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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

FYI Seagate 1T drives failing

I agree that this is crazy, but they did fix it apparently... Seagate is a great company and make very reliable drives. This major hick-up sucked... but I am still going to continue getting their drives. I am sure this has only made them test their stuff even more while it is going through R&D.
 
seagate bug explained

seagate bug explained

the problem would be something in the firmware:

"The problem with the 7200.11 series bricking, which has been in the news for the last month, was what really got the ball rolling. The Seagate employee says that is an old problem that was difficult to diagnose. A log or journal is written to in the firmware when certain events occur. If this reaches 320 entries and the drive is powered down, it will produce errors during initialization and not report information to the BIOS. "

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-firmware-7200.11-drives-bricking,6885.html

to check if you seagate drive needs a new firmware : https://apps1.seagate.com/rms_af_srl_chk/
 
Peter Karlsson said:
Wooo! Thanks very much for the link! I've have 18 1TB drives, and I guess 6 or 7 of them have died, and been sent back. Luckily I got Raid-6 so I always have an extra spare drive, to change to when the Raid has started to be degenerated. I'll better update those firmwares straight away, to get rid of this annoying problem.

/Regards Peter K
Click to expand...

This is rediculous.

This is a failure rate of over 30%. What did they say when you sent back 6 out of 18?

Hans
 
So after reading this post I was hoping that I wasn't going to become a victim. Ya right! I've replaced 8 of 16 drives over the past week. But that's not the problem. I receive the new drives and they sent me 1 that was dead in the box. These are not OEM drives, I bought them new from a good source.

Being a mac user it's not as easy to upgrade the firmware. And even if I wanted to to it would be a pain in the ass! Remove each drive from the chassy and install into the mac, boot the cd blah blah blah. I guess PC users don't have it all bad, they can check which drive needs firmware updates without having to go through this hassle.

I've been using Seagate products for years but I'm going to look for an alternative real fast. If anyone has any suggestions please share the info.
 
hitachi
 
Hitachi is the only way to go...along with WD drives, I've had about 3 1TB Seagate based drives and at the worst of times they failed, including the back ups..so since then I've avoided it at all cost. Might just be a few cases but still...i'd rather never take the risk...especially not with my music! :rofl:
 
Hitachi and the new WD black or green 1TB drives are all performing well for me. No casualties in over two years. I really like the green ones for external enclosures or stand-alone use within a system as they adapt their power consumption and rotational speed according to demand. The Black ones are better for primary system drives, use in RAIDs, etc..

In the past year, I've bought 5 Seagate 1.5TB and 3 of their 1TB. All of the 1TB drives failed and so have 3 of the 1.5TB. 4 of the 1.5TB were received in a RAID from CalDigit. One of those drives failed and I promptly swapped it out with another I picked up locally because it was a holiday weekend and I couldn't wait for warranty repair to kick in. Had another two drives in that array fail the following week. CalDigit sent me 4 replacement drives with updated firmware, all has been fine with the array since and it's used daily. The drive I picked up locally was put back into service in a FW800/eSATA enclosure and I updated the firmware. All has been fine with the 1.5TB drives since.

I don't plan to rush out and buy any Seagate products anytime soon. I'm planning to buy a new 8-bay RAID from MAXX DIGITAL once the 2TB drives are available. But if their first 2TB units are Seagate, I'll pass until others have worked them for 6 months or so to confirm they're worth it. I don't want to be another Seagate guinea pig while they release a faulty product that needs updated firmware.

I quit buying Maxtor labeled drives a while back after constant failures. It seems that after Seagate acquired them, the quality level of Seagate products has gone into the shitter.
 
If you read the small print Seagate Enterprise drives that are returned are replaced with refurbished drives :-o wtf!..

replacing all seagates here with hitachi and god or bad.. they are being shelved. to risky.

s
 
I firmly believe that for every product on the market, you can find someone on the internet to say they are all lemons, based on limited personal experience, and that it could well be a fluke that does not reflect the overall reliability of the product in the market.

And yet... I used to work in IT, and the hard drives that failed on the machines I supported were overwhelmingly Maxtors, and the only hard drives that failed on me personally were Maxtors. I did come across a couple of IBM Deathstars that failed.

I remember one computer that shipped with a drive from another manufacturer, and had a Maxtor added as a secondary. That Maxtor drive failed and was replaced on warranty twice, and then failed a third time when we gave up on replacing it. Through it all, the original drive never had a problem.

I used to always trust Seagate drives, but in the last few years, I've seen almost as many Seagates fail as Maxtors. How could this be? It seems that it started after Seagate acquired Maxtor in 2006.

When I still trusted them, I bought a new Seagate drive, installed it, and noticed it ran very slowly. I checked the SMART data, and found that it had recorded over 200,000 uncorrectable read hours within the first hour of being installed. The store replaced it, and I had the same problem with that drive. I took that one back, and got a Western Digital drive that ran perfectly on day one, and still is, a few years later.

I worked on a production where the Post Supervisor favoured Seagate drives, and bought a Seagate external hard drive unit with two drives inside, setup as a RAID. Both failed within a couple of days of each other, and when he opened the case up, he found the drives inside were labeled Maxtor.

I almost hate to say it because it's anecdotal, but I've got a pile of failed Maxtor and a few Seagate drives on one bookshelf, and another has a stack of Western Digitals that are all running perfectly.

Now, I will not buy anything other than a Western Digital, and if I have any say on a production, they won't use anything else either. I just waited over a week for some new WD 1TB drives to arrive because all the local retailers were sold out, even though the Seagate drives were readily available.

One important note:

The different colours of Western Digital drives do make a difference.

The Caviar Black 1 TB drives are what I use in desktop machines. If any Caviar Green drives come in, I use them for backups, as they are definitely a bit slower.

However, when it comes to on-set backups sitting in a hard drive dock and hooked up to a laptop, that then travel back to the office, I prefer the Caviar Blue 500 GB or 750 GB drives. Why? They can handle more shock than the others. I'm a big believer in "better safe than sorry."

Here are the shock specifications:

Black 1 TB
Operating Shock (Read) 30G, 2 ms
Non-operating Shock 250G, 2 ms

Green 1 TB
Operating Shock (Read) 65G, 2 ms
Non-operating Shock 250G, 2 ms

Blue 500 GB and 750 GB
Operating Shock (Read) 65G, 2 ms
Non-operating Shock 350G, 2 ms

These specs do vary based on size, so if you are concerned with a drive's ability to withstand a shock, check the specs.

Blue 640 GB
Operating Shock (Read) 30G, 2 ms
Non-operating Shock 300G, 2 ms
 
Thanks for the info guys. I guess Hitachi it is!

BTW I just lost another drive a few minutes ago :gun: SEAGATE

The real pain of all this is that when my MAIN RAID failed i went to my backup and couldn't read shit. I was getting a Quick Time error copying files.
 

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Hopefully Seagate will get their act together. They were once great and I think they can be great once again. I used to swear by Seagate HDD's and had no trouble buying them by the case. Only 1 out of 100 drives or so would ever be bad and it was usually DOA due to damage in shipping.

Western Digital has been great for the past few years... However, they used to give me lots of problems in the late '90s.

And Hitachi hasn't always been perfect either. I think the most problematic 320GB HDDs on the market were made by Hitachi.

The next round of drives coming up are 7200rpm 2TB units. We're also going to be seeing lots of new SATA-III (6Gbps) interface drives soon and more 10K and 15K rpm options as HDD makers are forced to compete with increasingly larger and more affordable SSD products. Anything can happen with these next round of drives and I'm hoping Seagate can redeem themselves.
 
I am still buying Seagates even with all of the news. Had no good luck with all other vendors. Hitachis seem to be OK but I am holding my breath as they bought the IBM factories and IBMs were dropping like flies on me a few years ago.

Never had a Seagate brick out on my yet (crossing fingers) Just put 6 1.5TBs in a new ReadyNAS Pro.

(Rolls the dice)
 
I have 32 of the Seagate drives that required the FW update. 16 are 1 TB and 16 are 750 GB. I had one of ea go bad. Once the first 1 TB died, I left the RAID array running for two months until the FW update came out.

As the Seagates fail, I am replacing with RE-3 and RE-4 drives.
 
I had one of the HDDs in this batch. And it promptly died. But Seagate's warranty service was SUPERB.

I've had the same Maxtor experience as Stephen. I'll never trust a Maxtor drive again. Although as of late out of 12 WD drives 7 have been lemons. Combined with Seagate's incredible customer service and my long term bad experiences with Maxtor and WD I'm sticking to Seagate.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
The next round of drives coming up are 7200rpm 2TB units. We're also going to be seeing lots of new SATA-III (6Gbps) interface drives soon and more 10K and 15K rpm options as HDD makers are forced to compete with increasingly larger and more affordable SSD products. Anything can happen with these next round of drives and I'm hoping Seagate can redeem themselves.
Click to expand...

Funny how the interface is getting faster but the write speed is about the same?
 
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