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A while back I bought six 1TB Seagate Baracudas. Every single drive failed within the warranty period; I RMAed them and got replacements. Every single replace

by Lazare 15y ago

A while back I bought six 1TB Seagate Baracudas. Every single drive failed within the warranty period; I RMAed them and got replacements. Every single replacement drive failed too. I RMAed a couple of them, and their REPLACEMENTS have now failed. I believe that's a 233% failure rate, and it would probably have been higher if I hadn't given up and just bought new (non-Seagate) drives. And before you ask - all drives were used normally in desktop machines, and they were kept cool[1]. I have no idea how widespread my experience was, but I've heard rumours of very high failure rates in some models of their 1TB drives. If so, I can understand them wanting to protect themselves from a repeat in the future. [1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/hard-drive-temperatures-be-afraid.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/hard-drive-temperat...

jamesaguilar 15y ago
233% failure rate isn't really a meaningful term. Did some of the individual disks fail more than once? I doubt it. One industry-standard term you might consider is "mean time between failures" or "mean time to failure".
- jws 15y ago
  The MTBF and MTTF has been so perverted by the drive vendors as to be useless. The 233% makes sense as "failures per purchased drive over 3 years". (or whatever period that is) Seagate is now using "Annualized Failure Rate" on their drives which is MTBF evaluated for the expected number of power on hours in a year (the first year). The Barracuda Green series gets the new one year warrantee, but boasts a 0.34% AFR in Seagate's specifications. That is on the order of only 1 drive in 100 failing over a 2 year period. Who in their right mind would cut their warrantee to one year if this was really the case?
  - ComputerGuru 15y ago
    AFR is fundamentally misleading. The percentages are compounding, and the probability of the drive failing "within this year" is only fixed if you restart your state machine. In reality, people don't look at whether the drive is going to fail "within the next year" but rather "this drive has failed and I've only had it for x years." MBTF may have been perverted by PR and marketing departments, but as a mathematical concept it is perfectly sound and indeed the ideal measure for failure rates. The solution isn't to make up a misleading statistic and label it as the new "easier to understand metric," while in reality most home users would feel royally screwed if their drive(s) failed within say 3 years of purchase. The solution is to stick to math and statistics and use mathematically-accepted derivations of MBTF that are rigorously upheld and pinned to an honest metric.
biturd 15y ago
I read that heat has yet to be proven to detriment a drive's life or performance within reason. Sure, 5000 degrees would be bad, but there apparently is no evidence that cooling drives matters. I can't source the article, but seem to recall is was google related with the data coming from their experience with drives in their data centers. It possibly could have come from BackBlaze, though that is a distant second. I used to run a small ISP, and found that I had a 10% failure rate on average of anything, before it was even used. Order 100 new servers, 10 will be dead on arrival. Order 1000 drives, 100 will be DOA. 100 network cables, all will work, that was about the only deviation. With drives, the failure rates were better, however, I never allowed drives to be put into use that were not internally "certified". I would use SoftRAID, which is a Macintosh application, though I am sure there are equivalent on Linux and Windows. While this is nothing more than software RAID for the Mac, many of my servers were not Macintosh. I didn't use the RAID capacity of the software, rather using the drive certification feature instead. It takes about 8 hours per 1TB drive to "certify" it. This will run through every sector on the drive, and make sure it is ok. The softwares ability to "predict" that a drive was about to fail, or susceptible to failure, was very good. I would never use a drive that didn't pass. One handy feature which I did run on non servers with the software, is that it can monitor the drive and tell me that is suspects failure to be imminent. This is not SMART, though SMART was a first line test, the software went deeper and logged aspects of the drive over time. Once I started doing this, drive failure went to near nothing. I can't really measure failure in percentage or time, as we would outgrow the capacity of the drive, or the server would be taken out of commission for a faster server before a failure ever happened. Those drives were then given to friends or sold. As a result, we never had an in use failure once we started using this method of testing. 42U worth of server space, with a mix of 1U, 2U, 4U, and a few 6U NAS's, plus switching gear. Do keep in mind, we were a small local ISP, and could take the time to perform these tests. Someone like BackBlaze has their system created in a way to deal with failure as part of the operation, and it would be a waste of time to perform these tests.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ComputerGuru 15y ago
powertower 15y ago
More than likely, you're destroying the drives yourself. Do you really think this is just all normal? I would guess that 95% of the people who experience repeated failed drive issues such as yours, are experiencing them because of power issues on your lines (voltage and AC fluctuations), or P/S problems. The other 5% are getting drives from the same bad lot #. I strongly suggest that you invest in either a voltage regulator or a power conditioning UPS.
- Lazare 15y ago
  I know, I know! That's the obvious explanation, right? And yet... 1) All three workstations with the Seagate drives have seen constant failure of Seagate drives. They have different brands of motherboard and power supplies, and checking system and HDD temperature shows nothing unusual (ignoring, for the moment, if temperature even matters). 2) All the computers in the office without the Seagate drives - but on the same power circuit - have seen no hard drive failures. At all. And some of the affected workstations had additional non-Seagate drives, including some ancient old IDE drives. None of the "extra" drives failed either. 3) Not long after the first round of failures, we noticed some power quality issues in the office. I purchased a fairly high-end Liebert UPS which solved the power quality issues, but didn't seem to change the Seagate issues. 4) As WD drives were purchased and swapped into the three affected workstations, the failures seemed to stop. Some of the WD drives have now been in service for significantly longer than some of the failed Seagate drives. Of course, none of that proves anything, but the obvious explanations don't seem applicable. My guess is that my first half dozen drives were from a bad lot #, and the remaining drives were some mix of: * Also from a bad lot # * Damaged in shipping * Were improperly refurbished * Failed due to sheer random coincidence I'm pretty sure I didn't break the drive which was dead on arrival from Seagate, if nothing else. :-) If you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them though. We were using RAID 1, and had backups to boot, so we didn't lose any data, but it was still quite a pain. If there's something I can do to stop it happening again, I'd love to hear it.
pasbesoin 15y ago
I believe (some of) their 1 TB models were known to suffer from what became known as "the click of death" -- the problem was that prominent.

by Lazare 15y ago

jamesaguilar 15y ago

233% failure rate isn't really a meaningful term. Did some of the individual disks fail more than once? I doubt it. One industry-standard term you might consider is "mean time between failures" or "mean time to failure".

jws 15y ago
The MTBF and MTTF has been so perverted by the drive vendors as to be useless. The 233% makes sense as "failures per purchased drive over 3 years". (or whatever period that is) Seagate is now using "Annualized Failure Rate" on their drives which is MTBF evaluated for the expected number of power on hours in a year (the first year). The Barracuda Green series gets the new one year warrantee, but boasts a 0.34% AFR in Seagate's specifications. That is on the order of only 1 drive in 100 failing over a 2 year period. Who in their right mind would cut their warrantee to one year if this was really the case?
- ComputerGuru 15y ago
  AFR is fundamentally misleading. The percentages are compounding, and the probability of the drive failing "within this year" is only fixed if you restart your state machine. In reality, people don't look at whether the drive is going to fail "within the next year" but rather "this drive has failed and I've only had it for x years." MBTF may have been perverted by PR and marketing departments, but as a mathematical concept it is perfectly sound and indeed the ideal measure for failure rates. The solution isn't to make up a misleading statistic and label it as the new "easier to understand metric," while in reality most home users would feel royally screwed if their drive(s) failed within say 3 years of purchase. The solution is to stick to math and statistics and use mathematically-accepted derivations of MBTF that are rigorously upheld and pinned to an honest metric.

biturd 15y ago

I read that heat has yet to be proven to detriment a drive's life or performance within reason. Sure, 5000 degrees would be bad, but there apparently is no evidence that cooling drives matters. I can't source the article, but seem to recall is was google related with the data coming from their experience with drives in their data centers. It possibly could have come from BackBlaze, though that is a distant second. I used to run a small ISP, and found that I had a 10% failure rate on average of anything, before it was even used. Order 100 new servers, 10 will be dead on arrival. Order 1000 drives, 100 will be DOA. 100 network cables, all will work, that was about the only deviation. With drives, the failure rates were better, however, I never allowed drives to be put into use that were not internally "certified". I would use SoftRAID, which is a Macintosh application, though I am sure there are equivalent on Linux and Windows. While this is nothing more than software RAID for the Mac, many of my servers were not Macintosh. I didn't use the RAID capacity of the software, rather using the drive certification feature instead. It takes about 8 hours per 1TB drive to "certify" it. This will run through every sector on the drive, and make sure it is ok. The softwares ability to "predict" that a drive was about to fail, or susceptible to failure, was very good. I would never use a drive that didn't pass. One handy feature which I did run on non servers with the software, is that it can monitor the drive and tell me that is suspects failure to be imminent. This is not SMART, though SMART was a first line test, the software went deeper and logged aspects of the drive over time. Once I started doing this, drive failure went to near nothing. I can't really measure failure in percentage or time, as we would outgrow the capacity of the drive, or the server would be taken out of commission for a faster server before a failure ever happened. Those drives were then given to friends or sold. As a result, we never had an in use failure once we started using this method of testing. 42U worth of server space, with a mix of 1U, 2U, 4U, and a few 6U NAS's, plus switching gear. Do keep in mind, we were a small local ISP, and could take the time to perform these tests. Someone like BackBlaze has their system created in a way to deal with failure as part of the operation, and it would be a waste of time to perform these tests.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ComputerGuru 15y ago

powertower 15y ago

More than likely, you're destroying the drives yourself. Do you really think this is just all normal? I would guess that 95% of the people who experience repeated failed drive issues such as yours, are experiencing them because of power issues on your lines (voltage and AC fluctuations), or P/S problems. The other 5% are getting drives from the same bad lot #. I strongly suggest that you invest in either a voltage regulator or a power conditioning UPS.

Lazare 15y ago
I know, I know! That's the obvious explanation, right? And yet... 1) All three workstations with the Seagate drives have seen constant failure of Seagate drives. They have different brands of motherboard and power supplies, and checking system and HDD temperature shows nothing unusual (ignoring, for the moment, if temperature even matters). 2) All the computers in the office without the Seagate drives - but on the same power circuit - have seen no hard drive failures. At all. And some of the affected workstations had additional non-Seagate drives, including some ancient old IDE drives. None of the "extra" drives failed either. 3) Not long after the first round of failures, we noticed some power quality issues in the office. I purchased a fairly high-end Liebert UPS which solved the power quality issues, but didn't seem to change the Seagate issues. 4) As WD drives were purchased and swapped into the three affected workstations, the failures seemed to stop. Some of the WD drives have now been in service for significantly longer than some of the failed Seagate drives. Of course, none of that proves anything, but the obvious explanations don't seem applicable. My guess is that my first half dozen drives were from a bad lot #, and the remaining drives were some mix of: * Also from a bad lot # * Damaged in shipping * Were improperly refurbished * Failed due to sheer random coincidence I'm pretty sure I didn't break the drive which was dead on arrival from Seagate, if nothing else. :-) If you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them though. We were using RAID 1, and had backups to boot, so we didn't lose any data, but it was still quite a pain. If there's something I can do to stop it happening again, I'd love to hear it.

pasbesoin 15y ago

I believe (some of) their 1 TB models were known to suffer from what became known as "the click of death" -- the problem was that prominent.