Beware of Seagate Drives - Defective drives "Normal"

[luudee]

I have recently purchased 7 Seagate ST31500341AS with
the latest firmware (as verified by their web site and
tech support).

Here is an expert of my email exchange with Seagate Tech
support:

"I immediately noticed very poor system performance. After
the RAID finished initializing, I checked the drive status,
and found that all 7 drives had very large amounts of errors.

Searching your web site, I found a notice that says some
drives may be having problems. None of the serial numbers
for my drives appear to be in the problem list.

However, as you can see from the SMART report below, in
the 48 hours of operation, each drive encountered over 100
Million Raw Read errors, and over 2.8 Million of seek errors.
I am sure this is not a normal case."

Seagate offers to replace the drives, but refuses to give
me a refund so that I can purchase other drives. From what
I have read here and on other forums (unfortunately to late),
no Seagate 1.5TB drive will work ...

(These drives are all CC1H Firmware).

luudee

[redclawkefar]

so, on your "RAW READ ERROR RATE"... from wikipedia S.M.A.R.T. Page:

Note that Seagate drives often report a raw value that is very high even on new drives, and does not thereby indicate a failure.

my Seagates, of which i have 23 in 3x N5200's and 1x N8800 all have RRER's that look like this number: 167545736

they work fine and have Power on hours in the 4000-5000 range.

just thought i'd share.

[dpankros]

I had eight of 8 drives, but within 30 days 6 or 7 had started building up reallocated sectors and one outright failed. I returned them all and replaced them with non-seagate alternatives (Thank you, Newegg). So far I have no reallocated sectors on the new drives.

I can't have network storage that is of questionable reliability.

I personally would not recommend the Seagate 7200.11 series but, of course, YMMV.

Dave

[msx8280]

1.5T seagate drives are just a lost case.
Don't even bother. Eventually you will get errors and at some point loss of data, so keep away!!!

[peterfu]

I had eight of 8 drives, but within 30 days 6 or 7 had started building up reallocated sectors and one outright failed. I returned them all and replaced them with non-seagate alternatives (Thank you, Newegg). So far I have no reallocated sectors on the new drives.

I can't have network storage that is of questionable reliability.

I personally would not recommend the Seagate 7200.11 series but, of course, YMMV.

Dave

May I ask with what type of harddisc You have replaced the Seagates ?
br
Peter

[dpankros]

May I ask with what type of harddisc You have replaced the Seagates ?
br
Peter

I used the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB drives. There are two series one is the "RAID Class" (i.e. enterprise class) which is certified by Thecus, the other is more of a consumer-level drive. The performance is nearly the same, according to Tom's Hardware and, after some research, there is only one difference in features, I think. I opted for the consumer-level drive for half the cost. (about $99 at newegg, IIRC) I really wish I had the extra 1/2 TB capacity but, in the big picture, reliability is just too important for me to ignore.

So far, so far I've had zero errors. I'm now confident enough to replace our old NAS with the Thecus unit. The new n8800 beta firmware seems pretty good too.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

Dave

[luudee]

so, on your "RAW READ ERROR RATE"... from wikipedia S.M.A.R.T. Page:

my Seagates, of which i have 23 in 3x N5200's and 1x N8800 all have RRER's that look like this number: 167545736

they work fine and have Power on hours in the 4000-5000 range.

just thought i'd share.

Yes, I hear that a lot. In my opinion, the RRER DOES matter. I
suggest you pull a drive and do a performance test of the drive.
I bet, you will see it's throughput rate (read only) around
10MB/s. A healthy drive should be around 88MB/s.

Also, get Seagates own drive diagnostic utilities ("saetools").
Run the SMART and "Long DST". I bet both fail, even-though you
are convinced the drives are "healthy"

Also, please remember that Wiki is written by ordinary people
like you and me. I can log-in and write up all kinds of things
about anything, without having real proof. Unless someone from
Seagate (official rep) can tell me that RRER and all the other
items are irrelevant, I will not believe that.

I also have 4x 1T Seagate drives and 4x 250G Seagate drives,
all of those show RRER as zero.

Cheers,
rudi

[PauLita]

I bet, you will see it's throughput rate (read only) around
10MB/s. A healthy drive should be around 88MB/s.