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Seagate 2TB Woes

I have 11 of them in Raid5+hotspare on my Areca 1231ML card. Not a single one has failed yet. However, I purchased mine either through Frys B&M or Amazon, I don't think I ordered any from the egg.
 
What storage controller are all the drives dying on? Also how are you sharing out the filesystem and to what clients? SMB to multiple windows boxes? I don't care if they are packard bell rebrands of some made in china maxtor knockoff drive..... Losing that many drives that fast implies other issues. Either drivers or controller or bad psu or bad vibration issues or bad cables or possibly one of the client machines is somehow causing issues. SOMETHING is not right though.
 
10 drives in ~9 months? That is highly unusual, and I cannot believe Seagate let you RMA that many without asking more questions.
 
There is a chance you are an outlier, but 200% failure rate in 8 months is wild. Seagate could never sell such a drive to OEM's, so they wouldn't produce a drive with that failure rate.

Newegg reviews are always highly skewed on hard drives because people generally report only failures, and hard drives are one of the only moving parts inside most PC's other than fans.
 
I have 4 Seagate 2tb USB drives... no problems yet.

What problems are you having that require an RMA? In my experience, aside from a SMART error or obvious physical damage, the problem isn't a defect in the physical drive - its firmware, controller issue, or a design flaw that renders the drive unusable in some situations.
 
breadtk said:
All of the drives begin to start "clicking" and eventually stop working all together. SMART shows massive amounts of errors. I've tried plugging them into another computer to see if its a cable issue, no-go there
Click to expand...

That sounds like another issue altogether than the drives... at least initially, with 10 dead drives and from that description (given they aren't working in another PC) I have a feeling you are doing something that is killing them. Normally a bad cable doesn't hit four drives at once with SATA.
 
breadtk said:
All of the drives begin to start "clicking" and eventually stop working all together. SMART shows massive amounts of errors. I've tried plugging them into another computer to see if its a cable issue, no-go there



As far as raid controller, I'm just using ZFS (in a raidz2 configuration) with FreeNAS. No dedicated hardware controller. I'm using the computer as a seedbox and as a place to store my HD movies. Just recently have I allowed FTP & SCP access to 3-4 of my friends who have barely used it.

One possible issue is that the computer is plugged into the same power strip as my small fridge. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Yup, the small fridge could do it, Suggest buying a UPS for it
 
Oh it could also be that your PSU is not supplying enough power to them. What all do u have in the box and what PSU is running it?
 
What's your cooling situation look like?

What enclosure do you use?

Have you measured or looked at the drive temperatures (SMART) during normal operation?

Are all of the components for your FreeNAS system new or did you re-use some old parts?

I would suspect either power issues or high temperatures.
 
Your PSU may be able to deliver up to 700W, but I highly doubt your system even consumes half that. If it did and you have no other cooling in the system, I would think you would have some serious heat issues in that case!
 
Have you tried rotating any other brand drives into your system? have they failed as well? I agree that the seagate 2TB aren't as good as the WD 2TB (as far as reliability) I have several of both, and my seagates are starting to click all funny.
 
Right. What controller? Sure you may jut be doing software raid, but what controller? What chip is on the other end of the cable? Is it some crap nforce controller? Or possibly jmicron based crap? Or silicon image crap? Is there a sata port multiplier being used.... If so is it a FIS multiplier? some controllers have many more issues than some others. Frankly, in some cases the intel ich7 Sara controller was absolute crap. Especially in Linux when doing drive recovery. It was bad enough that even USB->sata converters based on a cheap POS jmicron chip worked better. It could be power related. It could be controller related. It could be cable related. But with those kind of numbers, the odds of it being because they're seagate drives is very very low. (unless it's an issue where the controller doesn't like that model of drive for some reason) having a minifridge with a compressor on the same power strip doesn't sound good either. Hell, I don't want anything with a big motor on the same circuit as my computer gear even. If I had my choice, all the computer gear would get it's own phase, and nearly everything else would be on the opposite phase.
 
I disagree that it can be so clearly a controller or driver problem.. The Seagate 2TB drives are the only 2TB drives on newegg with 3 eggs. The rest are 4 or 5 eggs. If you are to say that the controller/driver is at fault, then you are also saying that, for some reason, Seagate 2TB buyers in particular use those "bad' controllers/drivers statistically more than buyers of other brands of 2TB HDDs. Really now? How about Seagate just has issues?
 
palmboy5 said:
I disagree that it can be so clearly a controller or driver problem.. The Seagate 2TB drives are the only 2TB drives on newegg with 3 eggs. The rest are 4 or 5 eggs. If you are to say that the controller/driver is at fault, then you are also saying that, for some reason, Seagate 2TB buyers in particular use those "bad' controllers/drivers statistically more than buyers of other brands of 2TB HDDs. Really now? How about Seagate just has issues?
Click to expand...

Yes. Simple. Seagate has to guarantee OEM's (HP's, Dell's, Acer's, and etc of the world a certain AFR. If Seagate drives were not reliable enough, on average, Seagate would face huge OEM contract penalties, and lose massive market share from just one of those contracts being broken.

Using Newegg ratings for hard drives, as well as Google searches, are really bad ways to see hard drive reliability. I would be willing to bet, 95% of NewEgg users use less than 8 hard drives. When 100 drives is a small sample size, individual reviews, on a product from one of the two largest manufacturers, are meaningless. With 10 drives dead, this is a user-controlled variable issue, not a drive issue.
 
Newegg user reviews are not meaningless. They show that, across the newegg user base, buyers of the Seagate brand 2TB drives are having more failures than those who buy other brands. To ignore this fact is absurd. As I was arguing, the only way you can pass off this information as meaningless is to somehow show that the group of customers that buy Seagate brand 2TB drives has some statistically significant difference from the groups that buy other brands (ie. Seagate buyers use a higher proportion of "bad" controllers/drivers than buyers of, say, Western Digital). I say that the buyer base is balanced, which means Seagate 2TB drives die more often on the same proportion of controllers/drivers that 2TB drives from other brands are being used on. Therefore, Seagate 2TB drives have issues.

By your implication, Seagate has not breached any AFR guarantees with these drives. I have two (main) questions:
1.) Would we even hear of a contract breach?
2.) How much does the OEM world have to do with us? I suppose we should just go buy OEM model motherboards to use their "good" controllers/drivers and forget about overclocking? Where's the [H]ard in that?
 
breadtk said:
*snip*

One possible issue is that the computer is plugged into the same power strip as my small fridge. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

This to me is a flashing red light if you have your system plugged in with a small fridge. Our apartment has outlets for window a/c units but it was closer at the time so I plugged my APC battery back up into it and it worked. The moment the ac was turned on or the compressor would kick it my battery backup would chirp it was on battery than switch back to normal power.

I quickly took it off that outlet and made sure my computers were on a different circuit but I can only imagine your computer getting cut off multiple times a day. :eek:
 
Sparkyy said:
This to me is a flashing red light if you have your system plugged in with a small fridge. Our apartment has outlets for window a/c units but it was closer at the time so I plugged my APC battery back up into it and it worked. The moment the ac was turned on or the compressor would kick it my battery backup would chirp it was on battery than switch back to normal power.

I quickly took it off that outlet and made sure my computers were on a different circuit but I can only imagine your computer getting cut off multiple times a day. :eek:
Click to expand...

sounds like you're describing a brown-out

a piece of electrical equipment with high-inductance [%] is turned on a momentarily pulls down the line voltage

[%] typically anything with a big motor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownout_%28electricity%29

wikipedia said:
A switching power supply may be affected, depending on the design. If the input voltage is too low, it is possible for a switching power supply to malfunction and self-destruct.
Click to expand...

computer PSUs are switching
 
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