Seagate 3TB lawsuit

[Mad_Professor]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

The only system I have that uses RAID for redundancy purpouses is the house's file server (Raid 5 of 3 500GB drives). Not redoing that rig again. The rest use it for performance reasons (RAID 0) and ZFS isn't worth the trouble (as all the important data is on the file server).

Which is why you should be using ZFS.

ZFS is simple.

RAID is outdated and needs to die.
RAID 5 write holes, whole platter resilvers if URE occurs or drive drops out, need to rely on hardware for performance and battery backup cache units to prevent data corruption on power loss. Array migration is difficult especially going to a different controller.
If array fails (unless mirrored), total data loss.
LONG ASS TIME TO RESILVER LARGE DRIVES.
It was cool in the 90's, time for it to die.

ZFS
Does not have raid 5 write hole.
Triple redundancy available.
If array fails, data is not 100% loss, you can force the drives back in array and retrieve data and it will tell you exactly which files or directories suffer loss or corruption.
Does not rely on hardware specific controllers, makes migration to a new hardware simple.
On power loss, zfs is copy-on write. Unless you deviate from standard configuration or use crappy hard-drives that don't obey flush requests or lie and say data has been written, you shouldn't have any data loss.
If a drive hits URE and times out, ZFS will wait for the drive to dropout and come back before re-inserting it into array. On the next read or scrub if corruption is found zfs will attempt to correct it and log it, if it's unable it will tell you, and if the array suffer data loss because of it, it will tell you which file or directory is corrupt.
It can use SSD for cache or log or both.
It uses a lot of ram ( this can be tweaked)
Can only use up to a recommended maximum of 11-16 drives per vdev but can have multiple vdevs in array and multiple arrays.
Good performance trade-off for redundancy and reliability.
ECC ram is a must.
LONG ASS TIME TO RESILVER LARGE DRIVES, but only for replacement disks.

But I can understand if data on your fileserver is not important enough and/or you have backups.

[Topcat]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I'll stick with RAID1 and RAID10 arrays. If you don't use crap controllers or cheesy software RAID's, migrations are easy. never had an issue, been an avid user of them since the SCSI2 days. RAID0 and RAID5 OTOH, I'll pass. RAID will never die....it will always be a good form of redundancy and will always kills bugs dead. I agree whole heartedly that it is NOT a form of backup though. Backup is a realm of its own.

[ratdude747]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I forgot to mention that the file server uses a BBU'd Dell PERC/5i card. It came with 3HDDs so RAID5 made the most sense (as it's mainly used for referencing files).

[fzabkar]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Also had a couple IDE Quantum Fireballs catch fire. Big IC on the bottom would randomly just start burning.

That would have been the motor controller. It was a common problem in those drives.

[fzabkar]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I doubt it. I once had a samsung 1TB 2.5" drive that was made post-merger; it was a 100% seagate drive (seagate-like model number too).

The drive that is the subject of the law suit is based on Seagate's F3 architecture, not Samsung F3. The post-merger Maxtors were also based on Seagate's F3 firmware. Seagate's recent problems started with the disastrous 7200.11 models. Their 4TB and 6TB drives seem to have turned the corner, though, if Backblaze's stats are to be believed.

BTW, the post-merger 2.5" drives were really Samsungs, despite the Seagate-like model number. The part number would have been Samsung's, as would the firmware and PCB layout. Recent models are a bit of a blur, though.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Wish i could say the same.... all my 250gb WD enterprise drives dropped sectors like flys!

Sounds like the problem Western Digital had back in the late-1990s, where their 1 GBs seemed to have sectors drop like flies!

1996s are possibly the worst.

2000s Western Digitals are more reliable, I found... (likely the same with the 2010s as well)

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I doubt it. I once had a samsung 1TB 2.5" drive that was made post-merger; it was a 100% seagate drive (seagate-like model number too).

Just like Maxtor after 2006!

Maxtor was my favorite HDD company before Seagate bought them! Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006.

The 2005 Maxtors rocked! Just like the badcaps.net business did the same year! Thus, I somewhat miss 2005, LOL.

The last Maxtor HDD I bought was on June 2, 2005.

2005 was also when I downloaded Ubuntu on 56K, LOL.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

yea i also used to like maxtor in the past. i didnt do my research properly and thought their drives were cheap and good having had 4 maxtor drives, two 40gb drives, one 160gb and one 250gb. never had one fail on me at least not thru carelessness. was a nub back then and i didnt mount the drive properly to the chassis and left it hanging around. needless to say the drive didnt last long improperly mounted.

didnt realise a number of ppl were complaining maxtor drives in general were crash prone until sometime later. by then it was too late, i had 4 drives... sold them off over the years as i had 500gb ide drives to replace them. only have the 160gb left.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

yea i also used to like maxtor in the past. i didnt do my research properly and thought their drives were cheap and good having had 4 maxtor drives, two 40gb drives, one 160gb and one 250gb. never had one fail on me at least not thru carelessness. was a nub back then and i didnt mount the drive properly to the chassis and left it hanging around. needless to say the drive didnt last long improperly mounted.

didnt realise a number of ppl were complaining maxtor drives in general were crash prone until sometime later. by then it was too late, i had 4 drives... sold them off over the years as i had 500gb ide drives to replace them. only have the 160gb left.

It's only the Diamond Max 8 series that sucked! (The slim ones)

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

In the old corporation I used to work for, Deposit Computer Services, Inc, back in 2005, we had a flood. The main building got more than 6 foot of water! We tried getting all the computers out but when it got to our necks, we bailed. After the water left, we went back in and grabbed a bunch of the more important PCs (managers, etc) that we couldn't get to. Every single Seagate hard drive had water in it. Almost all the Western Digital didn't. We'd shake the drive, if we heard water, we'd throw it. If we didn't hear water, we'd plug them into an USB external and see if it smoked. If it did, we tried copying the data. Almost all the WD's we got the data off.

I was soooo surprised Seagates had all the water. I mean, they got the word Sea in their name. I figured if anything, they'd be the most waterproof!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

It's only the Diamond Max 8 series that sucked! (The slim ones)

i remember my 160gb and 250gb were diamondmax plus 9 and diamondmax 10 respectively. cant remember what the two 40gbs were tho... i think they might be diamondmax 7 as i remember skipping a series between the 2 high capacity drives that required 48-bit lba to recognise the full capacity and the other two that werent. so i unknowingly skipped the bad series! lucky me!

In the old corporation I used to work for, Deposit Computer Services, Inc, back in 2005, we had a flood. The main building got more than 6 foot of water! We tried getting all the computers out but when it got to our necks, we bailed. After the water left, we went back in and grabbed a bunch of the more important PCs (managers, etc) that we couldn't get to. Every single Seagate hard drive had water in it. Almost all the Western Digital didn't.

thank you very muich for the expose on seagate. so it seems apparently the hydrophobic foam filters in their drives are broken and it does not work as intended, if they even actually intended to use hydrophobic foam filters in the first place... im guessing seagate is in with the chinese cost cutting techniques so they used cheap ordinary form instead of the more costly hydrophobic foam. busted!

if we heard water, we'd throw it.

are u sure thats a wise course of action? if it had sensitive data in it, u probably should have *destructively* destroyed the drive. giant electromagnet works nice... or topcat's/ratdude's method with the shotgun target practice works too...

I was soooo surprised Seagates had all the water. I mean, they got the word Sea in their name. I figured if anything, they'd be the most waterproof!

now thats the irony in their name! looks like their sea blocking gate at keeping the seawater out did not work! booooo! this is why u dont buy drives from a company that doesnt live up to its name!

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

I don't know if it was a wise course or not. I mean, with water inside of them, it'd be awful hard to get data back I'd think. I don't know what they did with the actual hard drives. I wasn't in charge of that part. They could have brought in one of those companies that grind up the hard drives with those giant blade things. Those things are kind of cool.

I think even with magnets, if someone wanted to get stuff back hard enough, they still might have a chance. Don't quote me on that. But I almost remember something in college how the only truly safe way is to physically destroy the drive. The NSA I think writes over the data 7 times before they consider to be securely wiped. I want to say the professor I had said something like writing over the data once or something wasn't enough. With something like 200,000$ worth of equipment, really really smart people could recover the data. What do you guys think? Is it possible or no?

[fzabkar]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

The professionals at the data recovery forums seem to agree that recovering data fom an erased drive is impossible, even by highly resourced government agencies. People often cite a demonstration by Gutmann, but that was done way back in 1996:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method

BTW, many implementations of the ATA Secure Erase Unit command are buggy. Also, many devices do not support the Enhanced version of this command.

https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...79eb060c40.pdf

[Stefan Payne]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Hard drives die. All of them. Some last longer then others bit I've had a WD black die on its second day out of its wrapper.
Anyone who isn't backing up their important data should be.
RAID is not backup.

Yeah, agree with that...

I've ordered two drives a couple of times and there was always one drive bad...
And one order was two 2TB Hitachis (5900rpm ones), one was two 4TB WD Green...
Buying 7200rpm drives doesn't make that much sense these days...

But back to the failure rates of that Blazething:

AFAIR there was a problem with their case and...
And that's why I hope this class action lawsuit fails...

The older case they used did not decouple the harddrives at all or much.
So there was a lot of 'good vibrations' going on.

And as we all know, harddrives don't like vibrations that much and may fail a little bit sooner if they have to endure it over a long period of time.

So the drives aren't neccessarily that bad, it could also be Blackblazes fault for the drives failing!

[fzabkar]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

So the drives aren't neccessarily that bad, it could also be Blackblazes fault for the drives failing!

Visit HDD Guru. The data recovery professionals will tell you that the DM series is extremely unreliable under any usage conditions.

Seagate would be best advised to find a judge who is technically illiterate. They're very common over here (we have one who doesn't know how to send an email).

[psychophat]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Two decades ago my Seagate literally burned, board partially melted after a lightning strike which spiked the line. After that I switched to WD > WD Black > WD Black Re . . . nearly another decade and still on a happy streak.

[shovenose]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Two decades ago my Seagate literally burned, board partially melted after a lightning strike which spiked the line. After that I switched to WD > WD Black > WD Black Re . . . nearly another decade and still on a happy streak.

The first (2?) generations of WD Black drives were underperforming, unreliable garbage. WD RE4 is very solid, but they're only SATA II even though SATA III was out for a long time at that point. Now they've been replaced with WD RE (SAS) and WD SE (SATA).

[fzabkar]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

WD's engineers have only recently discovered how a fuse works.

Catastrophic failures in Western Digital PCBs:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.p...&t=1119&p=5033

[shovenose]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

Buying 7200rpm drives doesn't make that much sense these days...

explain

[diif]

Re: Seagate 3TB lawsuit

The Backblaze stats are out for 2015. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...ility-q4-2015/