Seagate Drives

[MartinD]

I bought a small number of 500GB Barracuda ES drives in August last year for various reasons and I've just opened the very last two for use in one of those new atoms.

Both drives, despite being brand new, are clicking away like mad and clearly have faults. Was going to return them directly with Seagate but turns out they're OEM drives so I have to deal with the Vendor instead - some seller on Amazon.

Anyone else had issues with Seagate drives like this?

 

[drmike]

Yes sir.

This is why I won't buy Seagates any longer.

I have a total of 4 drives sitting here on my desk which are in various states of failure.  2 are USB 3.5 models and 2 are 3.5 desktop versions -- all 1TB or greater.

All have little to no use on them.

One I clearly unpacked and installed (had in storage closet for over year) - copied data to it and within 24 hours mass malfunctions.

Pitiful 1 year warranty on these drives mean I am SOL.

Clicking going on with 1 out of the 4 units.  Another randomly clicks.

4 drives doesn't sound like much, but these were all retail purchases at different times and what I have for home office.  Retailer is national big chain and otherwise fine with equipment.

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

They have always been problem children for us.  Practically every issue we've had with an array on one of our Storage nodes was promptly followed by "goddammit Seagate".

 

[blergh]

I use normal barracuda's in my desktop-arrays without much issues, I had errors with unwritable sectors on one drive and had to replace it (sub 2k hours on it). The clicking is probably related to firmware, try checking the firmware and if so update it and see if the clicking goes away.

 

[Virtovo]

Not sure I'd be comfortable sticking a clicking drive in after a firmware update.  Although would be interesting to see if that fixes it.  Blergh, what issues have you seen a firmware update fix with regards to clicking?

As for the drives, how many did you order initially?  From your description sounds like a high fault rate.  I'd be asking where the seller sourced them from and also if anything happened to them in transit.  How are the others performing for you?  Showing any errors? 

 

[MartinD]

I'm firing them back via RMA. Haven't had any issues with 1TB's just 500's - it's all a bit odd.

 

[coreyman]

Yea I've only ever had 1TB barracudas and not had any issues from them.

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

I'm firing them back via RMA. Haven't had any issues with 1TB's just 500's - it's all a bit odd.

The 'half values' seem to be where the issues are.  500G/1,5T end up being trouble, but 1T/2T are smooth as can be (the 1,5Ts are what gave us so many issues with the storage nodes).

 

[DomainBop]

The 'half values' seem to be where the issues are.  500G/1,5T end up being trouble, but 1T/2T are smooth as can be (the 1,5Ts are what gave us so many issues with the storage nodes).

+1 There was at least one 1.5 TB model that had a tendency to fail with certain RAID configurations and the Seagate forums/newsgroups were full of complaints about it.  word of warning: the majority of older servers with 1.5TB drives on Hetzner's serverbidding.com are using this model.  Nothing but problems with the 1.5 TB ones...

The only Seagate drives I'm currently using are 3TB drives/ST3000DM001 (at Hetzner) and I haven't had any problems yet with those.

 

[raindog308]

The problem with Seagate returns is...you get another Seagate.

For home, I've been buying WD Black (5-year warranty) or WD Green for archive/storage/backup.

 

[mhosts]

Proud to say we have a decent collection of expensive coasters! Some were even still under warranty but it's not worth the shipping cost to get another.

Western Digital, Samsung & Intel have been our best track record in the past 3ish years.

 

[MikeIn]

I got my 2 TB barracuda, failed without even lasting for 1 month of use and with not a lot of hrs of in use!

Though the replacement drive I got (refurnished)  is working fine now, maybe 1/2 yrs now +- !

Also a very very old 160GB HDD of seagate, still works with bad sectors :|

 

[qps]

Some of the older generation Seagates were pretty bad.  However, the newer ones are very good.

We have far fewer failures with the newer generation Seagates than we did with some of the equivalent Western Digital or HGST models.  

Seagate is really good with RMAs.  They always send back the same model drive or better.  However, with WD or HGST, when you RMA the drive, they often send back a much lower model drive.  We've returned WD Black or RE and gotten back a WD Blue, or returned a Hitachi Ultrastar and gotten back a 10 year old first model available SATA drive.  They ship the oldest crappy model they have available for warranty replacements.  Makes the warranty that they include not really valid, as the replacement drive they send is almost always garbage.

 

[MartinD]

Hmm, my experience has been different. WD always send me a better drive than the one I'm returning, without fail.

 

[qps]

Hmm, my experience has been different. WD always send me a better drive than the one I'm returning, without fail.

It's been well documented that WD and HGST send back crappy replacement drives here in the US.  It might be different in other countries.

 

[rds100]

It seems warranties work in a different way where you guys live. Here i never have to send drives directly to Seagate, instead i return the bad drives to the supplier we bought them from. He then gives us the replacements.

And we are happy with Seagate.

The same goes for other hardware we buy - we return the deffective parts to the supplier we bought them from.

 

[mhosts]

Hmm, my experience has been different. WD always send me a better drive than the one I'm returning, without fail.

Same here... Have never received a lesser model from them on an RMA, ever.

 

[DaringHost]

We've generally had good luck with Seagate ST2000DM001's. I've seen one DOA drive and two die throughout the past year.

 

[Magiobiwan]

I've never had issues with Seagate drives (consumer level). Well, excluding a 160GB Laptop drive which suffered a bit of a fall, but I don't blame it. Desktop drives also have been okay. WD on the other hand... I have one 2.5" drive which did okay but I've relegated to non-use as I replaced it, but the desktop drives I've experienced have had issues. I haven't bought any new WD drives recently though. Toshiba drives suck though. 3 failures in a year and Toshiba kept giving me the same drive model. Everyone has different experiences though. I guess it depends on the drive batch you get!

 

[Profuse-Jim]

Seagate are horrible, we HAD to buy 2-3 cases worth due the WD fire a couple years ago and they're just sitting around as paper weights. We have hundreds of WD drives and haven't had any serious issues with them.