Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

[b700029]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

Seems like it really depends on your luck how long a HDD lasts.

For example, I've got 2 identical Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120GB SATA HDDs (Model ST3120026AS).
One has 2285 power on hours (95 days .. almost nothing) and 1 pending + 1 bad sector, the other has 42102 power on hours (1754 days.. that's almost 5 years! ) and no bad sectors at all.
The UDMA CRC error is from a flaky connection (crappy SATA cable)

...

Temperature difference is because one was running for over an hour, the other was just connected for a few minutes.

Although the "raw read error rate" and "hardware ECC recovered" (the same?) raw values are absurd, the normalized values show that both drives are experiencing a huge number of read (and seek) errors, and only the error correction code is keeping things looking OK.

You might also want to check what's with the left one having 3180 power cycles in 95 days... power cycling over 33 times a day on average is not at all good for the drive.

[dood]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

Seagates are known for reading out abnormal values on those two attributes. Every Seagate drive I've had, even my new 2TB drive, read like that out of the box.

[momaka]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

Seagates are known for reading out abnormal values on those two attributes. Every Seagate drive I've had, even my new 2TB drive, read like that out of the box.

I can confirm that as well.
Seagate probably uses those parameters to measure something else.

[momaka]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

I just saw one like that 2 weeks ago at work. It was a Seagate SATA drive, not quite sure what model and size... most likely a 160 GB 7200.8. The drive wasn't clicking but rather beeping randomly. At first I thought it was something else, but then I went to plug in my flash drive with my utilities and noticed the noise was coming from the computer. When I checked the SMART log, the bad sector count was sky-high, up in the 1000 range as was the current pending sector and event count. My boss wasn't there that day, so I told another co-worker of mine to tell him about it. However, chances are that if that computer is working, the drive is probably still in it. If it's still there next week, I'll grab a copy of the SMART log.

Just to report that hard drive has now failed. I'm not really surprised, though. Actually it failed about 4 weeks ago, but I forgot to post about it. Only remembered now after I saw the smart logs on my flash drive. The bad sectors finally reached the files for the operating system.

You can see the results in the Seagate ST3160812AS (3).txt file.
Particularly, have a look at the Reallocated Sector Count under Raw Value.

When it was still working way back, I ran a HDTune test on it. Anytime I did a big read or write operation, the bad sector count would go up. The HDTune test alone increased the bad sector count by 1000. Probably a bad head stack. I've saved the hard drive. Will open it (if I don't forget) the next time I go to work (don't know when that will be, though).

Also, while I was browsing my flash drive, I found SMART logs of 2 other identical hard drives as the failed one above. Those haven't failed yet, but looks like they might soon too.

[ratdude747]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

...And now you see why I bought a 320GB drive for my desktop...

I still do not fully trust these larger drives... they seem to die quick.

[momaka]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

...And now you see why I bought a 320GB drive for my desktop...
I still do not fully trust these larger drives... they seem to die quick.

The drives I posted about above are all 160 GB.
I used to think that Seagate and WD are about the same, but after seeing quite a few dead Seagates lately (both old and new), I'm now leaning towards WD just being better.

[ratdude747]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

The drives I posted about above are all 160 GB.
I used to think that Seagate and WD are about the same, but after seeing quite a few dead Seagates lately (both old and new), I'm now leaning towards WD just being better.

sorry about that.

[kc8adu]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

these are all old drives with lots of hours on them and unknown treatment history.nothing to base quality or lack of on any brand.the seagate 1tb 7200.11 did have serious issues though.

sorry about that.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

...And now you see why I bought a 320GB drive for my desktop...

I still do not fully trust these larger drives... they seem to die quick.

I've been saying that for years but I always get flack for saying so.
.
I think there's been 3 1Tb-up fails show up here just this week....
.
Mid last year I figured they'd been around long enough to try some 1TB WD Blacks in the wife's media server just to see how well they work out.
I got six.
One has completely shit itself and another drops out of RAID every few days for no particular reason. [Passes all tests after.]
.
That's basically a 16-33% failure rate [depending on how you look at it] in the first year..
Yeah, they can be RMA'ed but it's a PITA and a big honkin' waste of my time.
.
Compare that to the roughly 40 WD 250gb and 500gb I have in service with zero fails for 2+ years now. [Some have been in use for 4 years.]
.
I'm going back to my 500gb Max policy for as long as that's possible.
Bigger drives are just too unreliable and too much trouble.
.

[mockingbird]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

I don't touch Caviar Green drives, though I think there is a way to disable head parking on them...

so far, I have had zero failures with blues on customers PCs, but I did have one failure with a black. Blacks do have problems with quality control though.

I also have an RE2 I took out of a WD external enclosure, though never got a chance to use it yet... Wonder how those drives are.

Regarding Seagate, someone just bought a system with a 1TB 64MB cache Seagate (That's the only thing available due to the shortage). The drive did have some kind of head parking going on, but I was darned if I could figure out how to disable it. Seagate claimed that it's not the parking, but there WAS this odd clicking every so often that irked me. The customer INSISTED on a 1TB drive, otherwise I never encountered one before.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

A number of my 250gb and 500gb are RE2.
Had no problems with them at all.
Some need a firmware update. [Which is easy.]
Those have model numbers ending in "YS" as so WDxxxxYS.
-
Only the ones with -just- YS at the end need the update.
For example WDxxxxABYS doesn't need it.
.

[shovenose]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

RE drives are specially made for RAID. Non-RE western digital drives have tremendous issues wit RAID. If you want to do any sort of raid with them you have to get. RE versions!

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

RE drives are specially made for RAID. Non-RE western digital drives have tremendous issues wit RAID. If you want to do any sort of raid with them you have to get. RE versions!

Not really.
Standard drives like Blacks work fine.
[As I recall BCN runs on Blacks in RAID now.]
.
RAID was around long before WD came up with RE and WD worked fine on RAID.
I've used zillions of WD__BB and WD__JB in RAID and never had issues.
.
The drives with problems are usually those with firmwares designed to save power. [Like the Greens.] They will spin down to a low power state too soon and just at the wrong time, the RAID chip thinks they are dead because they aren't available, and they get marked 'bad' by the RAID.
.
Drives that are optimized for other things can possibly also be a problem. Depends what they did to the firmware.
.
RE -are- better because their firmware is optimized for RAID, but drives with standard firmwares work fine too.
.

[Agent24]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

I still have a DTLA-305040 (40GB 5400rpm) deathstar that makes a click-feep sound every time it has to read a lot of files. Especially a bunch of small ones. It refuses to die completely though.

I had a couple deathstars that made that sound sometimes. They got continually worse over a period of months and eventually wouldn't show up in the BIOS.

I ended up buying a replacement Seagate 2tb too ! Got it for 125 shipped blew the local prices out of the water I figured due to the shortage which some are estimating will last from mid to the end of 2012. That prices were only going to get higher. The drive is made in China with a 3 year warranty.

Is it a ST2000DL003?

There's a thread on Seagate's forums which seems to suggest those may have a firmware issue.

...And now you see why I bought a 320GB drive for my desktop...

I still do not fully trust these larger drives... they seem to die quick.

I think that will end up being a useless exercise though, because now that we can get 500GB+ onto one platter, any new drive which is 500GB or less will potentially be a new type one with just 1 platter and capacity reduced in firmware, still the same higher areal density and same problems (if that is what causes the problems)

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

I think that will end up being a useless exercise though, because now that we can get 500GB+ onto one platter, any new drive which is 500GB or less will potentially be a new type one with just 1 platter and capacity reduced in firmware, still the same higher areal density and same problems (if that is what causes the problems)

Not really because with a single platter there are fewer issues with keeping all the heads on different platters simultaneously aligned to the smaller target zones.
.

[mockingbird]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

A number of my 250gb and 500gb are RE2.
Had no problems with them at all.
Some need a firmware update. [Which is easy.]
Those have model numbers ending in "YS" as so WDxxxxYS.
.

Ah, thanks for the info. It's an ABYS, so I am safe. How's the performance compared to newer Caviar Blue for regular desktop use?

RE drives are specially made for RAID. Non-RE western digital drives have tremendous issues wit RAID. If you want to do any sort of raid with them you have to get. RE versions!

All RE drives do is *officially* support TLER/CCTL SMART commands... I wouldn't be surprised if they're the same on the inside as blacks (but the firmware IS different to allow TLER/CCTL commands to be accepted and remembered on cold reboots).

Not really.
Standard drives like Blacks work fine.
[As I recall BCN runs on Blacks in RAID now.]

They're not supposed to, but if they're working they're working.

RAID was around long before WD came up with RE and WD worked fine on RAID.
I've used zillions of WD__BB and WD__JB in RAID and never had issues.

That's because those drives properly supported TLER/CCTL commands until WD intentionally REMOVED them from newer series to propagate another profit sector for themselves.

RE -are- better because their firmware is optimized for RAID, but drives with standard firmwares work fine too.

There is no such thing as *good* hardware RAID with Windows... Someone made a great thread on StorageReview a while back explaining the whole thing. I think I linked to it on this forum in one of our other threads discussing RAID. The only good implementation of RAID is ZFS, and that runs in software and can be used with regular drives that do not support TLER/CCTL commands.

Having said that - I'm going to have to agree with you that bios/hardware/software RAID in Windows or otherwise works just fine sometimes out of the box. I have a customer that insisted on setting up a RAID 1 mirror with two Caviar Blue drives on the AMD SB850 Chipset... Worked just fine. I wouldn't do it though.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

I dunno. I don't buy the Blues.
I only buy RE or Blacks since I went to SATA.
.

[shovenose]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

If we're talking about RAID I may as well pitch in that I use RAID on two Seagate Barracude drivers. They're the entireprise versions (forget what they're called )...They're 250GB SATA drives, attached to the built in controller on the mobo with Windows software mirrored RAID...
The boot drive is a 100GB Maxtor...
This is the Windows Server 2003 PC that's my network file server, backup server, and Minecraft server

PS: just noticed on Newegg they carry Lenovo hard drives. They any good?

[Agent24]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

All RE drives do is *officially* support TLER/CCTL SMART commands... I wouldn't be surprised if they're the same on the inside as blacks (but the firmware IS different to allow TLER/CCTL commands to be accepted and remembered on cold reboots).

I always read that this was the case.

In fact, that is what people used to do - and they just changed some parameters with a firmware settings tool to allow to use the drives in RAID.

Western Digital of course figured this out and disabled the modification, forcing people to pay more money for the RE models.

[kc8adu]

Re: Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

lenovo would most likely be hitachi.