel them as "OS" with no Seagate branding and sell them as-is at a discount to drive resellers.
5. The drive resellers may or may not do further testing on the drives (you can probably tell by how much of a warranty a given reseller offers) before selling them onto people wanting cheap storage.
Apparently Seagate drives that weren't good enough to have their own name on them... which given the history of even their branded drives, is something I'd only use for temporary caching of data that's easily regenerated.
Trying to think of reasons why the manufacturer wouldn't want their name on them and none of them are good. And for not even much of a discount.
Weren't shucked drives (removed from enclosures) referred to as White label drives at one point?