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Seagate Quality?

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markjx   10-04-2009 at 09:23:50 PM

Hello Tom's Hardware readers,

This is my first post, so please be gentle. :)

I'm using five Seagate 1.5 TB Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS drives at a customer's site. One died within ~6 weeks. I replaced it. That died with about six weeks. Today, I checked the other four: they are *all* dying.

At another customer site, I'm using about 16 of the same drives. Last week, I started checking them. I've got a stack of eight that are dying. I haven't checked them all yet.

Symptom: Bad Sectors. Seagate has told me that if I see SMART reporting bad sectors, that means that the drive is failing and should be replaced.

All in all, the drives are in probably six different computers: an old Xeon server, new Xeon workstations, Core 2 workstations, and some i7 workstations. So, I don't think it's a controller, power supply, or driver issue. Some drives are in external workstations. Some are direct connected to controllers / mother boards. Others are in hot swap arrays (I love the Kingwin KF-4000!)

Seagate's response is that these drives are meant for "single drive systems", or something like that. Since I'm using them in RAID's, the drives can't handle the vibrations of being next to other drives.

Does anyone have any other experience with these drives? I'm seeing incredible failure rates!

Should I just replace them and hope that the next batch is better? Should I go with a different drive?

I've placed an order for some Barracuda ES.2, and Western Digital RE3 drives. They're much more expensive ($/GB), but maybe they'll be worth it.

I know there are a bunch of smart people on here, so I'm curious to see what you people have to say!

Thanks,

MJ

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paperfox   10-05-2009 at 12:24:40 AM

Overall i think seagate hds are of good quality, exept the 7200.11s, which had that firmware bug. id avoid buying that version even if they said they fixed it, besides the 12s are better.

Your problem is not all that uncommon, about 2 or 3 times a month i read a post here in the fourms about people having mass hard drive failures.
I have heard that you shouldent use regular harddrives in RAID as it causes drive failures. The manufacturers recomends using special "RAID edition" hard drives, so maybe you should look into those.

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mindless728   10-05-2009 at 01:21:23 AM

paperfox wrote :

Overall i think seagate hds are of good quality, exept the 7200.11s, which had that firmware bug. id avoid buying that version even if they said they fixed it, besides the 12s are better.

Your problem is not all that uncommon, about 2 or 3 times a month i read a post here in the fourms about people having mass hard drive failures.
I have heard that you shouldent use regular harddrives in RAID as it causes drive failures. The manufacturers recomends using special "RAID edition" hard drives, so maybe you should look into those.



consumer drives work fine in RAID, its just that some drives time out when using a RAID controller card (not the crappy onboard in the motherboard) which causes them to drop from the array

Reply to mindless728
matt87_50   10-05-2009 at 01:55:51 AM

"Seagate's response is that these drives are meant for "single drive systems", or something like that. Since I'm using them in RAID's, the drives can't handle the vibrations of being next to other drives. "

:O

Thanks for this, I know i'll never buy one now. you were lucky not to have the firmware issues anyway.

Though I do remember seagate drives were sometimes a little pessimistic with their SMART readouts. my 750gig one reports some poor SMART results after heavy use, but its been going fine for a few years now.

Reply to matt87_50
Bronze Storage badge cjl   10-05-2009 at 03:17:50 AM

Honestly, I'd stay away from the 7200.11 drives. Seagate had some major issues with those. The 7200.12 seem pretty good though - they seem to have fixed the issue.

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EXT64   10-05-2009 at 04:48:35 AM

Wow, that is bad. Normally I'd just say bad luck, but that is more so. Are all the drives cooled well? I have a couple Seagates that work great, but I don't use them in any super stressful way. I have gone back to WD now though for their longer warranty. Might be good for you too, just in case you have a hard drive curse :lol:

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randomizer   10-05-2009 at 05:24:54 AM

markjx wrote :

Seagate's response is that these drives are meant for "single drive systems", or something like that. Since I'm using them in RAID's, the drives can't handle the vibrations of being next to other drives.


If you have alot of drives tightly packed in the same drive cage then the amplified rotational vibration might eventually cause a problem. But otherwise they just want you to purchase a (likely) more expensive drive. Many people run RAID arrays with non-"RAID edition" drives with more than 4 together.


Message edited by randomizer on 10-05-2009 at 06:11:30 AM
Reply to randomizer
wuzy   10-05-2009 at 06:09:19 AM

There's a chance it's a defective batch from the same supplier. It's something you'll eventually encounter with any HDD manufacturers when ordering drives for a a large array.

For ST31500341AS in particular there's only been one firmware issue relating to performance which was solved within a few months after initial shipment. This firmware issue is not related to the bricking firmware found in drives like ST31000340AS.

From experience extra measures in vibration prevention is only needed for 24+ drives so vibration is unlikely the cause. This of course assumes a typical heavy duty server chassis was utilitised. 6-8 drives for desktop tower cases is no problem obviously.

Since you're using more than 3 drive in an array I'd say Barracuda ES or WD RE would be more suitable, for the sake of having TLER (although it can be enabled on all WD drives). Besides that the firmware compared to desktop version are almost identical. The higher price of those drives come from 5yr enterprise warranty.

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