I purchased a 14TB Seagate Expansion drive from Bestbuy Canada. I had basic expectations based on my last Seagate shucking experience that has had me using WD drives for the last while. I was pleasantly surprised to find a SATA Exos 2x14 drive inside, white label, but does include the MACH-2 logo on it. It was a nice surprise to be sure and I may have to grab another while they’re on sale ($239 CAD)
Is this the new standard of what we’ll find in external drives?
I haven’t connected it to my server yet. I’m expecting it to show as a single drive with excellent performance.
It’s fairly likely that the Exos drive you received failed to pass some Seagate test to qualify it as an Exos.
is that true? I thought they were putting enterprise drives in these enclosures during the parts shortage. I think they are running a custom firmware though because they come up as 14TB single drives and work fine on sata. write speed is almost as fast as a quality sata SSD though, so no complaints here
Doesn’t matter which drive (enterprise or other) they will all show up as normal 14TB that work on SATA.
It is a common practice for drive manufacturers to put “seconds” into USB enclosures. Can’t say for sure in your case. You might be able to tell by opening the case and looking at the disk label.