Hitachi 2TB Harddrive Owner's Thread

I bought my 3 in early December when Tigerdirect had them on the cheap (with visa card rebates) so I'm passed my 30 days. Like i posted a few weeks back, i had one drive (can't remember which one unfortunately) drop from the array in late January, but I think it was a bad power cable. I replaced it, rebuilt the array and then it was smooth sailing for almost 3 weeks. The array would verify and complete everyday with no issues. Then about a week ago, I started getting about 2-3 of these "warning" messages each day during the auto-verify. I'll call myself "intermediate" in this technology so i came here looking for help. I know how to go run some of these utilities for example, but i'm green on when to worry and when to do what. i'm just looking to learn from the labor of others so I don't toast my "mission critical" cartoon collection.
 
Look what showed up today. :D

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What's that, a 24-pack? The plastic spacer at the bottom (and top I'm assuming) looks interesting... Looks like it's one piece, or two, guess the seller tends to sell HDDs in bulk fairly often. :p
 
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20 pack. The packaging is just standard Hitachi bulk drive packaging. It prevents the drives from moving or being crushed.
 
I meant to say 24 before, I was close, heh... Didn't realize Hitachi itself had packaging like that, if only OEM drives from online stores came packaged so well (Newegg we're looking at you :rolleyes: ).
 
Buy 20 and you'll probably get a box like that. WD's bulk packaging is similar (styrofoam instead of plastic though), but I haven't seen Seagate's or Samsung's in a while, so I'm not sure what they look like.
 
Used to be you'd get decent packaging even w/single drives tho... I've got several lil' boxes/pieces like that from drives I ordered years ago (160GB etc.), now you're lucky if you get an air bag on either side and it's properly wrapped in more than a single layer of foam paper...
 
I've received Seagate drives in a 20 slot soft foam housing, as of ~15 months ago
 
Yeah, I now have two of that style of box. I keep 'em for when I move...
 
If you ever need a spare, I can always get one for you from work. They just throw them out after receiving shipments.
 
I get them for free. :D
Unfortunately it kinda only applies to nitrobass as he is local to me...
 
Apart from the 2 dead drives I received (which I've already replaced), so far so good. Nice and fast in RAID 6. They don't run as hot as I imagined they would either!

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FWIW, Buy.com ships their drives in the same type of foam surrounded packaging. I ordered 5 from them and they came very well cushioned in a similar box. It was a nice surprise.
 
Too bad, it appears you are maxing out the speed on your raid controller and/or PCI-E interface. With 20 drives in RAID-6, I wouldn't have been surprised if you had hit twice that speed and achieved an average read speed of ~1600 MB/s.

Did you consider making two 10 drive arrays instead to see if you can get 800MB/s from each?
 
Has nothing to do with PCI-E. It's a STP (sas tunneling protocol) limitation he's running into. With newer SAS-2 cards like the Areca 1880 series we should see that bottleneck opened up.
 
The RAID array is now 50% full, so I can't do that unfortunately. I imagine it is very similar to the read speeds however.
 
Too late now as the drive has been formatted, but I have no doubt that it can do 800MB/s as well.

Edit: Doh, beaten by a second.
 
Back to $139.99 at Frys.com and Fry's retail stores 3/5 thru 3/11. Limit 2 per customer. Just picked up 8 more (brought a friend and they rang them up separately 2 at a time).
 
odditory said:
Back to $139.99 at Frys.com and Fry's retail stores 3/5 thru 3/11. Limit 2 per customer. Just picked up 8 more (brought a friend and they rang them up separately 2 at a time).
Click to expand...

Saw the same ad in my newspaper today. With tax in California that works out to $152.24, which matches the best internet prices at the moment. This weekend I plan to pick-up four or possibly six, since I'm down to as low as 1% free space on some of my drives. Four would go in a RAID-5 array, replacing the 500GB drives, and an additional two could possibly replace my older 7K1000 drives. Now if Fry's has a deal on external enclosures, I'm all set.
 
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Yeah it's not QUITE the steal they were the last week of December ($129 + tax = around $142) but heck for $150 for 2Tb these are good times in magnetic storage prices and a lot of people seem to take it for granted. I've now got 52 of these drives- woot!
 
52!? :eek:

A cool ~$7500 on hard drives alone in less than a year. I wish I had the kind of income to be able to afford that...

If I may ask, how do you have them set up?
Massive RAID-6? WHS? Single Drives? What SATA/RAID controller(s)?

Hard drives really are dirt cheap though. I mean back in '05 my two 7K500 went for $360 apiece, in 07 my two 7K1000 went for $260 apiece, and in '10 we have 7K2000 for ~$160 apiece. What's next, 4TB 7K4000 drives for $60 in 2012? :p

It really makes you wonder how anybody could complain about lack of storage space, with HDD prices like they are today.
 
They're not just for home/hobby use and they generate income, so price wasn't a big deal. That and the fact I've been selling my 1Tb's drives on ebay and breaking even for what I've been buying 2Tb Hitachi's for. This is kind of a unique point in time we're at because historically you couldn't really sell say a couple of 500Gb drives and buy a 1Tb drive and still break even. When I look at graphs it seems like 1Tb's have been holding their value at the $75-$80 pricepoint - even USED - while 2Tb's have only been going down.
 
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Wish all my servers and storage made me money. Fortunately unlike say video cards, hard drives, and especially Areca cards hold their value well.
 
Just a quick update to those of you that threw me some help. i ran my new drive through the Advanced Test and it passed so I swapped it out with the one that was giving me trouble. Long story short, the mobo wouldn't even recognize it - i could never get the Hitachi tools to see it either. I went back to the machine where the RAID was running and looked at the 3ware logs. It looks like the drive dropped last night during the verify. I'm 50% rebuilt and have an open RMA started. Has anyone had to RMA with Hitachi before? I'm wondering how quick it is and whether they send refurb drives or new ones as replacements.
 
I ordered the Hitachi drive in December 2009. The first drive was dead on arrival (didn't spin up, not recognized in BIOS). I then got a replacement drive that seemed to work better.

However, after only 40 hours of usage I got the first corrupted sector. Now at 180 hours life time I already have a reallocated sector count of > 400 and the drive randomly disappears/dismounts when writing data to it. The Hitachi drive fitness test still seems to think the drive is good though :rolleyes:

Well. I'm sending this drive back as well but I also ordered a Non-Hitachi replacement...

Having two new drives fail never happened to me before, not sure if there could possibly be something wrong with my pc that kills the Hitachi drives. But the other 3 drives in that pc work just fine.

I got the replacement for the first drive via the vendor (scan.co.uk) within about a week, not directly from Hitachi, so I can't really comment on how long an RMA with Hitachi takes.

EDIT: I'm kinda trying to make this drive fail the Hitachi fitness test by Monday so that I won't have any problems returning it. I currently simply write random data to it (using "cat /dev/random > file"), which seems to reliably increase the reallocated sector count. How many spare sectors are in the Hitachi drive? Or is there a better way to make sure the RMA is accepted?

This is what smartctl says:

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 098 098 016 Pre-fail Always - 262144
2 Throughput_Performance 0x0005 133 133 054 Pre-fail Offline - 100
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 119 119 024 Pre-fail Always - 605 (Average 612)
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 40
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 083 083 005 Pre-fail Always - 485
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 099 099 067 Pre-fail Always - 1
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0005 105 105 020 Pre-fail Offline - 42
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 183
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 060 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 23
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1946
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1946
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0002 230 230 000 Old_age Always - 26 (Lifetime Min/Max 13/35)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 076 076 000 Old_age Always - 607
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 2
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0008 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x000a 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
============

and errors reported by smartctl look like:

=============
Error 93 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 62 hours (2 days + 14 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
40 59 01 e8 18 68 00 Error: UNC at LBA = 0x006818e8 = 6822120

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------
24 00 01 e8 18 68 e0 00 16d+00:30:54.422 READ SECTOR(S) EXT
24 00 01 e7 18 68 e0 00 16d+00:30:54.420 READ SECTOR(S) EXT
34 00 01 e7 18 68 e0 00 16d+00:30:54.419 WRITE SECTORS(S) EXT
c2 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 16d+00:30:54.418 [VENDOR SPECIFIC]
fa ac 00 00 00 00 a0 00 16d+00:30:54.417 [VENDOR SPECIFIC]
=================
 
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joshnerl said:
Has anyone had to RMA with Hitachi before? I'm wondering how quick it is and whether they send refurb drives or new ones as replacements.
Click to expand...
Back in 2008 I did an Advance Replacement RMA with a Hitachi 7K500 and I received a refurbished drive in return. Still, all that says it is refurbished is a tiny sticker which could easily be peeled on and off. I wouldn't be surprised if occasionally Hitachi just takes a new drive, puts a refurbished sticker on it (for the sake of consistency) and ships it out. After all, if there are no refurbished drives in stock, they have to ship you something back. As for how long it took, my memory fails me.

Cyberbeing said:
This weekend I plan to pick-up four or possibly six, since I'm down to as low as 1% free space on some of my drives. Four would go in a RAID-5 array, replacing the 500GB drives, and an additional two could possibly replace my older 7K1000 drives.
Click to expand...
Ended up buying only four at Fry's. If I decide to by more, Amazon.com at the moment is selling them for a similar price @ $149.99 (no tax in California /w free shipping).

This is going to be a fun little maneuver which would have been so much easier if I bought six 7K2000 at Fry's, oh well...
Back-up 1.5TB RAID-5 (4x500GB) on one of the 2TB Hitachi drives.
Create a 4TB RAID-5 (3x2000GB) with the other three 2TB Hitachi drives.
Copy my nearly full 3TB RAID-5 (4x1000GB) to my new 4TB RAID-5.
Copy my backed-up 1.5TB RAID-5 to my 3TB RAID-5.
Once complete, add the last 2TB Hitachi to the RAID-5, expanding the capacity to 6TB (4x2000GB).

Anybody familar with 3ware cards?
Is creating a three drive RAID-5, adding data without initializing, expanding to a four drive RAID-5, and only then initializing possible?
Or do you have to create a three drive RAID-5, add data and initialize the three drive RAID-5, expand to a four drive RAID-5, and initialize a second time?

The latter sounds safer, but the former would take considerably less time if possible.

Basically, after adding data to an uninitialized RAID-5, am I then forced to initialize it before adding another drive and expanding the RAID-5?
 
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Cyberbeing said:
Back in 2008 I did an Advance Replacement RMA with a Hitachi 7K500 and I received a refurbished drive in return. Still, all that says it is refurbished is a tiny sticker which could easily be peeled on and off. I wouldn't be surprised if occasionally Hitachi just takes a new drive, puts a refurbished sticker on it (for the sake of consistency) and ships it out. After all, if there are no refurbished drives in stock, they have to ship you something back. As for how long it took, my memory fails me.


Ended up buying only four at Fry's. If I decide to by more, Amazon.com at the moment is selling them for a similar price @ $149.99 (no tax in California /w free shipping).

This is going to be a fun little maneuver which would have been so much easier if I bought six 7K2000 at Fry's, oh well...
Back-up 1.5TB RAID-5 (4x500GB) on one of the 2TB Hitachi drives.
Create a 4TB RAID-5 (3x2000GB) with the other three 2TB Hitachi drives.
Copy my nearly full 3TB RAID-5 (4x1000GB) to my new 4TB RAID-5.
Copy my backed-up 1.5TB RAID-5 to my 3TB RAID-5.
Once complete, add the last 2TB Hitachi to the RAID-5, expanding the capacity to 6TB (4x2000GB).

Anybody familar with 3ware cards?
Is creating a three drive RAID-5, adding data without initializing, expanding to a four drive RAID-5, and only then initializing possible?
Or do you have to create a three drive RAID-5, add data and initialize the three drive RAID-5, expand to a four drive RAID-5, and initialize a second time?

The latter sounds safer, but the former would take considerably less time if possible.

Basically, after adding data to an uninitialized RAID-5, am I then forced to initialize it before adding another drive and expanding the RAID-5?
Click to expand...

how would you add data to an initialized array?
 
OmegaAvenger said:
how would you add data to an initialized array?
Click to expand...
Is that a trick question? You add data to an initialized array just like you would an uninitialized array, so I'm a bit confused by your question.

After a bit of searching I came across a post made in 2008, from a user claiming that the 3ware driver won't let you add a drive to expand an array which is uninitialized. If you try to continue, it initializes the original array first, before proceeding to expand the array with the newly added drive(s). Unless something has changed in the past couple years (which is possible since LSI took over and re-worked the drivers), I guess that is just how it is.

Since the above appears to be the case, I went ahead and started the initialization process ~2 hours ago and it is already at 33%, which suggests I'm looking at ~6 hours total before initialization on the three drive array completes. Not as bad as I feared.
 
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Cyberbeing said:
Is that a trick question? You add data to an initialized array just like you would an uninitialized array, so I'm a bit confused by your question.

After a bit of searching I came across a post made in 2008, from a user claiming that the 3ware driver won't let you add a drive to expand an array which is uninitialized. If you try to continue, it initializes the original array first, before proceeding to expand the array with the newly added drive(s). Unless something has changed in the past couple years (which is possible since LSI took over and re-worked the drivers), I guess that is just how it is.

Since the above appears to be the case, I went ahead and started the initialization process ~2 hours ago and it is already at 33%, which suggests I'm looking at ~6 hours total before initialization on the three drive array completes. Not as bad as I feared.
Click to expand...


I mean uninitialized, sorry. It was late, I was tired. I thought uninitialized meant the array wasn't in operation. Hence inaccessible. I know you cant even access single drives in windows if they aren't initialized. Which is why I asked. All the real RAID controllers I have any experience actually using were old SCSI based ones.
 
Just an FYI - Microcenter has these drives for $129 each today for those of you close to them. No rebates, no gift cards. The website shows them as 16mb cache and with the older "white" box, but I picked one up last week and it's the 32mb "red" box drive.
 
odditory said:
Back to $139.99 at Frys.com and Fry's retail stores 3/5 thru 3/11. Limit 2 per customer. Just picked up 8 more (brought a friend and they rang them up separately 2 at a time).
Click to expand...

MicroCenter B&M $129.99 starting today!
 
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