I’m trying to slowly expand my storage, and I began by buying an 8TB Enterprise rust HDD, which was rated as “Enterprise HDD, not for home use” by the seller. In the end it was just a normal 7.2k RPM HDD, which has the SATA pin 3 power configured for sleep, and it was automatically sleeping.
A simple molex to SATA adapter was enough to make it “home-friendly”.
Yesterday I saw a different ad, for a 4TB SSD that looked ok for me, but also had the same warning about being an “Enterprise only SSD, not for home use”.
The model is a Samsung MZ-7LM3T80, and I couldn’t find anything specific about the model. Only an old/2020 topic in STH forums about it.
From the pictures it looks a simple SATA SSD, which is ok for me (I’d add this to a media/gaming rig in the living room).
Please note that I’m in Brazil, and the pricing of these stuff on eBay are really appealing to me, as pricing of similar items here is bonkers.
So, questions:
What makes this “Enterprise only” ?
Why shouldn’t it be compatible with a common SATA interface ?
Is there anywhere I could check TBW or Drives Written per Day on this specific model ?
It could have an internal 520 sector size that is firmware locked so you cannot format it as 512 which would be required for an OS. The 520 sector size is used by proprietary storage applications like NetAPP and require a license to use.
This is a marketing term. Means it’s an OEM drive that is intended to be sold to OEMs. Products, not just IT stuff, need to meet specific requirements when sold to consumers. This varies greatly between countries.
Businesses or OEMs are professionals and don’t require these standards. You can sell them e.g. on Euro pallets without manual and warranty leaflet.
The only difference is often price (part of a large order),warranty and manual/warranty papers + fancy retail box aren’t usually part of the deal either.
They are the exactly the same drives though…
Nothing. It’s a print on a sticker, that’s it.
If you bought it in retail, I’d check warranty or return the product. Retailers often smuggle these in because they’re cheaper and sell for the same price.
In the case of HDDs…“Enterprise” is just a name for the product group. There are both retail and OEM HDDs.
I will add I have about a dozen of the SAS version of these that I got from a NetApp salvage and all required sector formatting but I was able to still use them.
you can try Serve the Home and see if anyone else has this P/N but outside of googling every number on that sticker I dont have any specific source recommendation.
Enterprise drives like that will generally consume more power at rest, and are intended to have consistent and significant airflow. Usually not too big of an issue, but keep an eye on temperatures during use, and having a fan on it is ideal.
As mentioned, samsung produces a lot of drives intended for other vendors (HP, lenovo, etc) to sell, which then end up on ebay. Both samsung and the vendors will give you the finger trying to get support or firmware. You might possibly find something here: GitHub - lolyinseo/samsung-nvme-firmware: Collection of SAMSUNG nvme firmware
The vendors all fuck around with the firmware, so even firmware for the same model drive will most likely be incompatible across vendors. Samsung has encrypted their firmware ever since the 840 evo was decompiled revealing it to be a buggy mess.
Even in 2023 it’s still a buggy mess, and your drive may just outright get caught in a bad state that can’t really be fixed, without warning. While all SSD manufacturers have their issues, but I’ve personally found Samsung to be especially egregious, and I won’t buy Samsung drives anymore for this reason. Which is a shame, because the actual hardware is solid.
If your drive suddenly shows as an empty read only 1GB, and the firmware version reads as “ERRORMOD” (error mode), then all data is lost. At best you might be able to reset the drive to a working state with an involved process[1][2], if you are “lucky”.
I used 2 x HGST Enterprise Helium drives for my workstation long term storage. RAID 1 and they were chosen as they had the lowest failure rate. Never had an issue.
When I built my new rig, I got some 12TB HGST Ultrastar drives that were not recognized by my system. Turned out they were 4K and while ASUS said they were mobo compatible, they never worked. Got a pair of Seagate 16TB EXOs drives (512e) and life was good. I did use a LSIMegaRAID card for the RAID1.
Log covered the highlights in his post. More power and need decent cooling, but for my TR 5975wx Pro they are a decent performer. I chose Enterprise drives knowing that ahead of time, but the reliability was the main selling point. YMMV.
I’m currently using 3 x HGST 10TB HUH drives for my work station and they work wonderfully well. I’m wondering if you tried the old Molex to SATA adapter trick on your 12TB HGST drive. I also use EXOS drives with my work station as well. The HGST drives are also connected to an LSI card. I have to agree with you concerning the reliability of these mechanical hard drives. I’m guess the reason why some state that they are not for home use is because they’re made to work with ECC RAM but they can work with standard non-ECC RAM as well without issue.
