Some questions about Seagate 3TB hard drives

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GodOfGaming

Limp Gawd
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Apr 9, 2012
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Hello,

I want to buy five hard drives for my new PC, and I have my eyes on Seagate ST3000DM001 (3TB), with which I would be able to get 15 TB of space from 5 partitions of 3TB each?

My motherboard is Gigabyte Z77X UP7, and I'd like to know how hard would it be to get them to work. 4 of them will be storage only, the fifth will be a boot drive for Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and doubling as more storage. I will not be getting an SSD for that. Instead I will use the full capacity of 3TB for a single partition that will host my Win7 installation.

Basically, I want to ask if I can do that and how hard it would be. From all the googling I've done, what I understand is hard drives above 2TB are a pain in the a** to get working, especially as boot drives. The biggest drive I've used so far is only 1TB, so I have no idea what to expect.

Just as a side question, would I also be able to install Windows XP Proffesional SP3 32-bit on another one of these drives, or getting XP to work on a 3TB partition is a no-go?

And, a final question, what's the durability on these drives? How long can I expect them to last, approximately? And would they last longer if I leave them running 24/7, or if I turn the PC off when I go to sleep?

Thanks for your help in advance!
 
I had 5 out of 5 of these drives fail.

The best part is that they failed 14 and 15 months after purchase, the purchase made with a 2 year warranty, but Seagate doesn't honor the warranty since they left the Seagate factory more than 2 years ago.

They are absolute garbage in my opinion. And I had a previous array that I built around Seagates, using 1 TB disks, used the ES.2 disks, where I payed extra money for what Seagate calls enterprise drives. The careful observer knows where this is going, with Seagate actively misleading the public about the ES.2 firmware bug that would brick your drives.

I know some here still run Seagates successfully but I think that's going to change in the next 12 months or so.
 
GodOfGaming said:
From all the googling I've done, what I understand is hard drives above 2TB are a pain in the a** to get working, especially as boot drives. The biggest drive I've used so far is only 1TB, so I have no idea what to expect.
Click to expand...

How so? The 3TB drives I have had no issues to get working. I can't speak of using them as boot drives, but have had no issues in windows and FreeBSD.

I can't speak to the quality of these drives, though I do have a single Seagate external that has been fine so far. It's a backup drive though and doesn't see full-time use. I think drive quality in general these days has gone severely downhill, so having good backups is key.
 
As far as I'm aware of, hard drives die of mechanical failures that happen by chance, and the chance is lower the less moving parts there are. These drives have 1TB platters, which I think should mean of all 3TB drives these are the safest to own? Also they are definitely the cheapest, at only 106 euro each (the 3-year warranty version). If not these, then which ones? WD Black have 5-year warranty, but they are a lot more expensive, and actually I've seen much more complaints of dead drives with them....
 
those external hitachi touro pro 4tbs are $159 a pop and i havent had any fail yet.. Ive got 24 loaded in various backup servers.
 
I've had 1 of 8 of these drives fail. sent it in for warranty and order a western digital red to replace the dead drive. Using seagate as hot spare.
 
GodOfGaming said:
Just as a side question, would I also be able to install Windows XP Proffesional SP3 32-bit on another one of these drives, or getting XP to work on a 3TB partition is a no-go?
Click to expand...


Windows XP 32bit will not boot off of a 3TB drive.

But you have a 1TB drive you can install Windows XP 32bit on and that will work. You can access the data on the 3TB drives.
 
Yeah, I kind of gave up on XP, I had a few reasons why I needed it but I don't have them anymore.

Right now what I want is to pack my HAF X full of hard drive space. I have 5 HDD slots if I don't use the hotswap bays. What I'm gonna put in them? FIrstly, games. LOTS of games, new and old. Going all the way back to 1985 games, actually :D And I want them all installed and ready to launch at moment's notice. Also lossless music, and movie and anime BD rips. And porn.

As you can guess, the more space I can get the better, though even if I used 4TB drives it would probably be not enough :D Anyways, I'm pretty sure that all hard drives fail, there is no such thing as a dependable internal 7200rpm hard drive. Even though I have 2 in my old PC that are in their 6th year of life already, still no dead sectors or anything :D One of them is Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB, other one is Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB.

So, I thought, these ST3000DM001 drives are by far the cheapest as in price per GB, especially since I can get them with discount in one place. If they can last at least a few years, I will get a basket of external hard drives and backup everything. I guess this is the best that I can do until huge SSD drives decide to get cheap? Because right now a 1TB SSD costs more than five 3TB hard drives, which is insane :D
 
I believe both manufacturers quote expected annual failure rates of less than 1% however from time to time I have seen reports of return rates are more than double that. The now 6 year old google hard drive study had failure rates of 1% to 8% for first 5 years.

However when people have such a small sample (and not 10s of thousands of drives) a bit of luck can come into play. It could be poor handling in the by the shipper or some other environmental problem like power, temperature fluctuations or vibrations instead of a manufacturer defect.
 
I had about 30 RMAs on these drives in the relatively short period of time I used them. With a comparable number of WD RED drives I've had 2 RMAs in about the same amount of time. It might be a coincidence, related to QC after the flood, or maybe because they just weren't designed for 20 drive servers. At the time I couldn't find anything better for sale here, so I didn't really have any choice. Well, except enterprise drives that were priced 3x higher at the time.
 
Out of 15 of these drives I have had one go bad that I had to RMA so far.
 
If you do end up getting these drives make sure you update the firmware one them asap to get rid of the godawful chirping they do randomly. It isn't a load chirp its just a random chirp every couple of hours or so.
 
Edit: Nvm, found it.. This link does it properly. Can't stand that noise that the Seagates make.
 
GodOfGaming said:
Is there no such thing as a reliable internal 7200rpm 3TB hard drive?
Click to expand...

I replaced my Seagates with the Toshibas. No problems so far and I have been beating them up a bit before I put them in.

No hard errors logged (or observed). They are faster than the Seagates in cont read at least. "raw_read_error_rate" of 4 of the 5 is 0, one drive is at 1. None of them as reallocated sectors so far. All other error counts (soft or hard) are 0. The temperature is a bit higher than what the Seagates were reporting, 38-40 in my cage. Not sure whether this is rooted in higher power consumption or different placement of the sensor.

If you want some belly laugh fun I can post comparable numbers for the Seagates, although I admittedly didn't monitor them this paranoidly from the beginning.

I see no reason against recommending the Toshibas.
 
uOpt said:
I replaced my Seagates with the Toshibas. No problems so far and I have been beating them up a bit before I put them in.
...............
I see no reason against recommending the Toshibas.
Click to expand...

Which model exactly are they? PH3300U-1I72 ? DT01ACA300 ? Do they have 1TB platters? How long have you had them for?
 
I checked them out in google, they indeed have 1TB platters, though if you only had them for so short, that's not a proof that they're more reliable than the st3000dm001... I'll research them some more, though.
 
Had 3 out of 8 purchased Seagate 3TBs fail on me only a couple of days after I started using them (bad sectors developed). Took them back to the store I got them from and had all 8 changed straight up (even though 3 were faulty) and got Toshibas - have not had a problem since and that was well over a year ago (My Toshibas show up as the Hitachis and have the hitachi logo on them in a smaller text)

Ditch the Seagates.
 
GodOfGaming said:
I checked them out in google, they indeed have 1TB platters, though if you only had them for so short, that's not a proof that they're more reliable than the st3000dm001... I'll research them some more, though.
Click to expand...

I've had more then 5 ST3000DM001 die on me in the same year (2013). The toshiba DT01ACA300's are better since I started buying them mid last year (2012) and they have been running perfectly fine. I have WD Red's & Toshiba's (DT01ACA300) in RAID5 arrays together on a 9261-8i card and its been perfect. Seagates on the other hand.. no soo great.

I've also noticed that the Seagate ST3000DM001 drives that have lasted past the 1 year mark, struggle to make it to 2 years. I know when ever I buy a Seagate drive I expect a short life period with them.
 
GodOfGaming said:
I checked them out in google, they indeed have 1TB platters, though if you only had them for so short, that's not a proof that they're more reliable than the st3000dm001... I'll research them some more, though.
Click to expand...

If it is really, really important to you I could search through old syslog files. While my paranoid smart monitoring only started recently (as a reaction to that Seagate crap, actually) they will hold all hard errors that I have ever seen.

And now that you mention it, I think that md's scrub did detect inconsistencies that it corrected pretty early on.
 
I have 8x ST3000DM001s and 8x ST2000DM001's in a server handing off a pair of M1015's IT flashed.

I have about another dozen in customers servers as backup targets.

Total drives lost = 2
One went offline every few days, culprit, Intel RST software junk, drive is now happy as hot-spare in my server.
Other drive had total fail (click of death) for no reason, replaced and been fine since. Drives are between 18 & 24 months old and see running 24/7.


The drives are cheap and great value for money. Not a drive for Hardware RAID cards although, some get them working fine, others do not.

P.S Was in Win8 Pro Storage Spaces - Parity, now in same arrays on Server 2012.
P.P.S These drives are bloody fast too, good for sustained 120+MB/sec


Oh, and ROFL at the tools still running XP and even more at fools wanting to boot of 3TB drives.
 
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