Oppressed

Well I swapped the Seagates out for the WD green drives (WD20EADS 2TB). I pre-cleared both drives over the weekend without incident and copied over almost a terabyte of 1080p video. I have been streaming since without a hiccup so it appears that the drives were the culprit. Some other observations...During file transfer I am getting about 40MB/sec as opposed to the 15 I was getting with the faulty drives and there is no pausing. I cannot hear the new drives at all; they are dead silent. The Seagates (when working) are about 20% faster and slightly cooler than the WD drives. That said, the WDs are plenty fast and I'll take consistency over speed that I don't even utilize any day of the week. I hope someone finds this thread helpful and I'd like to reiterate that I was probably unlucky and bought a couple of drives from a bad batch (both faulty Seagates had the same manufacturer date and almost identical serial numbers). So... 1. Don't buy a lot of hard drives at the same time from the same outlet. 2. Pay attention to your system and as a whole (transfer speeds, hiccups, noises). 3. Learn to use and interperate SMART, logs, the search button on this forum. 4. ALWAYS Pre-clear your drives. 4. Individually, threads like these do not provide statistically relevant data and should not be used in your decision as to which drive to go with. Thanks for all the help!

Sounds like exactly what I'm experiencing. As I said, despite the clicking and pausing the replacement drive appears perfectly normal. SMART tests come back clean, no syslog events, and I can stream without a hitch. But in my experience clicking=bad and when I hear from people like betaman who are having no problems at all it makes me want to drop the RMA hammer. I'm quite frustrated. Last night I hooked up another power supply and moved the drives to different SATA ports with no luck. It is possible that the motherboard is bad (GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2) but I doubt it. I have 2 Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB drives arriving tomorrow. If they both Preclear and function properly I will conclude that the Seagates are defective. Also, this thread is in no way meant to bash Seagate. I've never been a fanboy of any particular drive manufacurer. I picked the Seagates because from what I've read they are faster, consume less power, and were cheaper than the WD greens. That said, for my purposes (streaming mp3, 1080p) any modern SATA drive is more than fast enough. Regardless of whether my recent experiences with Seagate are the exception or the norm I cannot help but have my confidence shaken if 2/3 drives I've received are indeed bad. We'll see tomorrow.

That's disappointing, I have many old Seagates around and they're great. When I bought the drive I noticed that several people on Newegg are reporting similar "click of death" issues but I attributed it to bad luck/bad batch. I'll let everyone know how it goes after I try the new PSU.

I have seen those threads, that is what prompted me to shuffle my cables around. I've tried two different sata cables. I have a spare power supply around the house so I'll give that a shot I guess. I find 2/3 new drive failures suspicious. Especially since the SMART report shows nothing unusual for the clicking drive.

Greetings all, I've just built a new server and decided to go with two of the Seagate 2tb drives (ST32000542AS Barracuda LP). One of the drives was VERY noisy, making clicking/clunking noises. When I tried copying data to it I got very low speeds over my gigabit network (about 5MB/sec) and every minute or so the drive would start going CLICK pause CLICK pause for up to 10 seconds and the transfer would freeze. It would also do this during streaming which caused hiccups in video/audio. An extended SMART test failed and I had about 10 bad sectors (the other drive checked out fine). So...I got a replacement drive. The new drive is very quiet and my transfer speeds went up to 30-40MB/sec when transferring files. Extended SMART report passed and shows no bad sectors or other problems and the syslog is clear. However, when transferring files to the drive I get the exact same CLICK pause CLICK pause thing. It happens less often than the first drive and does not happen during streaming so I haven't seen any hiccups but I'm not ok with clicking hard drives. I've tried switching sata/power cables with no luck. The only thing I have left to try is a new PSU. Does anyone have any suggestions? I really like the ST32000542AS on paper but after experiencing a 2/3 failure rate I'm strongly considering dumping them and going with the Western Digital 2tb green drives. Thanks!