Replacing HDD, Pipeline or Skyhawk

K

kirkyboy

New Member
Hi, need to replace my hard drive as the Toshiba S300 I fitted about 4.5 years ago is failing.
I see on Amazon that Seagate Pipeline is still available at £48 or Skyhawk which is £105, both of them are new 1 TB drives.
Just wondered if anybody could share thoughts on drawbacks of using the older model compared with benefits of using something newer at more than double the cost.

Thanks
Chris
 
You want a drive that is designed for PVR use. The highest performance and spin speed are not needed, but reliable operation without parking heads and limited retries is. The Seagate Pipeline range is designed for PVR use, I have no idea whether the Skyhawk is.
 
Seems like the Pipeline was discontinued around 8 years ago so now obsolete though still available from some sellers on Amazon.
Skyhawk are one of 2 drives recommended on this forum as being suitable for the HDR Fox T2. They're classed as being used in video recording as well as surveillance data storage systems engineered for 24/7 operation.
Just wondered whether it's worth splashing out the extra cash for the latest model.
 
Didn't know whether a newer model may be better as regards reliability, lifetime, read/write errors, bad sectors, need to run fixdisk in maintenance mode, etc.
 
kirkyboy said:
Didn't know whether a newer model may be better as regards reliability, lifetime, read/write errors, bad sectors, need to run fixdisk in maintenance mode, etc.
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These days I would tend to assume higher reliability from the older model. Hard discs are long past being a commodity product and now the drive is to make them cheaper.
 
Seller of Pipelines on Amazon is a domestic house in Northampton... Despite that link to a "Seagate Store".
That may or may not be an issue in itself?

There were stories of refurbished / smart info deleted WD drives for the Foxsat-HDR donkeys years back on another forum.

Caveat Emptor.
 
I am assuming you can get brand new still in the wrapper Pipeline drives. If not and they're all second hand then that's a very different situation. The initial post on this thread said nothing about the drives being not new unused.
 
kirkyboy said:
Seems like the Pipeline was discontinued around 8 years ago so now obsolete though still available from some sellers on Amazon.
Click to expand...
kirkyboy said:
Good point, think I’ll go for the Pipeline and see what it’s like.
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Be very wary. Unscrupulous sellers know Pipelines are in demand and are feeding the market with "clocked" or even cloned knock-offs. I would carry out extreme diligence, but at least with Amazon it's easy to get your money back.

HDR-FOX HDD Replacement
 
The FARM log isn't reset on a SMART data reset which for some fraud publicity helped indicate that some supposedly brand new HDDs had their SMART data reset.
Example news report:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Increasing-evidence-of-origin-in-China-10269059.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcou...to-misrepresented-used-hard-disk-drive-sales/
Seagate started to introduce what they call the FARM log by 2021, but may be limited to enterprise and NAS-focused hard disk drives, including some Seagate Skyhawk models.

Even 6 years ago, in 2020, there were a few posts on this forum that thought that even these Amazon market place listings of "new" Seagate pipeline drives should be treated as suspect.
Example:
MartinLiddle said:
I am nervous about buying hard drives from sellers on Amazon Marketplace. At least some of them are not new as claimed but have had the SMART data reset to make them appear new. You may consider it worth the risk but personally I prefer to buy direct from a reputable UK seller.
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