Anyone noticed 1 and 1.5tb hdd's seem to be much more unstable?

[adambeck7]

I've been looking at filling up my server w/ 1 or 1.5 tb hdd's but a lot of reviews i've been reading make them look much less reliable than the 750gb hdd's. i'm seeing more DOA's and crashing within the first few weeks. should i just go with the 750gb's or hasn't anyone else been seeing the same trend?

[Billped]

I have heard nothing about that.  Link?

 

 

Bill

[SSD]

It is pretty common to see lots of reports of DOAs on sites like newegg. A person that gets a DOA is much more likely to post than a person having no problems.  When the 750G came out we saw the same type of question you are asking.

 

Truth is that DOAs and other early failures are not uncommon on any new drive. It is good to run new drives through a good burn in period before adding it to your array.

 

I would go with the biggest drives I could.

[ilovejedd]

Check out Newegg. Lotsa DOA and infant mortality reports over there. Albeit, if you manufacture a million of these things, it's inevitable that some of them will fail and people with complaints are more likely to review than those with perfectly working drives.

 

There's a discussion regarding firmware issues with the Seagate 1.5TB AS drive on avsforum. Basically, the fault is pretty fatal if you're using it for a RAID array. I'm not sure how that will affect unRAID, though, since it's JBOD. It might be an issue during parity checks or writes, but so far, I haven't encountered an error yet. I've got a whole bunch of the 1.5TB drives on my unRAID array and I'm really hoping it doesn't go kaput.

[WeeboTech]

I noticed the significant DOA reports on newegg also. This is one of the major reasons I do not adopt the latest drives for a while. I'm usually one or models behind the curve of bleeding edge. I might try out a pair of drives, but never more then that at a time.

 

Notice from the AVS forum how there is report of loosing the whole array due to multple drive failures.

In my experience, when you buy a "lot" of these drives in one swoop the chances of multiple drive failures increases vs drives bought over time.

 

For unRAID we're slightly safer then allot of other RAID type, but the chance does exist.

 

Therefore I would recommend taking advantage of a sale or two, but limiting how many you purchase in one lot.

You could even try multiple vendors.  Spread your purchase around, grow incrementally or choose drives which have gone through a maturation cycle.

 

I've not had an issue with the 1TB Segate or 1TB WD Green drives. (Although 1 green drive was DOA, it happened to be re certified so I'm not counting that one).

 

[adambeck7]

looking around on newegg today and noticed they have WD Black drives now. the 640gb was only $10 more than their normal 640gb. these are the benchmark numbers one of the reviewers posted. compared to his old WD Raptor WD1500ADFD.

 

Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 (fresh install with all updates and drivers)

Intel D975XBX2 w/Intel Core 2 Duo E6600

FYI: this drive will format out to 596GB of usable space under NTFS

 

Minimum Transfer Rate

WD6401AALS: 59.4 MB/s

WD1500ADFD: 53.8 MB/s

 

Maximum Transfer Rate

WD6401AALS: 118.4 MB/s

WD1500ADFD: 83.9 MB/s

 

Average Transfer Rate

WD6401AALS: 98.0 MB/s

WD1500ADFD: 73.3 MB/s

 

Burst Transfer Rate

WD6401AALS: 125.4 MB/s

WD1500ADFD: 103.4 MB/s

 

 

anyone have one of these or can confirm the numbers? since the price per GB is about the same i might get a few of these rather than the 1.5 TB drives.

[GK20]

I have heard nothing about that.  Link?

Bill

 

some information

 

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1080005

 

BTW, i have 3 Seagate 1TB AS disks, so far so good.

 

[abq-pete]

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863

 

Seagate points to problems with specific firmware versions...

 

Regards,  Peter

[WeeboTech]

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&message.id=2771#M2771

[Lunatic]

I ordered 2x 1.5TB drives for my system. Both were model ST31500341AS, firmware SD17 as per the drives with issues.

 

I just RMA'd one of the drives because I have a lot of issues when setting up my unRaid array. Main problem was all the clicking noises coming from the drive. With the drive that I kept, I set it up as Disk1 with no Parity and I copied about 800Gb to it already. I have also streamed a few movies from it and so far everything is fine (knock on wood).

 

The vendor gave me a refund so I purchased a new drive which I'm expecting to arrive tomorrow and will install as Parity. Will see how it goes...

[Romir]

I have one SD17 which I've been a bit suspicious about, and unfortunately it's my parity drive. I'm in the process of removing it and trying a SD35 to see if that fixes the 8bmps parity writes. Having a 75mbps cache drive and moving data in the morning has masked the slow speeds nicely at least.

[abq-pete]

From a stock perspective, I received my last 1.5TB drive from Amazon and it was firmware SD37.  I was a bit concerned but after running SpinRite and parity checks several times, no problems have surfaced.

 

Regards,  Peter

 

EDIT:  I wrote SD35 when I meant SD37

[WeeboTech]

More on the subject matter here

Seems segate released a response to the situation.

 

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863

[jimwhite]

I received my last 1.5TB drive from Amazon and it was firmware SD35.  I was a bit concerned but after running SpinRite and parity checks several times,

 

Wow... that sounds like a three day procedure... 

[GK20]

 

latest news from Seagate

 

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=2879&view=by_date_ascending&page=21

 

[Jay_Z]

I have had 4 of the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 and 3 of them have failed, one doa out of box, one within a month and the third failed within 5 months ... not very good statistics.

 

On my latest, it seem to be spinning but not reading, it clicks to begin with (like a clock ticking, cccllllick, cccllllock, ccclllick, ccclllock) ... it will show in 'My Computer' after about 15 seconds but nothing can be accessed.  Trying to get some data off before I shoot this thing - or send it back for a replacement and give someone else the lousy replacement.

 

Not a firmware issue ... any suggestions to resolve or at least temporarily to get more data off drive??

 

Ugh, these things are BAD, very BAD!

[Joe L.]

I have had 4 of the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 and 3 of them have failed, one doa out of box, one within a month and the third failed within 5 months ... not very good statistics.

 

On my latest, it seem to be spinning but not reading, it clicks to begin with (like a clock ticking, cccllllick, cccllllock, ccclllick, ccclllock) ... it will show in 'My Computer' after about 15 seconds but nothing can be accessed.  Trying to get some data off before I shoot this thing - or send it back for a replacement and give someone else the lousy replacement.

 

Not a firmware issue ... any suggestions to resolve or at least temporarily to get more data off drive??

 

Ugh, these things are BAD, very BAD!

Is this drive in your unRAID array?

 

If it is, the easiest way to get data off it when it has failed is to unassign it and then start the array.  It will show up as missing and its contents will be simulated by parity in combination with all the other drives.

 

You can then copy its contents elsewhere.

[RobJ]

If it is in Windows, there are some free tools to access SMART data.  Try to get a SMART report for it, wherever it is.

 

In Windows, a damaged or clicking drive may perform differently from power up than from a soft reboot.  Does the clicking continue on, or is it about 7 periodic clicks to start with, after power up only?  You can also try the Windows Disk Manager to see if the MBR was read and partitions are visible.

[RobJ]

Also, there are many drives that have been at least partly recovered by tools like SpinRite, even some clicking drives.

[TSM]

Any hard drive you buy, a certain percentage of them are going to be duds.  True for any brand, any model.  You just have to hope you're one of the lucky ones.  And I take every review I read on Newegg with a grain of salt.  Many people that post negative reviews either don't fully understand the product they purchased, or don't know what they're doing.  The funniest ones are the poeple who list their tech level as very hight, but make a mistake only your Mother-In-Law would make. 

[Joe L.]

Think this through...

 

Do you think that drives with higher capacities... requiring much higher tolerances when positioning heads to read data, because the data is so tightly packed on the disk, might suffer errors more quickly from any mechanical mis-alignment or wear more than a drive with lower capacity and bits packed not a tightly together?

 

First generation of ANY capacity drive is likely to suffer from earlier failures than later generations.

 

Remember, there are ONLY two types of disk drives in the world...

 

No, not IDE and SATA...

 

The Two types are:

 

1.  Those disks that have already failed...

2.  And those disks that have not yet failed... but will... given a bit more time.  It is why we have unRAID arrays.

 

Joe L.

[fitbrit]

Of my 7 WD Green 1 TB drives, 3 have been DOA or died shortly after. One was a parity drive, and hence caused a ton of problems. That's the only datum point I have to offer. I still love the drives when they work, though.

[musicmann]

Just as a data point, I'm running 6x Western Digital GP 1TB, 1x Seagate 1TB, and 2x Seagate 1.5TB, and I have not had any issues. 

 

The WDs were put into service in November and December of 2007.  The 1TB Seagate was added in July 2008, and the 1.5TB Seagates were added in February 2009.  Other than the 1TB Seagate (my cache drive) most of the drives are spun down most of the time, but most of them (including the 1.5TBs) probably spin up at least once or twice a week...not sure if that's good or bad for wear. 

 

I remember having to upgrade the firmware on one or two of the Seagates.  So far, I haven't had any issues (other than some HPA-protected sectors that I am convinced is a mobo issue).

[Jay_Z]

This drive is being used in a Windows system.

 

It sounds like it spinning up and withing a few seconds (about the time you would hear it starting to read) it just makes a clicking noise about 11 times and then shuts back down.  It doesn't get recognized by the system.

 

Just trying to determine if there is any options to try and recover any info off this - especially since it doesn't get to a point at which it's recognized (would make it impossible to use any software for data recovery, right?).

 

 

As I mentioned, just on the topic of reliability, this has certainly been the case for me - 3 out of 4 have failed.  I certainly don't have any faith for the remaining drive!

 

 

If it is in Windows, there are some free tools to access SMART data.  Try to get a SMART report for it, wherever it is.

 

In Windows, a damaged or clicking drive may perform differently from power up than from a soft reboot.  Does the clicking continue on, or is it about 7 periodic clicks to start with, after power up only?  You can also try the Windows Disk Manager to see if the MBR was read and partitions are visible.

[SSD]

Most problems here are related to drive cabling, not drives themselves.  Cabling includes backplanes / docks from this perspective.  You should try hooking up the drive directly to a motherboard port and directly to a PSU connector (no splitters).  If it still fails replace the data cable, connect to a different port, and connect to a different PSU connector.  If that fails you can be pretty sure it is not the cabling.

 

Although I guess its possible that there could be a bad batch of drives and you could get a bunch of duds, I have never had this happen or seen this type of failure rate.  If I had so many go bad in such a short period of time I think I'd suspect the PSU or something environmental.