tomhudson's Journal: Seagate ate *another* RAID 1 33
Yes, 2 more Seagate drives, 2 more failures. So now I have 4 bad Seagate drives.
I figured that, since Seagate was going to be half-way decent (after a bit of haggling) over the two new drives that failed, I'd use the long weekend to try out openSUSE 10.3 - so I bought 2 more Seagate drives, exact same make and model, from a different supplier.
An hour ago, one of the drives started making funny noises
Seagate 320 gig hard drives - ST320620A - avoid them like the plague!
Its pretty bad when I have to depend on the out-of-warranty +10,000 hours operating time Western Digital 250 gig that's been running in that same box for the last 3 years, because 4 brand new Seagate drives are just so much crap!
Well, look on the bright side
Still, what a way to waste 2 days of work on a long weekend
In the meme poll spirit... (Score:2)
2. Originate/Instigate class-action lawsuit for lost time and/or data.
3. PROFIT!!!!
(4. Remember your friends)
I'd say something about a beowulf cluster-f of these things, but we've all seen trash heaps before...
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What are the odds that 4 out of 4 drives would fail, from two different retailers? The only thing they have in common is the make and model. Its certainly not my computer, because the Western Digital is still chugging along, with over 10,000 hours on it.
At this point, I just want my money back ... I definitely *don't* want any more Seagate drives.
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But the waste of time really is a shame. (having
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I *tried* to purchase different batches, but from the model numbers, it looks like they were made on the same day. If it were a car, I'd say it was made on a Monday ...
I could have bought a cheap new tower for what I've spend on drives, or for $50 more, a new laptop.
I brought back the second set of drives to the other retailer Friday - now I remember why I haven't dealt with them in 5 years. Their only answer was to run the extended SMART diagnostics (and come back in 4 hours). They're a Windws-only sh
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Holy crap (Score:2)
On a slightly more than tangentially related note, I've got a Samsung 120 GB SATA drive that has been having major problems. I bought it in early September, and since then, I've been having all kinds of problems with files getting corrupted and having to run chkdsk, including a total disaster that forced me to reinstall Windoze from scratch. I have discovered that m
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If you can boot off a linux cd-rom,
You'll see stuff like the number of errors, etc.
Google's studies show that the thing to look for is the raw read error rate and the number of "misses". All the drives that failed have raw read error rates in the hundreds of millions (one has over a billion), which is bad for drives that have, in 2 cases, 1 day of use.
Noise (rattling, hi
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By the way, I was mistaken about the source of the rattling. It appears my Samsung SATA drive is not rattling.
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There's something I'm not understanding here. What good does it do to install the programs on other drives? Once you lose the Windoze drive, you lose the registry, and so even though the executables and support files are all on the other drives, you still have to reinstall everything, or Windoze won't recognize those programs. A
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Gotta be that model (Score:2)
I remember a few years ago losing all three new 60GB IBM DeskStars within 40 days of purchase. They were popularly known as IBM DeathStars, and word was all over the web that the DeathStars made in Hungary were crap (over 60% failure rates!) Perhaps yours were made in the "wrong" factory, o
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I've still got two 160's, one in China, one in Singapore... both working ADMIRABLY, in fact they often outperform my Maxtor/WD's in speed both on writes and 'moves/copies'...
They're WAY out of warranty...
MAXTOR:
I have on the other hand, had 3 Maxtors die on me, (got refurbished warranty replacements that are working fine... strange that.)
WESTERN DIGITAL:
I've yet to have problems with WD's,
IBM:
I've had two IBM Deskstar GXP65's and one GXP75 die on me within months of receiving them.
Speaking of IBM dr
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I had an old 80 meg Western Digital that, after years and years of running, I stopped using the machine it was in (286/20). Just for the heck of it,I booted it up a few years ago before junking it, and it still ran fine.
I had an old Seagate (340 meg) in a 386 that never caused any problems.
Maxtor, on the other hand, sometimes is DOA. The place I used to work at, it was always the Maxtors that I would RMA.
Western Digital - my home box - I've had one 160 gig fail (its not "really" dead, just started to
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As for hard drives. I had a big maxtor die on me, it was my backup drive in college. I must've lost a good 100 gigs of media and at least another 70 gigs of random miscellany, some comp sci work, some god only knows what it may have been...
We call that lesson two things... "expensive" and "learned"
Started ba
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I've got most everything backed up. The most important stuff was several years worth of email, which I tarballed and stuck on a 2 gig usb key.
funny how, in the great scheme of things, the one thing I would absolutely not want to lose is my email. Code I can always replicate (and probably improve at the same time), but email ...
That definitely sucks... (Score:1)
OTOH I've had a pretty good run with them. I have 6 320GB Seagates, all about 2 years old and not one problem with them. I also have 8 750GB Seagates and a few smaller Seagate disks.
It could be that my disks have been sourced from different factories than yours.
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From the other comments posted, it may be because they're now making them in China instead of Thailand, Malaysia, etc. Not one of the 4 has lasted more than a day without starting to give problems ... that's seriously screwed up.
Even though they wre bought at 2 different stores (and not the same company), the serial numbers tell a different story:
f
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A year or two ago, I had a serious run of bad Maxtor drives - 'bad' as in 'entire room full of machines losing HDDs in a few months'. (To add insult to injury, their 'warranty' system entailed international mail, at our expense; as it happens for these drives, that cost only a tin
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The last digit in the serial numbers could be a check-digit, meaning the disks are even closer together. Even though you purchased them from different retailers, the two retailers most likely get them from the same distributor. There is a good chance my disks come from a different batch/factory.
When I get a chance to open up my machines I will try to find out where my disks were made - that shouldn't be too far off, I have to
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I hadn't thought of the check digit. If the last one is a check digit, they're only 4,887 units apart.
These were made in China. As another poster pointed out, its probably Maxtors' old factory. I knew that Seagate had bought Maxtor, but I didn't think they were so stupid as to try to get away with rebadging Maxtor drives. None of the Maxtor drives over 40 gig have ever lasted to the end of their 3-year warranty period. To expect these to go 5 years is unrealistic.
I've been following this sordid saga for a while.. (Score:1)
At least their warranty repair service is relatively hassle-free.
Re:I've been following this sordid saga for a whil (Score:2)
It may be just that particular model, since some of the other drive sizes may have been sourced from a different factory. Its just my bad luck. I had wanted to pick up a couple of 500 gig drives, but the first retailer didn't have any more in stock (they had sold the last two that morning), so I ended up taking the smaller drives.
My original plan had been to buy two 500 gigs, install them as a raid1, and after a month, buy 2 more 500 gig drives as a second raid1. This way, I would have /, /usr, /var, /et
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And I've seen the results of one case firsthand that was blamed as a HD failure, but since the data was randomly striped (many files had parts of
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I wouldn't use a hardware raid controller - they're too limiting in what you can do, esp. in terms of recovery when you're running raid5 and the controller/motherboard dies, and the manufacturer is out of business (saw a scenario like that a month ago). Also, these are pata, not sata. The WD on the same controller as one drive is still working, and so is the dvd on the other controller. Its definitely the drives. When they make funny noises after less than a days' operation, and smartclt shows an ever-incr
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I personally like seagates, and have had very little trouble with them over the years. Fujitsu was another that had near zero problems, although that was a much smaller data set. Maxtors do tend to fail, and are the drive with the largest number of failures. WD is too noisy, and generally too hot, althou
Great (Score:1)
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Unnerving (Score:2)
I also have 2 Maxtor 40GB drives that are 5 years old now and despite be
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I would settle for audible clicking noises at this point :-)
I thought the 320 was a weird number also. If the first retailer had had 500s in stock, I'd have bought them. Heck, for what I've spent for 4 defective drives, I could have bought a couple of 750 gig drives, or thrown in another $50 and bought a new cheap laptop or desktop.
To say I'm disappointed is an understatement.