HGST Ultrastar He6 HUS726060ALS640 (0F18370) 6TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SAS 6Gb/s 3.5″ Helium Platform Enterprise Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: It’s a 6tb hard drive.

Cons: Well… I ordered an HGST He6 HUS726060ALA640 (0F18335) 6TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Enterprise Hard Drive Bare Drive… The He6 in the name means it’s helium filled for longevity and cooler operating temps. I paid $179.99 ($198-something with tax). It was ordered through New Egg seller, “Electro Bee”.

What I got was an Hewlett Packard Enterprise 6TB Hard Drive. So. Not HGST. No helium. But it IS a 6tb drive, appears to be new and functional… packing slip says it’s from Oceansidestore Eb*y, and it has an item price of $129.95.

It was *very* slow to ship– all my items were ordered on April 4, delivered on April 10. Except for this. Ordered at the same time, delivered on April 17. There was no tracking info provided, just the word “SHIPPED”. Seriously, in this millennium, who still does that? I have the distinct feeling that I’ve been lightly scammed, but like I say, it IS a 6tb drive, Hewlett Packard Enterprise model and it’s likely to be more trouble than it’s worth to wrangle around with the seller to get them to exchange for what I actually paid for, so I’m just going to keep it and remember the seller’s name so I know never to do business with them again. “Electro Bee”.

Giving two stars because at least they didn’t send me a brick or some old angle iron or something. It IS a 6tb drive at least.

Overall Review: I didn’t get what I ordered, so there’s no way I *could* recommend it to anyone else. I certainly don’t recommend the seller.

Pros: – Only had 47 hours on it when it showed up; I’ll call that brand new.

– While it makes some odd noises, none of the noises it makes are very loud. Certainly can’t tell it makes any more noise than its 9 WD Red friends.

– Didn’t run a real benchmark on it, but write performance seemed pretty good.

Cons: – Manufacturing date of August 2015.

– When I look my drive’s serial number up on HGST’s site, it says “Please return drive to the point of purchase or system manufacturer.” So hopefully the drive just has a nice long life and I don’t have to find out how good goHardDrive’s warranty service is.

– The drive takes significantly longer than most drives to spin up and respond to commands, my SAS2116 on FreeBSD wasn’t able to find it at first. I increased hw.mps.spinup_wait_time significantly, and now it finds it. On a Linux system the kernel had time to throw a handful of warnings about the drive not responding before it got around to waking up.

Overall Review: – The drive showed up in a western digital box, with standard WD plastic “mounts” or whatever in the box. Strange, but at least reasonably packed.

– The antistatic bag was at least sealed well enough that I can’t tell if it was the original manufacturer bag.

Pros: Works fine

Cons: None

Overall Review: An old adapter gave a false reading.

Pros: Good prices

Cons: Slow communication compared to other marketplace vendors.

Overall Review: If you are not in a hurry for the product these guys are great. If you are in a hurry you might want to consider a different vendor.

Pros: Mine actually came packed very well in Styrofoam packing trays and anti static bags (i ordered 5, I typically try not to buy so many drives from the same place at once but had no choice this time). All showed low power-on times as well and passed testing. Right now they are sitting in a Raid array being initialized and the temps are lower than 2TB drives at idle i have in another array.

Cons: Before i use a drive i always check smart and test them and these seemed a bit chatty but all passed with no issues. They are nearly silent in the raid box though.

Overall Review: pretty happy with them and the supplier at this point. Hopefully they give me a few years of trouble free deployment.

Pros: price/performance, quiet, runs cool (36C, at the moment)

Cons: packaging during shipment

Overall Review: The price seemed too good to be true ($169 last week) and there were no reviews, but I had good luck with previous HGST drive, and the seller had great reviews, so thought that I would give it a try. It arrived in a plastic, bubble wrap envelope, and little else. This worried me a bit. I put it in the screwless bay, which was a little snug, but OK. Formatted it ext4, and ran a short SMART test. For some reason I could not run a conveyance test, probably because of the bay? It passed fine. It was not noticeably louder than my other drives, and seems fast, though not yet tested.

All good so far.