Question 1

Are these new or "renewed" drives?  They are priced like renewed drives and the number of failures in the reviews makes me suspecious.

Accepted Answer

The drives I received came in sealed in typica HDD plastic wrap, and then a plastic shell for shipping.  I have received some in the past w/o the plastic wrap and they were OEM drives pulled from machines or shelled from external drives.  I checked the warranty status on them and they were not covered so I immediately returned them.  This is happening everywhere, not just Newegg :(  I urge you to check the warranty status and power on time on the drives as soon as you get them.

Question 2

Can I use the Seagate ST20000NM007D for a ZFS?

Accepted Answer

I've used these drives on ProxMox VE with ZFS in a mirror for a while now, and it works great for storage. I should note they're a little slow for running the VMs from, but it does work.

Question 3

Are these retail packaged or OEM drives?

Accepted Answer

OEM-like, but I’ve never seen these drives in a retail package. Newegg is an authorized seller, so you do get the full 5 year warranty. Packing for shipping isn’t the best if that’s your concern.

Question 4

How many bytes per sector (512 or 2048) are these drives?

Accepted Answer

Logical is 512 bytes.  Physical is 4096, not 2048.  The disks come 512e.  You can switch them to 4Kn.  The manual tells you how kind of.  However older OSs won't work with 4Kn and also different software, probably server software that can deal with disk access won't work with 4Kn.

As long as you have a 64 bit OS AND it's newer than Win7 you can use 4Kn.  I don't know if it gives much benefit.  It may be a little faster, but 512e runs fast.

Question 5

Can the Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM007D 20TB hard drive be a bit noisy?

Accepted Answer

The Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM007D is noted for its quiet operation during idle times.

Question 6

What should I do to get past the 16TB limit of this HD?

Accepted Answer

Not sure what you mean - 20TB works fine at full capacity in Linux (Kubuntu)

Question 7

i have a docking station for sata drives can i use this with it?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can use the Seagate Exos X20 ST20000NM007D 20TB hard drive with a docking station for SATA drives as it uses a SATA 6.0Gb/s interface.

Questions & Answers