Seagate Never Again

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cinjun

n00b
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May 3, 2011
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I'm RMAing my 3rd Seagate drive in 2 months. Had two zpools, one will a mix of WD's and seagates, and one with seagates only. Two drives in the seagate only pool failed, and now the only seagate in the WD pool is failing. Never again seagate, never again.

Too bad I bought them before the Backblaze report :(

Spend the extra money guys and buy WD's.
 
I manage 9 racks in our DataCenter and Seagate's drive failure is nothing short of absolutely incredible.

I would guess I replace their enterprise class drives on a 50:1 ratio with WD's. Last year I made the call to start phasing out all Seagate drives from our environment for WD Enterprise drives (FYYZ's) and they've been unbelievably rock stable.
 
Thanks for the info ChristmasGT, hopefully Seagate will take the hint one of these days.

Right now I'm looking at either the WD Reds or Greens. I'm kinda leaning towards the greens cause I don't run in RAID, just off an HBA. So I don't really benefit from their feature that stop the drive from retrying endlessly in RAID config (The name escapes me at the moment).
 
I would look HGST coolspins instead.

So I don't really benefit from their feature that stop the drive from retrying endlessly in RAID config
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You still benefit from that when using zfs.
 
I too am getting totally unacceptable failure rates on my home NAS. > 50% of seagates failed in < 2 years. And the worst part is I scavenged them from USB enclosures so none of them have warranty. Worst computer parts decision I made in years. All the replacements are HGST/Toshiba (no failures yet).

My sample size is small though so...
 
It (TLER) has nothing to do with talking to a raid card. Its about how long to try to recover an unreadable sector. ZFS although it does not require that a drive only takes 8 seconds to read a sector then errors out benefits from it not taking a few minutes freezing your system while waiting.
 
drescherjm said:
B&H has the 4TB coolspin for $149 shipped

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/835055-REG/Hitachi_0S03359_4TB_Internal_Hard_Drive.html
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I wish I would have known about that before buying 14 Seagate ST4000DM000 drives for over $2000. I have not used the drives yet but am sure I can't just return them. According to the Backblaze report, they have the lowest failure rate of the Seagate drives but I would still prefer HGST over anything else... I am depressed now :( ...
 
cinjun said:
Thanks for the info ChristmasGT, hopefully Seagate will take the hint one of these days.

Right now I'm looking at either the WD Reds or Greens. I'm kinda leaning towards the greens cause I don't run in RAID, just off an HBA. So I don't really benefit from their feature that stop the drive from retrying endlessly in RAID config (The name escapes me at the moment).
Click to expand...

greens are the worst WD drives. I had 90% failure out of 10 drives, not a big sample size, but never again buying WD greens.
 
One time I bought a bunch of Seagate drives for a storage server, and every one of them failed within a week of putting the server into production. Then a week after that, I find out I'm pregnant with 7200.11 twins and was promptly fired.
 
I have used Seagate for years with only one failure and it cooked itself.
 
About the only good thing I can say about Seagate drives, is that out of the many that have failed on me, almost all have done so in a way that allowed me to retrieve data from them before they totally died. In some cases I've even been able to simply transfer the partition off the old drive onto the new drive making it a really easy transition.
 
Been happy with my 6 ST3000DM001 (pulled from external cases) for the last couple years... but like dresherjm said it is a small sample size so I may have just been lucky. It's about time to upgrade anyways and I've been looking at the 4TB HGST drives. Never been tied to a specific manufacturer... but I still have heartburn thinking about going back to WD after bad experiences with both WD Green and RE2 drives...
 
SirMaster said:
But why does it have to be that I'm lucky. Maybe cinjun was unlucky?
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Not possible. There would be too much unlucky guys, as cinjun is not the only one.

Adding my 2 cents, here's the list of hard drives I used in my desktop-server system. The system is on 24/7 and there is always some activity. I built it about 5 years ago, but some of the drives were purchased later, the youngest drive must be about 3 years old.

10xHitachi - all still alive with ideal smart
3xSeagate - 2 died, 1 alive with lots of reallocated sectors
1xWD VelociRaptor - still alive with ideal smart
1xSamsung - still alive with ideal smart
1xToshiba 2.5" - still alive with ideal smart

Now this can't be just luck.
 
There might be other things to think about in relation to this.

About 2 years ago i ordered 14 x ST3000DM001 - 7 for myself and 7 for a friend of mine.

To this date, i have 0 SMART errors and 0 issues with the 7 drives that i have, my friend however has replaced all of his due to a mix of SMART errors and dead drives.

Im thinking it might be due to a power supply feeding them dirty power or something like that, but i honestly have no clue, i just feel that its worth mentioning.

So far, i have no issues with Seagates..
 
tsrtg said:
Not possible. There would be too much unlucky guys, as cinjun is not the only one.
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How is it not possible?

The latest backblaze numbers were 15.7% for their 3846 2 year old ST3000DM001's.

If I have 6 disks then in order to see 1 failure in 2 years that would equate to a 16.66% failure rate for me.

Since the average on a scale that's 641x larger than mine the failure rate seen was 15.7% I would argue that you have to be unlucky (below the average) to see even 1 failure in 6 disks.

I am not lucky, I am the expected, the norm, I am within the same % that backblaze found.

cinjun on the other hand was probably unlucky since he saw 3 failures in 2 months.

He would have to have 19 drives and see 3 failures in 2 years to match the 15.7% that backblaze is seeing. If he has less drives or sees more failures than that then he is well above the average and that's unlucky.

If 3 failures in 2 months is not unlucky and rather is "normal", then backblaze would have seen a much, much higher failure percentage in their larger dataset.

Or look at is this way.

Lets say instead of backblaze having all 3846 drives lets imagine that 3846 people all got 1 seagate drive each.

Now we would expect the same failure rate that backblaze saw so that means that 15.7% of the people would see their disk fail in 2 years and 84.3% of the people would not see their disk fail.

Are you saying that the 84.3% of people are just lucky that their drive didn't fail and the 15.7% of people who's drive did fail are "normal"?

To me it seems like the 84.3% of people who did not see a failure represent the "normal" and the 15.7% of people who saw their drive fail were unlucky. 15.7% is too much unlucky guys?

I would say that 84.3% of people is way too many people to call "lucky" since it's the same probability to be lucky or unlucky.
 
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SirMaster said:
Are you saying that the 84.3% of people are just lucky that their drive didn't fail and the 15.7% of people who's drive did fail are "normal"?

To me it seems like the 84.3% of people who did not see a failure represent the "normal" and the 15.7% of people who saw their drive fail were unlucky. 15.7% is too much unlucky guys?

I would say that 84.3% of people is way too many people to call "lucky" since it's the same probability to be lucky or unlucky.
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Heh, this reminds me the eternal debate between optimists and pessimists: is the glass half empty or half full? As a natural pessimist, I would not hesitate to characterize one's presence among the 84.3% of people as "lucky". Even though technically (and statistically) speaking you are absolutely right.
 
After reading the blackblase report I was quite glad I chose HGST for my ESIx AIO and only using Seagate as a datapool backup (they were left over drives from previous builds)
 
fishie said:
There might be other things to think about in relation to this.

About 2 years ago i ordered 14 x ST3000DM001 - 7 for myself and 7 for a friend of mine.

To this date, i have 0 SMART errors and 0 issues with the 7 drives that i have, my friend however has replaced all of his due to a mix of SMART errors and dead drives.

Im thinking it might be due to a power supply feeding them dirty power or something like that, but i honestly have no clue, i just feel that its worth mentioning.

So far, i have no issues with Seagates..
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To counterbalance this thread, me neither.

I have 20 x ST4000DM000 that I've run 24/7 without issue since I purchased them last year. Though they have mostly only been written to once until they were full, but they get a lot of reading.

I also have a number of other Seagate drives, from 7-8 years old and upwards, 500GBs, 1TBs, 2TBs. Some of the oldest are even IDE. None have failed yet. Knock on wood. ;)
 
I always been a bit weary of Seagate but never realized they were THAT bad. There was a report by Google which showed they had higher failure rates, now Backblaze, and just general reports from people.

They sure have a terrible track record lol. SAN/ mass storage manufacturers love high failure rates though, because they can charge an arm and a leg for replacements past the warranty, and you can't just go buy any drive as they'll typically have a custom firmware. So maybe the bad failure rate is a deal between mass SAN makers and Seagate. :p
 
blog-fail-drives-manufactureX.jpg


4TB Seagates > 3TB WD's
 
cinjun said:
I'm RMAing my 3rd Seagate drive in 2 months. Had two zpools, one will a mix of WD's and seagates, and one with seagates only. Two drives in the seagate only pool failed, and now the only seagate in the WD pool is failing. Never again seagate, never again.
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2 drives are statistically meaningless. And we don't know if there's something else about your hardware configuration that could have exacerbated the problem - power supply, temps, loose power connector etc. 2 drives are extremely unlikely to fail at the same time, which suggests there was some other issue.

cinjun said:
Spend the extra money guys and buy WD's.
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No thanks. Could tell the same "never again" tales of my own about WD Greens failing left and right years ago, but I know its pointless.
 
Out of my 8x hitachi 5k3000, 6 failed or had a lot of errors.

Now i moved to seagate, my 4tb have been running for a year, no smart error or bad sectors, scaned monthly with stablebit scanner, all solid strong for almost a year, crossing fingers.

Hard drives is luck, into how they handle them to you, even if they boot fine, error might show over time... life isn't black n white with hdds, i used to swear by brands... until 2 raptors and 1 wd black failed on me, then i moved to hitachi 6 of 8 failed on me.... now im with seagate, and probably will grab some wd reds sometime in the future, grab whatever you like, all will fail, so backup, and try not to be brand centric, grab whatever fit your needs and budget.... that all i can suggest.
 
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