lpq's Journal: Another Seagate drive goes belly up -- 3 in 2 months

GRR....woke up this morning to an evil email about another drive gone dead. Another 750G SATA. That's my 3rd Seagate SATA drive gone dead in the past 2 months 1-750G in Dec., 1-1T at beginning of Jan, and another 750G this morning...

What is this?? I been adding more fans & cooling when my 400GB Seagates went out after only ~30 months (out of a 5 year warrantee, but I don't care about warrantee, I want them to last, not be replaceable!). My idle drives maybe run in the 30-35C range, under load I try to keep them under 40C -- have alerts set for 38C. So I'm pretty sure these latest drives have maintained their cool. I *still* have a 750G ATA drive that's running 'fine'...That scares me -- But outlasting all of them are some 15K SCSI drives that I know have run hot in the past before they got dedicated cooling fans (didn't realize how warm they got and that case fans weren't enough). But the 15K SCSI's are running at twice the speed -- yet they are lasting 4-5 years or more (I replace drives before fail when I can -- at the first sign of a sector remap).

But the sector/track remapping, that's adds another question. Am I to believe that one the 750GB went to getting some unreadable sectors before fail, but it was less than a year old -- died it run out of spare tracks and sectors? I thought it should be able to handle some failures before exposing bad sectors to the user -- and allocate spare blocks. Two out of three 400, and 1 out of the 2 750GB drives showed unrecoverable sector read errors that I couldn't get rid of by reformatting or overwriting the partition or files. I'd hope that a write would remap a known bad sector -- back 5-10 years ago, hmmm....I think I had more IBM/Hitachi drives -- so maybe that's the difference. Looks like Seagate is going down hill in quality fast -- but this all seems to have happened since they purchased MAXTOR -- almost as if Maxtor's low quality disks were being sub'ed in for Seagate drives?

I had something similar happen on my Seagate 1TB -- it was a retail box, but inside was a OEM model 1TB disk -- the serial numbers MATCHED, but the model numbers did not. Fry's eventually took it back because I argued it was an open-box when I bought it and it could have been switched -- but both the Fry's person and I suspected the switch had happened at the Seagate factory -- which the Fry's person was still willing to 'cover', since they'd sold me a drive, fraudulently (in retail, 5-yr warrantee box, but with OEM-no warrantee disk inside).

Maybe this is someone at Seagate giving Fry's a bad deal due to the Fry's payola scandal. Seems trite, but someone might have been out for some payback.