Seagate 3TB Hard Drive Woes

wyliec2 · Feb 17, 2016

I suppose the easy answer is my two Seagate 3 TB drives (ST3000DM001) are toast. I had them in a RAID 1 mirror array and kept losing redundancy - I never actually lost data. In Event Viewer one of them was reporting Disk errors.

These two drives are from the 2012-2013 timeframe when it appears there was a bad run of Seagates that fail at an abnormal rate.

Anyway I was expecting one bad drive - when running Seatools I can run several tests successfully on both drives:
* Overwrite full (6-7 hours each drive) passes.
* Generic Short and Long (6-7 hours each drive) passes.
* Fix All (8 hours each drive) passes.
* S.M.A.R.T info shows GOOD

The other major test fails quickly on BOTH drives - the SCT Write Same Erase fail on both drives - not instantly but within 5 minutes.

In searching I cannot find any information about this specific test and throughout all of these tests no further errors are logged in Event Viewer.

CrystalDiskInfo shows both drives good.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

firefoxx04 · Feb 17, 2016

I personally use Disk Checkup http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

I would just stay away from those drives. Replace them but keep your data on them "just encase".

I am more paranoid than most though. My data is stored on my file server and then mirrored onto a linux server running ZFS + weekly snapshots. You can never be too safe I guess.

photonboy · Feb 17, 2016

They may continue to work fine, so it's hard to say.

Not all tests indicate impending doom, though I had the same exact model and it gave me warning signs of issues a few months before dying completely.

I'd suggest sticking with your RAID1 solution. It sounds like you STOPPED that due to the redundancy so maybe investigate why that happened. Perhaps you need a different RAID solution. If software, switch to hardware (will lose all current data though). Maybe even an inexpensive RAID card.

Another solution is to use something like SYNCBACKSE FREE edition.

The above is not RAID, it simply scans folders and makes changes to the destination. For example, you could set the entire "E" drive as source and "F" drive as destination and tell it to BACKUP (if you add a file, it scans say once daily, then automatically copies that file).

This software solution will also tell you if it has issues reading and writing. I doubt it's perfect because that requires bit-level read/write (though RAID won't do that either on a regular basis).

Or...
Use a program like Acronis True Image to:
a) make a backup IMAGE of your C-drive (Windows etc), and

b) make a backup IMAGE of one of your 3TB HDD's (if it's a different drive).

Both images can be set to be VALIDATED automatically (I do backup/validate once a week). You should have space left over on the 2nd 3TB HDD even after both backups since the data is compressed.

If one of the 3TB HDD's fails you'll have some indication of that so you can replace and then make backups again.

smorizio · Feb 17, 2016

one thing also to check see if both drives has the same firmware. sometime two drive with two deiffrent firmwares on the same raid can act strange.

photonboy · Feb 17, 2016

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/

I guess that's my top advice for now. Don't replace the drives. Why? If one of them fails you'll have a backup. So perhaps something like THIS:

Drive #1: SSD - Windows, apps etc

Drive #2: 3TB HDD - Steam games, downloads etc.

Dive #3: 3TB HDD - (backup Images of Drive#1 and Drive#2)

*You will have to look carefully at the SPACE you need and automate what to do if you run out. You can for example set to Incremental and delete chains older than a certain number of delete based on how much SPACE is used. It's a bit confusing at first.

You can COMPRESS (I'd use 2nd highest as the highest doesn't do much but takes a lot longer) to save space, but then adding more backup copies eats up space. Again though, you can figure out how to AUTOMATE this completely.

You will get e-mail notifications to indicated success or failure (as well as popups).

wyliec2 · Feb 17, 2016

Thanks for the comments!!

Actually I don't have any data on these drives at present - the various tests have zeroed/written data over 100% of both drives (and both passed).

These are in a small server with a separate OS drive that is fine. I have a new server that has all of my data on it.

I am planning to sell this server, obviously I'd like to sell it with at least one 3 TB drive. I won't include them if I know they are bad - it's just this one test failing out of a everything I've used that passed - it almost seems like the test itself is buggy. I'd try this test on some WD Red drives I have but this 'advanced' test is only available for Seagate drives.

I am copying data onto the drives - 2.71 Tb of data onto the 2.72 Tb of formatted space available. I'll see if any errors show up in this process.

I'll also check out the passmark option.

Thanks again!!

photonboy · Feb 20, 2016

wyliec2 :

Just run the appropriate diagnostics, some of which REPAIR errors. So you may have to repair problems and run the testing again to confirm everything:
http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/support-content/downloads/seatools/en-us/seatools-for-windows-en-us.pdf

Read the part about using the BOOTABLE environment to fix bad sectors via Long Test.

I'm no expert, but perhaps do:
1) Full erase (bootable)
2) Long Test (bootable)
3) DST (Windows)
4) LST (Windows)

I've had weird issues that a full erase fixed before, but I'm no drive expert. Then as said the Long Test in bootable (I assume similar to Checkdisk) can fix bad sectors, and finally run a quick DST then LST to confirm operation in Windows.

wyliec2 · Feb 20, 2016

photonboy :

I have run full erase and long fix multiple times successfully. I have copied 2.71 Tb of data to these drives and done long generic read tests that passed. All the S.M.A.R.T analysis programs show all parameters as 'OK'. It's just the one SeaTools SCT Write Same Erase that fails consistently. I put these drives back into a mirrored RAID 1 configuration and wrote the 2.71 Tb of data to them without issue. I'm doing a full format of the mirrored partition now. I believe there was an initial problem that the full erase and long fix all processes resolved. I think the SeaTools SCT Write Same Erase fails are an unexplained anomaly - everything else (including all of the other SeaTools diagnostics) say the drives are OK.....

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