Seagate 1tb Click Of Death

[Agent24]

Originally Posted by kc8adu

lenovo would most likely be hitachi.

Note that in March this year, Western Digital is expected to buy Hitachi GST.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by c_hegge

I've seen that on a WD drive recently. It would just click from time to time, but it held up long enough to get the data off it, but it died shortly after.

Western Digitals used to give me bad sectors often. At least ones made before 1998.

And a Caviar 1 GB I had, pre-1998, always fails after 238 MB!

DOS' FORMAT.COM usually displayed "Format terminated" with any attempt to format past 238 MB and I also got a click-of-death.

[shovenose]

I just got a "new" Seagate 1TB Barracuda ES.2, "Certified Repaired" (refurb, probably), HDD, and it clicks when you turn it on? Like twice, then it acts normal. is that a problem?

[mockingbird]

I would stay far, far away from Barracuda ES. And you know that Seagate is now only doing 3 years along with WD?

[shovenose]

What's wrong with Barracude ES?

[Shocker]

Originally Posted by momaka

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.

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).

Wow!!!!!!!! 40,637 reallocated sectors?????

Did you have it apart???

[momaka]

Originally Posted by Shocker

Wow!!!!!!!! 40,637 reallocated sectors?????

Did you have it apart???

Yup, just did that last week after I took it home. It's a single platter drive. The top surface looks fine. If the heads really are scratching like I'm suspecting (it sounds so, at least when the HD tries to read certain areas of the platters), it must be on the bottom surface. I will take it apart again when I have more time, this time removing the headstack and the platter as well.
The number of bad sectors aside, that hard drive is still working! It gets recognized by the BIOS and even tries to load Windows when I start it on my computer (but it fails since I'm trying it on a completely different motherboard and processor).

[b700029]

Wow. I will be very surprised if it still works after you remove the heads and platter and put them back.

[Agent24]

I've done that before. The drive will still work, but for how long, who knows?

It certainly won't get any better, that's for sure!

If the drive is multi-platter you run a huge risk of screwing it up, if you get the platters misaligned. Of course if you open it outside of a cleanroom you will screw it anyway.

But it might live long enough to do some data recovery...

[Wester547]

Originally Posted by Scenic

What regular WD Greens (and only these) are notorious for is parking their heads after a 4 second timeout on a plastic ramp to the side of the platters (supposedly reducing friction and saving power. BS if you ask me).
Because they do that all the time, the drives die early. I've seen 1 year old 1TB WD Greens with 400-500k head parking counts in SMART. No need to explain why they had trouble reading and kept losing the partition table. Out of head alignment from all the parking crap.

I believe spin down is the culprit of the premature deaths of WD Green and Scorpio Blues, not as much the head parking. I don't imagine that parking the heads off the ramp is anywhere near as drudging for a drive as incessantly spinning up and down, especially at inconveniencing times (especially with regard to spinning up, as the process of spinning up is toughest on the spindle motor). The greatest issue I think parking heads lots would incur is stiction (for notebook drives moreso). At a minimum, desktops drives are rated at a load cycle count of 300,000 and notebook drives tend to double that and have more shock resistance also. WD Scorpio Blue drives, by default, have their APM configured at a value of 96. Not only does that mean parking the heads after 4 seconds of inactivity, it means spinning the drive down a minute later or so (after inactivity)! That's a recipe for death. It's almost like WD program those drives to die - thankfully, a simple change of configuration on the drive can fix around that. However, I would also recommend disabling APM, since 4 seconds is rather in excess. 8 seconds is not particularly great with the green drives either, so I would either elongate that timer or turn it off. But again, I don't see the head parking as the biggest problem. It's an annoyance, for sure, especially when playing a game or watching a video. But I have a HTS541010G9AT00 in an old laptop still going with almost 600,000 cycles and it's doing just fine with 13,000 hours and 13,000 on/off cycles on it. It has no reallocations or bad sectors, nor pending.

Originally Posted by Scenic

The performance of those green drives really isn't all that bad. Especially if you consider the price (before the Thailand stuff) and how cool they run. Most of the time these green drives don't even need a fan and still stay near or below 35°C.

I do think that sounds good thermally, but significantly lower and that would be too cold for my tastes - to my knowledge, hard drives have trouble lubricating properly when working under heavy load at temperatures below 30C. So I think 30C-40C is an optimal range (preferably below 40C but upward of 30C). And yes, I also feel the WD green drives perform just fine, especially for the thermal output. I don't see why a casual user would need a 7200RPM drive when 5400RPM drives can perform that well. Not sure about green drives not needing a fan - at least, the ones installed in my MyBook gets hot when it's under load (it has feet at its bottom and vents, or rather grates, to exhaust heat) and only runs cool in idle, with its head parked. Note that this is a USB 2.0 drive, so it is not hitting very high numbers in transfer rate.

I also agree that larger drives are more prone to fail, especially with more platters and especially in the case of mechanical HDDs. The only advantage I can think of with a two platter drive (as opposed to one) is lasting longer if one platter fails. I would only trust a 1TB drive at the very most, and a two platter one at that - anything more and I think one is bounded for failure. It kind of expounds upon why older (quality) drives tend to last so long. Also, unless in huge amounts over a short span of time, reallocated sectors don't worry me that much. They'll certainly stress the drive more and will wan performance, but the operating system cannot see them so I can't see them causing much trouble such as the above example. Pending sectors are far more worrying to me, especially with surfeits of them, along with offline uncorrectable sectors. I have a Toshiba MK1637GSX that has 110 pending sectors (not sure why they haven't been reallocated yet with only 9 reallocations, and since there are no offline uncorrectable sectors, but the S.M.A.R.T. log shows 6,409 errors!) and often I hear it scratching and clicking when the HDD is writing or reading slowly enough (it seems to never happen when the drive is rapidly working). It sounds like this...

Tick tick...

Tick tick...

TICK TICK CHTICKEETIE....

Tick tick.

Tick.

It's not literally ticking. More 'chitting', if you like. But it does tick when you hear it scratch and/or click. I guess Superfetch doesn't help (the drive has Vista Home Premium 32-bit on it) - it seems to work the hard drive more. Disabling it helps a might bit. Turning on Windows Search seems to help even more - it has the drive working quickly, so not nearly as many ticks, scratches, or clicks are heard, though it's not very good for heat and power.

But I know those sounds definitely denote the pending sectors. I can't even get it to complete, say, the full benchmark of HD Tach (by Simpli Software) because of it. As for Seagate and the original topic of discussion, I don't care for what became of Seagate once they merged with Maxtor. Before they were fantastic. But after.... I'd call them more Maxtorgate. Or Seamaxtor. But they're not Seagate to me anymore. The quality control and quality itself is just too far gone.

[Shocker]

Originally Posted by Wester547

I believe spin down is the culprit of the premature deaths of WD Green and Scorpio Blues, not as much the head parking. I don't imagine that parking the heads off the ramp is anywhere near as drudging for a drive than incessantly spinning up and down, especially at inconveniencing times (especially with regard to spinning up, as the process of spinning up is toughest on the spindle motor).

I did get my hands on a dead WD Green 1TB last year. It clicked but the motor was fine.

I also agree that larger drives are more prone to fail, especially with more platters and especially in the case of mechanical HDDs. The only advantage I can think of with a two platter drive (as opposed to one) is lasting longer if one platter fails.

If one head fails, the entire drive goes down. The platters are interleaved. So if the drive has four heads,

• The first track is read by head 0,
• The second track is read by head 1,
• The third track is read by head 2,
• The fourth track is read by head 3,

Then it switches to the next cylinder and repeats.

A little like RAID 0 except that it only does it to increase capacity, not transfer rate.

Also, unless in huge amounts over a short span of time, reallocated sectors don't worry me that much. They'll certainly stress the drive more and will wan performance, but the operating system cannot see them so I can't see them causing much trouble such as the above example. Pending sectors are far more worrying to me, especially with surfeits of them, along with offline uncorrectable sectors. I have a Toshiba MK1637GSX that has 110 pending sectors (not sure why they haven't been reallocated yet with only 9 reallocations, and since there are no offline uncorrectable sectors, but the S.M.A.R.T. log shows 6,409 errors!) and often I hear it scratching and clicking when the HDD is writing or reading slowly enough (it seems to never happen when the drive is rapidly working). It sounds like this...

Tick tick...

Tick tick...

TICK TICK CHTICKEETIE....

Tick tick.

Tick.

It's not literally ticking. More 'chitting', if you like. But it does tick when you hear it scratch and/or click. I guess Superfetch doesn't help (the drive has Vista Home Premium 32-bit on it) - it seems to work the hard drive more. Disabling it helps a might bit.

But I know those sounds definitely denote the pending sectors. I can't even get it to complete, say, the full benchmark of HD Tach (by Simpli Software) because of it. As for Seagate and the original topic of discussion, I don't care for what became of Seagate once they merged with Maxtor. Before they were fantastic. But after.... I'd call them more Maxtorgate. Or Seamaxtor. But they're not Seagate to me anymore. The quality control and quality itself is just too far gone.

Scratch???

I had two bad Seagate 1TB drives. The first one was an ST31000333AS from, surprise surprise, a Maxtor-branded USB enclosure. SMART looked fine, but it would act up once in a while and I eventually took it to bits. The second one is an ST31000524AS which developed lots of bad sectors. I don't know about you, but I would act like if I saw 1000 reallocations on one of my own drives.

OTOH, I am still using an OLD ST380011A (from an old whitebox from 08/2004; 37,226 hours on the clock) for my, uh, important stuff. If there's any type of abuse that will destroy that thing, I haven't found it. It's heavy too. (At least for a drive with one platter...)

I even had an ST320414A (which wasn't MY old drive) fall about 1m to the floor. (The cat knocked it off. ) When I plugged it in, it worked fine. I was careful enough not to drop the ST380011A - good thing, because that was before I had a backup of anything.

If they really are going downhill, it's sad because they made some ridiculously tough drives in the past. The last generation I feel confident in using for anything important is the 7200.8, maybe the 7200.9.

I guess I have two options. Western Digital, or enterprise drives.

[Wester547]

Originally Posted by Shocker

I did get my hands on a dead WD Green 1TB last year. It clicked but the motor was fine.

I would think something was askew with the media then. Maybe the mechanical subsystem had ado reading it. But I'm certain that spinning up and down a drive often is a far more certain token of death than parking the heads. But perhaps the Caviar Green/Scorpio Blue drives are not suited to head parking perpetually for some reason.

Originally Posted by Shocker

If one head fails, the entire drive goes down. The platters are interleaved. So if the drive has four heads,

• The first track is read by head 0,
• The second track is read by head 1,
• The third track is read by head 2,
• The fourth track is read by head 3,

Then it switches to the next cylinder and repeats.

A little like RAID 0 except that it only does it to increase capacity, not transfer rate.

For sure; I don't like the idea of a drive having many heads. Fortunately, I've never had a head crash.

Originally Posted by Shocker

I had two bad Seagate 1TB drives. The first one was an ST31000333AS from, surprise surprise, a Maxtor-branded USB enclosure. SMART looked fine, but it would act up once in a while and I eventually took it to bits. The second one is an ST31000524AS which developed lots of bad sectors. I don't know about you, but I would act like if I saw 1000 reallocations on one of my own drives.

OTOH, I am still using an OLD ST380011A (from an old whitebox from 08/2004; 37,226 hours on the clock) for my, uh, important stuff. If there's any type of abuse that will destroy that thing, I haven't found it. It's heavy too. (At least for a drive with one platter...)

I even had an ST320414A (which wasn't MY old drive) fall about 1m to the floor. (The cat knocked it off. ) When I plugged it in, it worked fine. I was careful enough not to drop the ST380011A - good thing, because that was before I had a backup of anything.

If they really are going downhill, it's sad because they made some ridiculously tough drives in the past. The last generation I feel confident in using for anything important is the 7200.8, maybe the 7200.9.

I thought Seagate to be wonderful in 2005 and before. I have a ST3250824A, which is of the 7200.9 Barracuda series PATA drives. It's a 250GB and it still works nary a problem to this day. S.M.A.R.T. thinks otherwise, seeing 8 reallocations, 9 reported/uncorrected errors and 1 pending/offline uncorrectable sector, but I think that's fine for a drive that has 20,000 hours on it and for a drive that has been power cycled 3,000 times. Judging by the S.M.A.R.T. log, those issue only arose within 19,000 hours of its life. I have some 7200.7 series and ATA IV series drives as well (a ST3160023A, a ST3120026A, and two ST340016As; one of them is in rather exacerbated condition but I think that's because of problems it had with the master boot record a year after I had it, and I also have a few others). They all work fine. Some of them have bad sectors but considering their age (and that they were power cycled twice the amount), I consider that tenable. I think power cycles are harder on drives than power on hours.

My only issue with those drive series (the 7200RPM ones in particular, and other 7200RPM drives of the time from other companies) is how much heat they generate without cooling from a fan, even at idle. Older drives seem to run significantly hotter. Also, the scratching doesn't surprise me - I've never heard good things about Toshiba (who only make portable and mobile drives, to my recollection) and would think them to be the worst of the companies manufacturing HDDs, in spite of HDD quality depending (usually) not so much on the company.

Originally Posted by Shocker

I guess I have two options. Western Digital, or enterprise drives.

I wonder if SSDs could be an alternative now that the floods in Thailand have raked up the prices of HDDs so caustically. We still have to take the read/write cycle limitation into account but outside of that and expenses, I think much more effectual use could be made out of a SSD. And maybe Seagate Barracuda's (and Momentus drives) could last, so long as they are not ordered online (due to the physical woes drives may be subject to with shipping) so long as they are treated very well.

[dood]

Every time a WD Green drive parks its heads, God kills a kitten.

Please, think of the kittens during your next HD purchase.

[Shocker]

Originally Posted by Wester547

I would think something was askew with the media then. Maybe the mechanical subsystem had ado reading it. But I'm certain that spinning up and down a drive often is a far more certain token of death than parking the heads. But perhaps the Caviar Green/Scorpio Blue drives are not suited to head parking perpetually for some reason.

The only two hard drives I've seen with seized spindles were 60GB Maxtor D740X from a server. I think now you know the reason for fluid bearings...

I thought Seagate to be wonderful in 2005 and before. I have a ST3250824A, which is of the 7200.9 Barracuda series PATA drives. It's a 250GB and it still works nary a problem to this day. S.M.A.R.T. thinks otherwise, seeing 8 reallocations, 9 reported/uncorrected errors and 1 pending/offline uncorrectable sector, but I think that's fine for a drive that has 20,000 hours on it and for a drive that has been power cycled 3,000 times. Judging by the S.M.A.R.T. log, those issue only arose within 19,000 hours of its life. I have some 7200.7 series and ATA IV series drives as well (a ST3160023A, a ST3120026A, and two ST340016As; one of them is in rather exacerbated condition but I think that's because of problems it had with the master boot record a year after I had it, and I also have a few others). They all work fine. Some of them have bad sectors but considering their age (and that they were power cycled twice the amount), I consider that tenable.

Mine has 26...

http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowre...ation=A5554B7B

Care is nothing to write home about though.

I think power cycles are harder on drives than power on hours.

Sure, but the motor hardly ever fails (unless it's a ball bearing motor and you leave it on 24/7). What actually goes wrong is either wear at the head/platter interface or misalignment from repeated load/unloading.

My only issue with those drive series (the 7200RPM ones in particular, and other 7200RPM drives of the time from other companies) is how much heat they generate without cooling from a fan, even at idle. Older drives seem to run significantly hotter.

For me, 50°C is good enough.

Also, the scratching doesn't surprise me - I've never heard good things about Toshiba (who only make portable and mobile drives, to my recollection) and would think them to be the worst of the companies manufacturing HDDs, in spite of HDD quality depending (usually) not so much on the company.

I heard somewhere that Toshiba drives in general only have a 1-year warranty. If so, then it doesn't surprise me, either.

I wonder if SSDs could be an alternative now that the floods in Thailand have raked up the prices of HDDs so caustically. We still have to take the read/write cycle limitation into account but outside of that and expenses, I think much more effectual use could be made out of a SSD.

I would consider that, too, if building a new PC using new components. But for me, old hard drives do just fine for stuff that doesn't take up much space.

And maybe Seagate Barracuda's (and Momentus drives) could last, so long as they are not ordered online (due to the physical woes drives may be subject to with shipping) so long as they are treated very well.

Hmm, yeah, perhaps a poorly shipped drive could be subjected to even more shock than a dropped drive.

Oh, and what I said earlier:

I even had an ST320414A (which wasn't MY old drive) fall about 1m to the floor.

To the tile floor, mind you.

But that doesn't mean you'll get away with dropping a drive onto a carpet.

Originally Posted by dood

Every time a WD Green drive parks its heads, God kills a kitten.

Please, think of the kittens during your next HD purchase.

[Wester547]

Originally Posted by Shocker

The only two hard drives I've seen with seized spindles were 60GB Maxtor D740X from a server. I think now you know the reason for fluid bearings...

Well, that's why the ST340016A was such a quiet and long lasting drive. It had a very good, dynamic fluid bearing motor, and because of that it did not develop the high-toned whine WDs of the time tended to with old age. Of course, a drive with a ball bearing motor could still last a while too. It's probably 24/7 use that would make the discrepancy, as stated.

Originally Posted by Shocker

Mine has 26...

http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowre...ation=A5554B7B

Care is nothing to write home about though.

The threshold for the amount of reallocations a Seagate can safely have (judging by S.M.A.R.T. data) is 54, so 26 should still be okay, especially for almost 38,000 hours of use. One of my ST340016As has 50 of them (but hence 291 errors in the S.M.A.R.T. log and 73 data address marker errors), and it has 49 before last September. It's still working alright, and only has 16,000 hours on it by contrast (though it was power cycled 6,000 times). That, and these hard drives have a pool of 256 spare sectors.

Originally Posted by Shocker

Sure, but the motor hardly ever fails (unless it's a ball bearing motor and you leave it on 24/7). What actually goes wrong is either wear at the head/platter interface or misalignment from repeated load/unloading.

I don't contest that, but my point is spinning a drive up and down all the time is very arduous on the spindle motor and will for sure not only curtail its life but the life of the drive (given that spinning up is the most difficult way to task a motor on a HDD). And while I'm not a fan of loading/unloading either, I believe more modern drives are designed to load the heads off the ramp with minimal stress induced, for the sake of both power and heat. In the case of laptops, it's useful when moving it.

Originally Posted by Shocker

For me, 50°C is good enough.

I see that as too hot to be comfortable, even at load. I noticed that drives tend to develop bad sectors easier when kept at 50C or above for sustained periods of use, especially when power cycled.

[Agent24]

Originally Posted by Wester547

Well, that's why the ST340016A was such a quiet and long lasting drive. It had a very good, dynamic fluid bearing motor, and because of that it did not develop the high-toned whine WDs of the time tended to with old age.

My loudest drive is some old 2GB Seagate. Forget the model number but it's pretty old, and looks very different to any other Seagate drive I've seen. Maybe it was a server drive or something, I don't know.

Motor makes a noise like an old fridge, when you listen to it from afar... but it refuses to die.

Originally Posted by Wester547

The threshold for the amount of reallocations a Seagate can safely have (judging by S.M.A.R.T. data) is 54, so 26 should still be okay, especially for almost 38,000 hours of use.

Yeah but when you've already got 26, more will usually follow...

[Wester547]

I don't argue that - that's why 49 changed to 50 on my old drive. :P But I still think the drive will last a while longer.

And a IC35L040AVVN07 I have has a ball bearing motor but lasted 15,000 hours of use (and 5,000 power cycles) just fine - only 6 reallocated sectors, 7 reallocation events, and 1 pending sector (though the pending sector is my fault - it arose after running chkdsk of my own volition), along with 19 S.M.A.R.T. errors (2 being from that run of chkdsk). Not saying drives with ball bearing motors can't last long, I just think fluid bearings would ultimately be more reliable (and more quiet, though the IC35L040AVVN07 is a quiet drive already).

[Agent24]

Running CHKDSK won't cause drive damage, it just ends up reading files (and thus sectors) that otherwise wouldn't often be read and shows up defects.

Those sectors already had issues, you just weren't doing anything with them and therefore didn't know there was an issue with them until you ran CHKDSK and it tried to read\write them.

In saying that though, if a drive is borderline, running intensive programs like CHKDSK can push it over the edge.

[Wester547]

That's what I suspected, but I still worry that the drive will have further issue because of it....

[Agent24]

If you have a backup there's nothing to worry about