Hitachi 2TB Harddrive Owner's Thread

this is getting me worried too. If they are almost gone I have a big problem unless those ecogreen f4 drives are suitable.

I'm looking into the F4's as well now. slightly cheaper- but just need to get confirmation from someone that these wont drop out of a raid setup...
 
So there is a new retail package version of the Deskstars. The old red/ black/ white retail packaging is getting hard to find (and becoming higher priced) but the new white/ green retail packaging is cheaper and widely available.

I bought 4x of the newer packaged drives a week or two ago ($87 each).

Ditto... if you scroll back a few pages you'll see more comments on the new drive/packaging.
 
So there is a new retail package version of the Deskstars. The old red/ black/ white retail packaging is getting hard to find (and becoming higher priced) but the new white/ green retail packaging is cheaper and widely available.

I bought 4x of the newer packaged drives a week or two ago ($87 each).

are the drives the same?
 
I think the new package got discussed a page back. Exact same harddisk physically/mechanically.
 
Yea that is my guess. I cannot tell them apart. I have the four new HGST drives in with a bunch of older ones (red/ black/ white packaging) and they all show up as "Hitachi HDS72202" under Nexenta/ Napp-it.

Big difference is the part number seems to have changed and therefore the older ones are going to be harder to find.
 
They shouldn't. However, it you are referring to the TLER variant for Hitachi, they could drop out (I don't think they have it enabled). However, at that point it would be wise to just replace the disk that is dropping out.
 
@egraphix - These are rock solid. If you look back for posts by odditory you'll see that he's running ~100 of them in various configurations and has never had drop out issues. I think these are about as safe as they come.
 
I ordered 8 a few days ago. have set themup in raid 6 on a reca 1222 8 port.

took just over 9 hours to innitialise. Working beautifly atm! no hick ups or issues as of yet.

PS. can someone let me know the latest firmware available for these?
 
Would someone mind catching me up on what the big deal was over the latest 3EA firmware? I skimmed back through this thread but can't find what was supposed to be compelling about it, nor anyone that's actually done any A/B testing or at least reported on it. There were a few months where I wasn't active on the forum and must've missed something.

Googling around I can't really find anything substantive except claims about emails from Hitachi indicating "there were problems with earlier firmware". What problems? I read they removed AAM support in 3EA but not much beyond that. I'm also aware there was a performance increase in the 1TB model when moving to 3EA, but that has nothing to do with the 2TB model.

Has anyone else had problems with a particular firmware version which made them want to upgrade? I haven't experienced any, and all my drives are a mixture of all different revs (20N, 28A, 3EA). If anyone's done their own testing please chime in.
 
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After some wrangling I was able to get the 3EA firmware from Hitachi but the firmware update tool they provided me is pretty muddled and clearly meant for testing drives rather than updating the firmware. Anyone who has updated the firmware on the drives know the easiest way to update it; perhaps using the Windows Utility isn't the simplest method.

It also looks like it doesn't support my controller and can't see any drives (assuming I am using it properly) so I will most likely have to again individually connect drives to another machine.
 
And why are you under the impression you need to update all of them? What convinced you? Did you read something somewhere?
 
I would have to dig into what I believe is either this thread or the Areca thread (might even be the HP SAS expander thread as there was a lot of Areca discussion there) but yes I did read that somewhere here on the forums that someone had identified different firmware versions mixed with 3EA as a potential issue for RAID. I hadn't done it and I put it in my notes as something POTENTIALLY to do because it wasn't clear if it resolved his issue or not (if I recall correctly). The only reason I am honestly considering it is because I am rapidly running out of other ideas to identify where my performance problems are coming from besides sending in an RMA to Areca. Somehow I even doubt that it will make a difference given that you have a similar setup with Hitachi drives, with mixed firmware versions.

--EDIT--
It looks like people are talking about it here on pages 12-15 or so. It is unclear as to whether or not it 'fixed' any issues.
 
I think is the drive I'm going to be buying for my ZFS setup; WD Greens do some goofy shit, the F4s are 4k w/ sector emulation, which annoys ZFS, these drives are simply what they say they are: 2TB and spin at 7200rpm.

Any thoughts on where to find these cheap(er)/ish? I think I'll start with 12-14 drives, and buy the last 6-8 later this year/early next year.
 
I had 24 of these Hitachi 2TB's working beautifully in two raidz2 pools on a test NexentaCore + NappIt GUI install. However I noticed that with an SMB share there was some weird behavior on the client PC side in windows explorer compared to when a windows box hosts a share, so I shelved the whole ZFS thing for now. But that was just an SMB issue and not really ZFS's fault -- I tested failing a drive and resilvering and all that worked great with the drives attached to an LSI SAS2008 chip on the X8SI6 motherboard, and an HP SAS Expander dual linked to it.

These drives have gotten as low as $87 with rebate on Newegg, I'd just get as many drives as you need now and then keep your eyes open for the occasional sale. I'm sure Fry's will put them on sale again as we close in on black friday. the week before new year's is also notorious for sales - grabbed a ton of these drives last year during that week.
 
I would have to dig into what I believe is either this thread or the Areca thread (might even be the HP SAS expander thread as there was a lot of Areca discussion there) but yes I did read that somewhere here on the forums that someone had identified different firmware versions mixed with 3EA as a potential issue for RAID. I hadn't done it and I put it in my notes as something POTENTIALLY to do because it wasn't clear if it resolved his issue or not (if I recall correctly). The only reason I am honestly considering it is because I am rapidly running out of other ideas to identify where my performance problems are coming from besides sending in an RMA to Areca. Somehow I even doubt that it will make a difference given that you have a similar setup with Hitachi drives, with mixed firmware versions.

--EDIT--
It looks like people are talking about it here on pages 12-15 or so. It is unclear as to whether or not it 'fixed' any issues.

Well let me know if you find that person, I sure can't. At this point all i've read is speculation about problems with mixing different revs of firmware. Obviously the absence of AAS in firmware 3EA is significant in terms of the behavior of the mechanics, but I have my doubts that difference shows up in actual use or in a striped array. It would be helpful to know why Hitachi chose remove AAS in 3EA in terms of any side effects it may have been causing, but who knows if they'd ever cop to it.

I guess i'll have to do my own testing -- 24 drives updated to 3EA tested in RAID and JBOD, and another 24 drives with a mixture of 28A/20N/3EA also in RAID and JBOD, and see if I can tell any difference over a few days worth of stress tests and performance measurements.
 
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It looks like the Hitachi drive flash tool (HiTest) is even more picky about motherboard SATA chipsets than their Drive Fitness tool. I can't get it to recognize the drives even connected to the PC the DFT supports; what a pain.

--EDIT--

I couldn't get it to recognize drives in my server, secondary PC or primary PC; argh. I may table updating the firmware on the 3 drives that are different for now.
 
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HiTest isn't used for updating the firmware, that is just a drive testing tool for enterprise customers afaik.

Their Firmware update utility is a 65KB DOS-based utility (need to create a DOS start-up disk) and requires a regular non-AHCI, non-RAID, IDE-compatible SATA port.
 
It's a minor point but HiTest IS the utility that Hitachi provided to me with the firmware update and while, yes, it is primarily oriented toward drive tests (it's very obvious) it specifically has an action built in for doing firmware updates. It couldn't feel anymore like an "internal only" tool more if it tried!

I am curious though where this DOS firmware update based utility can be had. Their support couldn't tell me if there were any other options besides using what they provided to me (HiTest). However I am not TOO curious because I couldn't get the HiTest tool to work so I gave up on updating the FW on my drives and resolved my issues another way (apparently they weren't related to drive FW).
 
Hitachi should have never given you HiTest in the first place, considering it's a readily available public download from Hitachi and not the correct tool for the job.


They should have given you the following files:

JKDL_SP.exe (Jupiter-K ATA/SATA Microcode Update Program)

JK0NB3EA.BDX (3EA firmware)


The DOS update utility is very simple, and you shouldn't have any problems as long as you use a non-RAID IDE-compatible SATA port.

Unlike HiTest, JKDL_SP does appear to be an internal Hitachi tool, which I believe requires escalation of your request and approval before being given out. Your standard support rep probably doesn't even have access to it normally, but the same goes for firmware files, so who knows what happened in your case.
 
I already read the thread once but I can't remember whether this has been answered yet.

Does anyone have an idea about the start-up current for this drive? There is an Hitachi spec sheet here but I can't really make sense of it.

I'm assuming 2 ampéres (= 12v * 2 = 24 Watts) of start up current. I don't know whether I'm even close but I'm guessing on the safe side.
 
I had 24 of these Hitachi 2TB's working beautifully in two raidz2 pools on a test NexentaCore + NappIt GUI install. However I noticed that with an SMB share there was some weird behavior on the client PC side in windows explorer compared to when a windows box hosts a share, so I shelved the whole ZFS thing for now. But that was just an SMB issue and not really ZFS's fault -- I tested failing a drive and resilvering and all that worked great with the drives attached to an LSI SAS2008 chip on the X8SI6 motherboard, and an HP SAS Expander dual linked to it.

These drives have gotten as low as $87 with rebate on Newegg, I'd just get as many drives as you need now and then keep your eyes open for the occasional sale. I'm sure Fry's will put them on sale again as we close in on black friday. the week before new year's is also notorious for sales - grabbed a ton of these drives last year during that week.

Good to know, thanks. I think I will go in stages to save my wallet (end goal is 3x6 -Z2 vdevs + 2 hotspares), so might start with 2x6.
 
I wouldn't suppose anyone who has the latest firmware and the utility (JKDL_SP.exe andJK0NB3EA.BDX) could email them to me?
 
hey thanks for this. I'm sure I'll need some new hitachi drives in the next 6 months.
 
just wanted to add that hitachi is now shipping 3MA on newer built drives.

got my rma replacement with the this newest firmware. build date is OCT-2010
 
@young: what model drive did you get back? HDS722020ALA330 or H3IK20003272SP ?
 
@young: what model drive did you get back? HDS722020ALA330 or H3IK20003272SP ?

3ma.png
 
interesting. well once again we have the question "what the heck changed". :)

guess I'll try to hit up Hitachi for more info, but of course will have to phrase it in such a way that it bypasses their DEU (dumb end user) filter, where they stay tight-lipped unless you make a good case, apparently.
 
interesting. well once again we have the question "what the heck changed". :)

guess I'll try to hit up Hitachi for more info, but of course will have to phrase it in such a way that it bypasses their DEU (dumb end user) filter, where they stay tight-lipped unless you make a good case, apparently.

i did some initial hdtune benches i can post up if you like between 3ea and 3ma but performance wise did not see much of a difference.

edit hdtune

i tested these drives on my areca 1680ix-8 hooked up to supermicro el1 sas expander.
results in few area affected the same on both drives with the 1680 vs on board sata controller would have.

block size 2mb in hdtune

3ea
3eatestr1.png

3eatestw1.png


3ma
3matestr1.png

3matestw1.png
 
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I had 24 of these Hitachi 2TB's working beautifully in two raidz2 pools

I hope you guys aren't just buying a huge batch of the same drives. because when half of them fail at the same time because they all got dropped on their head in the same container, you'll be praying to the raid6 gods and they won't answer
 
it's called "backup". and the whole notion of "source your drives from all different places to avoid a bad batch" is generally FUD, assuming a new drive can complete a health check and full surface scan without errors. i'm pretty sure a batch of physically mishandled drives don't decide "okay guys on june 11 we all die." but if you know of a study that's been done feel free to link it.
 
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thx for the firmware utility!

Unfortunatly, I'm still kind of stuck with what I'm doing:

I've got a Dell MD3000i SAN from work (no drives). I've got the one Hitachi 2tb (which is listed under the support matrix for the md3ki). The issue is, Dell locks the MD3000i's from using any drive other than "Dell" branded drives (they show up in MDSM as unsupported drives if they're not dell).
The only difference between the one I have an one I could get through Dell, is the firmware. I've verified this with Dell support, and through our rep. $129 from newegg or $709 form Dell... you see my frustration with dell!

I've got the "dell" firmware for the Hitachi drive, but the Hitachi utility does not successfully flash the drive with it. so I'm kind of stuck.

Now, with that said, Dell does unlock the MD3000i's for non-dell drives IF you connect to it using a SAS interface. I'm wondering if I can connect via a SAS interface, if I can then upgrade the firmware with Dell's firmware, and then connect using the iSCSI connections..
I'm not sure if that will work (and I may contact support to find out). If it does, then I'd just need to pick up a SAS controller (I think its limited to 2 types of SAS controllers for it to be unlocked - will need to verify with our rep).

I don't like that alternative since it would mean having to purchase a SAS controller just so I canflash firmwares and use the drives via iscsi..
Obviously, I'd rather be able to update the firmware w/o having to do the SAS connections, etc..

So, I guess I'm looking for suggestions, or maybe someone here is a firmware genious and can tell me a way I can get the hitachi utility to flash the drive with the dell firmware..

make sense at all? (sorry a bit tired this morning!).

-Jim
 
5400RPM version definitely looks interesting with a claimed 29% power savings over 7200RPM version.
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/desktop/deskstar/deskstar-7k3000

Good stuff, I'll probably grab a few, though will wait for 4TB drives before making any mass exodus from my 2TB's. They all still have many years of runtime.

Another plus for those 3TB Hitachi's is they've stuck with 512 byte sectors. Given all the threads about 4K drives and the challenges they present, maybe sticking w/ 512 byte sectors is a good thing especially with no appreciable performance improvement (that I've seen) in 4K drives.
 
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Did you guys buy all of these up or what? ;)

I seriously just checked all over and they are all out of stock, I hope they are planning a sale for black Friday or something :(
 
Did you guys buy all of these up or what? ;)

I seriously just checked all over and they are all out of stock, I hope they are planning a sale for black Friday or something :(
I haven't seen them in stock anywhere in a while. I imagine Hitachi cut off shipments with the new models coming out.
 
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