Hitachi 2TB Harddrive Owner's Thread

Emailed them. In the meantime, if anyone wants to send me the 3EA firmware, feel free to PM me :)
 
called them and was told to email them, after 10 minutes of going over my problem... guess the guy didnt trust me over the phone
 
Well, I just picked up 2 at Fry's. And, thanks to myrison, I'm going to go back up there and get another. Thanks for helping me spend my money man. ;)
 
OK got 12 of those running in raid 6 on areca 1280 so far no issues, did 72hrs stress test without any problems, the drives run hotter then my seagates (+5 C) but nothing crazy (38-42 C)

On a side note I misplaced the screws for norco trays, had to cannibalize my other system to get the drives mounted. If anyone knows a source for the screws I would appreciate a link.
 
are "case screws" the same as "drive bay screws" or is that just a grab bag of screws? Everytime I take apart something on my 4220 its a different size screw (roughly the same diameter just longer or shorter it seems)
 
Well, got the 4 drives hooked up to a new MB, SATA card wasn't working with my old board. But, now I have to figure out why it's not booting from my old 2T drive.. grrrrr. but, it was nice to see them all show up in the BIOS screen. :D
 
Bought 4x HD3200 from newegg during their deal. When connected to the ICH9R, they are about 45-50C idle (which seems really high).

I haven't found a way to monitor temperatures while connected to my LSI raid controller. I'm looking through their command line utility MegaCLI, but its proven to be quite painful.
 
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dexvx, what are your ambient room temperatures? Either your room is way too hot, or you have extremely poor air circulation in your drive bays.

For comparison, here are the active idle temps of various drives currently in my system:

Ambient Room Temperature 24-25° C
Velociraptors 28-30° C
7K2000s 34-37° C
WD Blacks 38-42° C
 
Ambient room temperature is a little warmer than most, at 25C (I plan on moving the server to a room with ~20C room temperature once I install an ethernet drop). The case is an Antec 300. The 7K2000's are sitting in the topmost 3x 5.25" bays converted into 4x 3.5" bays. There is a 150mm case fan blowing air out about 4" from the uppermost 5.25" bay (cool air, I might add). I did a touch test on the mounting mechanism and it felt warm (but not 50C warm).

For reference, I have a Seagate 7200.12 500GB in the same chasis and it is currently sitting at 28C. I also have a Core2 Duo E6300 at 30C (both cores). These are readings from CPUID Hardware Monitor 1.16.
 
If you swap the location the Seagate resides with a Hitachi are temperatures the same?

If you have only two instead of four drives in the 4-in-3 with a space in-between, do temperatures significantly improve?

Does your 4-in-3 drive bay module have a fan blowing cool air from outside over the drives? If not, it sounds like you do have very minimal airflow over the drives, as the case fan above the drives blowing air out wouldn't be all that helpful. In close quarters, these hard drives will get hot without at least minimal direct airflow moving over the surface of the drives. The heat from each drive is likely being trapped within your 4-in-3 and making all the drives hotter than normal. If the drives are consistently breaking 50° C under load, I would be looking into better cooling options. For example, two 3-in-2 (two drives in each) with a built-in fan or a 4-in-3 with a built-in fan.
 
hitachi is making me list all of my drives, serial numbers, firmware, and REASON for the firmware. What's the best reason to tell them for going from 3EA, 28A and 20N to all 3EA?
 
Say you're using them in a RAID and would like it so that they have all the same performance characteristics?
 
E-mailed them with:

I am using 16 drives in a home server RAID setup and notice performance issues with the older 20N firmware when coupled with the 28A or 3EA firmware. I would like to update everything to the latest 3EA firmware so every drive performs the same.

Below is a list of Part Numbers, Serial Numbers, Manufacture Date, and Firmware Revision for all 16 drives.
Click to expand...

and I listed all 16 drives :)
 
JeffBlair said:
Well, I just picked up 2 at Fry's. And, thanks to myrison, I'm going to go back up there and get another. Thanks for helping me spend my money man. ;)
Click to expand...

Hehe. I'm here to help. :)

Your next stop: The FT/FS forum... or, you can do like I did and just keep them all for different purposes. :)
 
Cyberbeing said:
If you swap the location the Seagate resides with a Hitachi are temperatures the same?

If you have only two instead of four drives in the 4-in-3 with a space in-between, do temperatures significantly improve?
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. Swapped some HDD's around (putting the cooler Seagate next to two Hitachi's and they are now sitting at around 40C (using a laser temperature gun).

Anyways, here are some numbers:

Single Drive (+/-3% on all 4 drives) connected to ICH9R:
CD-H1.jpg


4x Hitachi 7K2000 2TB Raid 5 on a LSI 8888ELP:
CD-HR.jpg


4x WD Caviar Black FALS1001 1TB (my old drives) on same LSI 8888ELP:
CD-WDR.jpg
 
So I just setup 2 Hitachi 2tb drives in RAID0 on my Areca 1680ix-24. I am going off of a SATA 24" multilane breakout -> eSATA pci bracket extension -> 36" eSATA cable.
I just received TIME OUT ERRORs on 1 of the drives (tested with hitachi tools 100% fine) twice when I did my initial 2 minute read from the volume...
Is the cabling too long? (No other way to test at this exact moment.

No power management is enabled.
Write back (battery backup installed)
NCQ disabled
HDD Read Ahead Cache enabled
Volume Data Read Ahead normal
Hdd Queue Depth 32
Disk Write Cache Mode enabled


now i see:

Code: 
    │2010-06-02 03:39:03 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Device Removed                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:39:02 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Device Failed                      │
    │2010-06-02 03:39:02 Raid Set # 001   RaidSet Degraded                   │
    │2010-06-02 03:39:02 Raid Set # 001   RaidSet Degraded                   │
    │2010-06-02 03:39:00 ARC-1680-VOL#001 Volume Failed                      │
    │2010-06-02 03:39:00 ARC-1680-VOL#001 Volume Failed                      │
    │2010-06-02 03:38:52 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Time Out Error                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:36:39 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Time Out Error                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:36:28 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Time Out Error                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:36:16 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Time Out Error                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:29:26 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Time Out Error                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:29:14 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Time Out Error                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:27:52 ARC-1680-VOL#001 Create Volume                      │
    │2010-06-02 03:27:06 Raid Set # 001   Create RaidSet                     │
    │2010-06-02 03:24:24 Enc#2 SLOT 21    Device Inserted                    │
    │2010-06-02 03:24:23 Enc#2 SLOT 22    Device Inserted                    │


testing the "bad" drive now - passed quick test w/ hitachi tools - running advanced overnight.
 
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yea, drive passed all tests, so i'm sure it was the ghetto cabling/enclosure setup i had going on.

i am moving one raid to another, so i have to take one raid down, 16 drives out of their trays (in a norco 20 bay), put these 16 in, create the raid, test it, copy the data over, remove the drives from the trays, put the other ones back in, remove the 16 drives from one i'm taking down (16 bay sas enclosure) and put the 16 new ones in and re-test for a week or two before i sell my 16 WD 1.5TB drives.

EEK!
 
This is why I have 2 Norco cases (and at one point a 24 bay Supermicro too). Made migrating my data so much easier. :p
 
lucky! don't do this often enough to warrant the $300+ for the case, though.

i'll just make sure i'm really well grounded and throw the active drives straight into anti-static bags and store them well for the ~1 week testing period.
 
I just pile mine on the floor or top of the rack when they're not being used. Nothing like having hardwood floors instead of carpet.
 
The cat likes to shock things. Plus I won't have backups of the drives I'm taking out, so I want to be extra careful. I have a 20 bay Styrofoam box to put the drives in just in case there's an earthquake and the 11 floors above me come tumbling down.
 
good priorities, in case of a disaster make sure ur *pr0n* collection is safe. :D
 
VulcaN said:
I just picked up 2 of these disks...
Do these stats seem right to you guys? This is for a SINGLE drive with just one 1.81TB partition. I thought the 512k read seemed low...

37839544.jpg



and then here is my other disk
82645778.jpg


Both disks are connected to the same ICH10 SATA controller, JBOD
Click to expand...

Actually I think I was right on that the performance was too good on the other drive.

The reason your getting so much better random 512k results is because you are running it on a 50 GB partition so the drives is short stroked giving it much better seek times. I honestly would expect to see the same increase on 4k as well though.
 
How do you guys feel about the relatively short warranty on these units? Over here in the UK at least, the warranty is 24 months. The other manufacturers (WD, Seagate and Samsung) range from three to five years.

I would have expected at least three years from Hitachi. I'm a very happy long-time Hitachi user by the way, so I have no product gripes with them.
 
myrison said:
Hehe. I'm here to help. :)

Your next stop: The FT/FS forum... or, you can do like I did and just keep them all for different purposes. :)
Click to expand...

Yep, I've got my old 2T as the boot/download drive, and the 4 Hitachi's in a RAID5:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 493G 5.9G 462G 2% / (Seagate)
/dev/sde4 1.4T 51G 1.3T 4% /home (Seagate)
/dev/md0 5.5T 1.8T 3.7T 33% /mnt/storage (Hitachi's RAID5)

Humm.. I might be able to post in the over 10T post now. :)
 
parityOCP said:
How do you guys feel about the relatively short warranty on these units? Over here in the UK at least, the warranty is 24 months. The other manufacturers (WD, Seagate and Samsung) range from three to five years.

I would have expected at least three years from Hitachi. I'm a very happy long-time Hitachi user by the way, so I have no product gripes with them.
Click to expand...
They have a 3 year warranty in the US.
 
Two questions:

1) Is AHCI a bad choice for these drives?
2) What might cause them to transfer files very slowly at first and then pick up speed at the end of the transfer?
 
The RMA process with HITACHI so far has been HORRIBLE. They have had my drive for over 4 weeks now (in their hands) and they just shipped it 8 days ago (still no receipt). And they won't give me a tracking number.
 
pgjensen said:
The RMA process with HITACHI so far has been HORRIBLE. They have had my drive for over 4 weeks now (in their hands) and they just shipped it 8 days ago (still no receipt). And they won't give me a tracking number.
Click to expand...

Why didnt you ask for an advanced RMA?
 
nitrobass24 said:
Why didnt you ask for an advanced RMA?
Click to expand...

didn't give me that option online. either way, i've never experienced a wait this bad with seagate or WD :(

they can't find my tracking number it shipped 9 days ago. they have had the drive for 25 days. i also asked the guy if they had an advance rma option and he said no.
 
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I finally had one of these start to die. Was able to get data off and secure erase, but once a drive starts acting funny I pull it. Hitachi's RMA process is definitely a step below Seagate or WD.
 
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