ur welcome

just reminder to others and myself. buy from the seagate or wd approved sellers only.

https://www.seagate.com/where-to-buy/


price wise for a 12tb, from official source for wd red plus 12tb u can get for rm1500 which is really about the same as a 12tb from this store with a dodgy warranty. so no point even going that route.


some of the seller though it's not directly listed as distributor, they do source their drives from the official distributors locally. those should be fine for rma because is same region purchase.


*this is from a different store. Just an example. But yes Amble is listed as official seagate distributor, and this reseller sources from there, meaning it's a local SEA region. But as always you SHOULD check the serial as soon as u get the hard drive on the seagate rma site to check the status. If it says not valid, immediately go lodge complaint and get refund.

Other than that, also do a full check of your hard drive. Checking smart isn't Enough. if it's seagate do the farm check. I don't think you can do that for wd, but if u buy from a credible source u probably dont need to be as wary/careful about that.


point here is cover all ur bases, make sure u ask the seller the questions, take the screenshots, if later got dispute u can use as evidence on shopee platform. outside shopee is tribunal small claims but if its a legit store then not going to go that far so dont worry about that.



fyi i did buy 1 seagate x18 exos from pc curator. when i did all the checks as mentioned in the quote above, it did check out on power on hours. about 5 months which is when i bought it, and that tallied with smart. and checking the smart no errors, and used till now no increased reallocated sectors. So i do think for this 1 at least is indeed unused brand new, but i cannot say it's 100% safe. at least i can't recommend it to others in good conscience. especially when someone already reported warranty is as good as useless from this store so no, not buying again from that store. also fyi the one that i did order was labelled new, and 4 year warranty (i took screenshot, because when u check now, that listing disappeared, so where is your proof? hence why u need screenshots )



This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Oct 31 2025, 10:02 AM

wd red PLUS should be ok.

If u dont get plus then i would be wary


wd wanted to sell wd red smrs for nas purposes. which they really shouldnt, but since they insist and they got caught, they came out with the PLUS. As in yes these are the real deal for nas drives, we promise

then newbs who dont know will buy the wd red (NON PLUS) and get hit by smr. then wonder why for truenas zfs is sux

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Oct 31 2025, 06:09 PM

to anyone trying to get refund from shopee for hard drive warranty dispute, be warned.

here is the case example

you buy hard drive, turns out seagate cant rma. so it falls under store warranty. but the seller doesnt honor warranty (more accurate they pretend they are, saying they will claim on ur behalf. they quote take 2 month. but u wait 3-4month no replacement. why? because they lied and made u wait that long. they are trying to waste ur time hoping u give up at this point to get ur refund).


This is what shopee says about refunds

shopee rejected claims on basis of it's outside the 15 day guarantee.

But notice how there is a claims outside that period which falls under the manufacturer (e.g. seagate rma) or store warranty.


Which the case falls under but shopee pretends not to know this, unless you point out this specific line in their own guidelines.



I managed to claim refund before just citing this and providing proof. So if your refund gets rejected and you do have solid proof, keep reopen ticket to dispute. because unless you go through a few rounds of this back and forth close, reopen, close, reopen, you wont get your refund through shopee.

you have to

1. prove that the seagate rma is not valid (show screenshots)
2. prove that seller does not honor store warranty (show screenshots)
3. provide proof your hard disk is dead (just show screenshots of your smart test etc)
4. dont let shopee trick you about the limited 15 day guarantee (theyll give u any excuse if it lets them not refund you if u allow them). refer them to the guideline for outside that period in regards to the store warranty not being honored. this will be ur basis for refund as per their own guideline.



my point is, prevention is better than the cure. so if you dont want to go through hell, just order from the legit sources.

those amazon prices r nice cheap and legit, but since they wont arrive in good condition and dont qualify for rma locally in malaysia, u can stop dreaming about buying hard drives at those prices unfortunately. just accept u have to cough up the high mark up prices from the local stock official distributor/resellers in malaysia >_<:



This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 1 2025, 06:04 AM

unfortunately. i can definitely see new gen homelabbers who getting into this buy a " NAS drive", buy the wd red (NON PLUS), thinking oo yeah it's a nas drive for 24/7 continuous usage. unbeknownst they got the SMR and use it non the wiser till something happens




hm... on their website i dont see the NON plus drives. they no longer produce them? that solves the problem at least.

But people need to be wary buying the old stock which are the wd red NON plus models

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/hdd/internal-hdd


Actually for western digital, it wasnt just the SMR issue that landed them in hot water, it was their other trick.


"power on hours warnings after just 3 years of nas use"



so basically what that was, WD would do a warning if your power on for the hard drive was 3 years then they will falsely tell u the drive needs to be replaced.

But that goes COUNTER to smart info. Smart tells you when the drive is actually gone bad. Whereas what WD did was put a firm power on hours limit even if drive still works fine, in order to get you to buy a new drive to replace it when actually u didnt even need to.

Very scummy behavior by WD

https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/...rkd_as_warning/





https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/...still_an_issue/

dont think wdda 3 years power on hours is an issue in 2025 cause the nas brands mostly didnt support it (they removed support is the newer firmwares). i dont think truenas even uses that metric either. nobody liked it except western digital



For seagate though they too were in that smr debacle, they didnt dare do that for their NAS line of hard drives, but not WD. And seagate didn't pull that WDDA 3 year power on hours stunt either.

when your choice for hdd is seagate, western digital or toshiba..... u know the situation is bad






but the thing is AI doesn't mention about warranty for those cheap drives. Yes u can get cheaper from US (but out of region so cannot claim warranty. and they arrive in bad condition due to the shipping), but malaysia local? all jacked up even for legit sources what to do?


This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 1 2025, 07:01 AM

If you are responding to shoee you can ask AI to draft you the response, it would be something like this




Obviously you will need all the screenshots and proof for this. Without it, it will be hard to argue for your case. You are your own champion in this matter, nobody else unfortunately, not even shopee who will be quick to try reject your refund as hard as they can




just to mention again on shopee rejections claiming exceed their 15 day guarantee refund. This is the actual law that SUPERCEDES their internal 15 day only refund nonsense

Sure you are within your rights to dispute and take action with the steps mentioned. but it's a big hassle, so unless it's a big order, most won't bother.

What it boils down to, shopee is just gouging to see how serious you are whether you will take matters further based on the actions consumers are within their rights to pursue. So it's a game of chicken basically


few time they gave up and refunded me in the past (since i had the proof and they didn't want to test me), but honestly, just buy from the official sources and just rma seagate. then u wont have to deal with this trouble

for seagate rma, i just give them my smart info screenshot (i also included printed copy in the package) and this was enough to get a replacement (obviously only rma hdd with actual problems). The only thing they care mostly is that you bought from authorized source and within region. If that's ok, chances are your rma will go through without issue. I did this a couple times no issues.

The only time i ever had a problem because of the seller i bought from

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 1 2025, 08:56 AM

most up to date review is here





for normal nas user homelab, pro or non pro nas hard drive is fine. get whichever is cheapest and doesn't have any glaring failure rate frequency in the news.


for truenas if u want to test new hard drive, open the shell do this

tmux

then





sda replace for your drive. find out in the disks in truenas ui. this changes on reboot so careful.


open a new shell, then tmux again, repeat.


if you want to check the tmux active sessions, go to shell type




change 0 for 1, 2, 3 and so on. the list of active tmux is shown if u do tmux, there is a list of tmux numbers for active sessions.


so if u receive say 4 hard drives, run the check for all of them same time.



the command will fully test all blocks to see if they work or got issue. if your drive break after using this, just rma. i did this for one drive, it died after 1 month the seller had reset the smart, so i only could know the disk was on cusp of death only after running this badblock test.


This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 1 2025, 11:34 AM

basically dont count on any sort of warranty claims on shopee. they dont have ur back

not really sure if shopeemall is any better.

example of what a bad hard drive looks like




it wasn't this bad initially. But as soon as i got the initial warning, and zfs raid z1 was in degraded mode, i did my backup.

once done, i did the smart test long and a zero fill format (because want to send back for refund. normally u would sent for rma replacement, but....)

after that did the more stressful test/check

which is the badblock test i mentioned previously.

When doing that test, the hard drive smart got worse (don't do this if you hadn't yet backup first). So yeah, conclusive proof the drive is not just a bit bad, it's very bad. Not usable at all.

Hard drives can be in a few different states

1. it's fine. this is the ideal state u want your hard drive to be in. it just works no issue.

2. it's showing initial signs it's going bad like current pending sectors. It becomes a bigger concern if those values keep on increasing and frequently, which is a very bad sign. But even if it doesn't, i would still want to replace the hard drive. Smart just tells you when a hard drive might be dying, so don't wait for the drive to die before you want to backup and stuff. My drive was basically in this state.

3. the drive is very bad. the error values just keep getting worse and frequently. This was my drive after doing the stress test.






Sometimes people say oo it's a bad sata connection. but actually for my case that wasn't it. How i know?

do this command




then look for the interface crc errors. If it's 0, it's not a bad sata cable or loose cable causing the errors.




So just a troubleshoot tip for people wondering how to check if your hard drive sata cable is faulty or not.

People often focus too much on the hard drives themselves, that they neglect to pay attention to the sata cables as well. Check both

Another tip, when installing the sata cables, make sure they route to the proper drive bay. If not, then how you know which bay has which hdd ? If you messed up like i did, what i do is, i go to scrutiny find out the serial for the problematic hard drive.

I pull out the hard drive (these are not part of a pool, and nas supports live hard drives so pulling them is fine. Only if it's part of an active pool, make sure you shutdown your NAS first to power off).

Then i check the label to see the serial. That's how you know you pulled out the correct hard drive based on the serial on label.


This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 2 2025, 09:21 AM

i'm running the bad block scan test, it really stresses out the drive. and i'm watching the scrutiny show smart failed.

it will read/write each and every block on the hard drive. for this it typically takes up to roughly 10 days for a 12tb to do that. It's very thorough and if anything is off, just observe the values like current pending sectors, and all the critical values to see if the disk is dying or not.

the regular smart without scrutiny, is less intuitive. scrutiny ui for me is much easier to read. But u have to be careful and check by serial number. In truenas those drive letters can easily be mislabeled i found from using truenas.

e.g. SDB could actually be SDA on reboot, at times. or some history of test that never got cleared but stuck in cache.


3 out of those 4 came from the same source. and 1 of those failed.

in the farm data it shows the power on hours of 4+ years despite owning it only 1 year.

For the other things like pending sectors, etc, farm shows a clean bill of health. Except for that 1 drive that got flagged.



like you said, i can't trust the smart since we know its not new, so i zero filled and did the black block test to check if anything goes bad. so far 3 out of 4 is fine. only the 1 is confirmed dead/dying.

scrutiny also had a feature where it can flag if a drive health is not good and impending going bad. But it's not 100% as even the dev admitted. I just observe the important values and see if they get higher increments and how frequent. so thats how i'm checking for myself

Seagate also has their own tool for testing. You have to pull out and connect to your pc and run the test.

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 3 2025, 01:48 PM

Does anyone know if

"yes it distribution" is a legitimate seagate reseller? They say they get their stock from Seagate Malaysia local distributors.

Some sellers will specifically point out the seagate distributor, this one was a bit vague.

Not familiar with the shop, are they legit on shopee?



i wanted to order thundermatch because pricing should be similar to yes it for this, but they are out of stock. they refuse to say when they will restock

tmt quoted price rm1599



ALLIT they say dont have. not even listed. max listed was 10tb


looked on shopeemall, the seagate 12tb @ rm 1.3k

but it says pre-order and overseas. So doesn't mean not local stock? But it's on shopeemall "cool pc laptop supplies". No i dont recommend this store or anything like it. just surprised it was on shopeemall.


viewnet got but markup to rm2k for the 12tb, fuk that Their shopee price ridiculous. but on their website price listing it's about rm 1.6k
https://www.viewnet.com.my/price-list#reloaded


from this list i only know tmt and allit is legit. problem is they are out of stock....


czone has a wd red plus listed for rm 1.5k but they dont have a shopee presence. may have to go there in person to buy

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 4 2025, 11:20 AM

https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/


if they dispute, they will sometimes ask u to use their own tool to check the drive health. hasnt happened to me yet, but that is what some say.

i just use the truenas smart info and also scrutiny and just screenshot and print it out. and that was enough for my previous seagate rma to pass without issue.

not sure if needed, but print out the screenshots and add to the hard drive package. why not?

what do u mean by that. u mean got shops that pretend to be legitimate shops on the regular shopee (not shopee mall) ? is that a thing

if like this i can click shopeemall and use that. i check pricing its the same as shopee, so may as well use that just to be safe.


well see the 11.11 sales which has a good deal. i'm only buying 1 hard drive first. I'll check the serial number and then ask the seagate live agent to confirm status see if it checks out.

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 4 2025, 08:49 AM

shopee doesn't even monitor this and delist them? wah..... shopeemall as well? wtf

anyway thx for the heads up.

anyway i'll be sure to check serial and contact seagate to verify first. hopefully 15 days enuff to check this

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 4 2025, 10:52 AM

what about here

https://www.reddit.com/r/malaysia/comments/...ops_in_low_yat/


got sell hard drives? anyone check before?

cheapest wd red plus rm 1499. for seagate ironwolf non pro was rm 1580

stocks r both limited.....

i'm waiting for 11.11 see if got deal if non i'll have to buy at those prices sadly


did i already mention this?
https://www.techradar.com/pro/surging-ai-de...e-also-going-up


not good




seems most of the heat are for the 30tb hard drives. but i see even 12tb are getting low on stock. prices not that great (compared to amazon at least)






This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 4 2025, 12:09 PM

is the seagate warranty valid? their source is local authorized distributor is it?

on shopee some confirmed that (their claims...) others they said is overseas import (do not buy this one. its essentially same as saying no seagate rma. store warranty is usually bs)

This one? but no hdd listed
https://www.etexpc.com/


This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 5 2025, 05:53 AM

bought the ironwolf 12tb non pro.

was considering the wd red plus but i didnt get it though it was cheaper


because

1. its lower rpm. so for a nas they will use the lowest rpm drive.... so my other drives are 7200 rpm...

2. different brand. might not be a good idea to mix. it will work, but i rather not do that

3. not a fan of wd warranty rma. u have to pay for shipping urself.


i also got from the official seagate seller list. i dont want to argue with seagate saying i didnt buy from the list, then get rma rejected

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 12 2025, 03:22 PM

viewnet


they offered about rm 1580 at the shop but i not free to go. so i got it at 1700 on shopee. so if u want a cheaper deal, u have to drive down to lowyat and ask in viewnet for that price.

first thing i did was check rma (dont have to open the anti static since u can see the serial. so i check first before i open, in case i need to return). it's valid. also they are indeed an official source for seagate.

yes the shopee is legit, cause i asked direct on whatsapp from their shop , and they confirmed.

i was looking for some 11.11 deals, but wasn't lucky. ironically the prices for the drive i was looking at was cheaper prior to 11.11

fyi this drive sells for close to rm 1k on us amazon. so basically overpaid, but what to do, the malaysia market for the nas drives r just more expensive than US

I did bad block scan for my other 3 drives. so only 1 was bad. so silver lining only 1 needed to replace. giving me time to save budget for next replacement, hopefully not anytime soon.


viewnet shopee they ship the drive in a very bubbled wrapped package, and inside a small cardboard box to fit 1 drive. i've seen better hdd packaging where they do bubble wrap + box + foam enclosure. So not the best packaging, but not worse either.

Now i have to bad block scan and check the drive arrived in good condition or not. Seems to be local stock since it took 1 day to ship.


day of manufacture is 18 sept 2025. with the rma Dec 2028 so yes 3 year warranty from seagate rma.


the cardboard box, the anti static bag, and bubble wrap i keep for later rma in future. hopefully not needed. it also came with a receipt, which is good cause u can scan a copy and send with ur rma if they ask if u bought from their official malaysia seller



allit, thundermatch all on shopee no stock



so my setup now has 12tb x 4 in raidz1.

My backup is 6-8 x 4tb. Since the backup is powered off unless i recover or backup, running that many hdds isnt a big deal. just need to backup once or twice a year or as needed.

this is why for my main nas i run 4 hard drives max. because more drive means more electricity consumption. my elec bill with 4 x 12tb for my homelab is ok for my bill


took video and photo before opening package. so plan is, within this 15 day period, i have to do the bad block scan, do smart short and long. then check. if not good, immediately request refund. i rather not rma and get a recertified drive. refund better then order again. anyway hopefully the test is alright.

fyi it takes about 10 days to do the bad block scan for 12tb hard drive.



i tested the smart and farm both show 0. Which clearly matches the manufacturer date to indicate it's brand new unused. so yes it's legit. i mean the source was credible to begin with, but doesn't hurt to check.

just a reminder u can check farm using this docker container app
https://github.com/gamestailer94/farm-check


its better to check farm before u do the smart test and bad block test. so u can check that it is 0 hours.

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 12 2025, 04:56 PM

u said it yourself. my reason for not doing so, because the difference in rpm.

if in raid it will choose to use the slowest drive as the speed for all the other drives. so i didnt want that. so i stuck to the 7200 rpm drives. so may as well stick to seagate.

I do have a mix of older wd with seagate on my backup. but it's a backup so thats perfectly fine. U use whatever u have on hand.

but yes u r correct. under the right pre-requisites u can mix match.



i've tried both low rpm and 7200 rpm hard drives for nas before (what i mean is, i use a batch of 4 for each one run separately in their own raidz1 or mdam raid5 so no mix and match). low rpm is nice because less noise and feels like they would last longer. Downside is the performance, is gonna be less than the 7200 rpm. I use a 10g networking setup. So less performance is not really what i want haha...

But that said, i find that with 4x 12tb 7200rpm hard drives, i can't hit 10g speeds. I think i need 6 hard drives to do that.







electricity cost not too bad, replacing 2 additional drives when they die is the main problem. they do die, just a matter of when.



price wise, 4 drives is the limit for me. speed wise, highest i saw was about 5-6g thoroughput r/w with just 4 drives better than most homelabbers haha..








The drive i got is ST12000VN0008




says old model but it was recently manufactured so should be ok. i didn't ask what the price was for the newer pro model


actually though AI said it's an older model, there is actually an older model than the 008 which is the ST12000VN0007. So luckily they didn't give me that older model at least. some shops on shopee do list they sell the 007 so at least get the ST12000VN0008 or the ST12000NT001 for seagate. pro is probably 5 year warranty but will cost extra. so 008 which is a non pro with 3 year warranty may be more attractive if on a budget.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/commen...is_write_cache/



when i enable scrutiny metric, my drives dont pass. only this new drive passed. but when i set to smart only, all pass

scrutiny metric can get false positives at times. i only rely on smart mostly to tell if the drive is dying.

even smart isn't fully reliable but based on my own experience, when smart shows some indication of failure, usually it's spot on in my experience. so i do replace when i see something is going wrong

This post has been edited by Moogle Stiltzkin: Nov 14 2025, 08:55 AM