ANOTHER seagate drive failure! Now 4 drives replaced!
 

A little more than a month after a previous failure, yet another drive has failed.

I've now had...

* 1 drive DOA - replaced
* 1 drive failed within 24 hours - replaced
* 1 drive failed with bad sectors last month - replaced
* 1 drive failed with bad sectors yesterday - will be replaced

This brings the total to 4 failed drives out of 8 (once it's replaced). In other words, out of my original purchase of 4, all have needed to be replaced. A 100% failure rate!!!!!

More fucking around with RMAs, finding suitable packaging, paying postage, and waiting for the replacement while my system chugs along with a degraded array...

I am SO glad I chose to set up RAID, at least there has been no data loss and I can continue using the PC in the meantime (although I'll be taking it easy, and doing more regular backups)

:censored :censored :censored

For those curious about cooling and power, I don't think it's that... I'm using a Coolermaster Stacker with fan cooled bays, and a 500W PSU. The hardware configuration has been static for over a year so I'm at a loss to explain the most recent two failures. Maybe I should have just returned the lot after the first two failures. :mad:

ouch, that sucks man :-/

fuck seagate. my 200GIG backup crashed 2 weeks ago. I'm still trying to recover shit off that Baracuda drive with Kernel software

...if it's a backup then why do you need to recover data?...

sometimes you simply get unlucky, unfortunately. Many more failures however, and I'd start to take a look at your environment. Your failure rate definitely falls outside of the curve a tad :)

In a hosting operation, we have thousands of Seagate drives in production. We also have thousands of Maxtor drives previously deployed in production before our wholesale switch to Seagate. Maxtor has a somewhat higher historical failure rate than our Seagate drives in production - but in the end it's pretty close. The factor in choosing Seagate (before the maxtor was bought) was due to both the 5 year warranty vs. 1 year, and the fact that Seagate tended to be on the upper end of the performance and technology curve.

Seagate has been great in our book, lower than "average" failure rate, and RMA procedures that are simple to do bulk returns with. Hard drives should always be treated as something that is about to fail - as that is exactly what they are.

I also strongly urge keeping a spare disk around for your array :) A drive is much more likely to fail during the rebuild process, as that is when they are the most stressed. When you get into 15+ disk arrays, you start to see interesting mathematical probability issues - such as uncorrectable error rate per million sector reads. Doing the math someday can be a pretty wide eye opener.

Ah well, good luck!

If I had known that 4 drives were going to fail within 18 months I would have purchased a fifth drive as a spare. :) Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to buy the same model now... and given these issues I'm not sure I'd want to. :disgust

sounds like an outside variable.

don't think it's HDs per se.

check easy stuff first, overheating, bad fan(s), line surges, line spikes, other conditions on same household circuit (like air cond cycling on and off).

good luck.

ive had a bunch of seagates arrive DOA or die within the first 5 minutes.. but i have yet to have one fail after that point (knock wood) - probably have 60 seagates between 250 and 750gb

Drives are sassy.. so I don't do backups at all but a few progs, installers, pics. Let it be... I am a fatalist. ;)

Content was on it.

yeah, with that many drives failing, you really should look at the other stuff around them. Failures and bad sectors can often occur with power spikes. You might want to make sure you have a good line conditioner / power controller so that you aren't getting any AC spikes. You may also want to closely monitor things like DC power, internal case temp at the drives, etc. You may even want to install an additional fan to suck air away from the hard drives.

We use Seagate drives in all our new computers. Rarely have one go bad

wow.. that's seems fishy

Hope you figure it out

Check the power supply. I would bet money yours is 1. underpowered for the devices your attaching to it or 2. Just plan bad. List all the devices running off the power supply and the power supplies output.

Sorry to hear. I've have nothing but good experiences with Seagate.

Now Western Digital... That's a whole other story.

I second double checking your power supply.

And i 3rd that, low voltage is one of the main reason for failures on hardware

Great post :thumbsup

one of my 500 gig drives just died.. I have not even has time to pull it out of the computer yet.. but tomorrow I will pull it and see what type it is..

this shit makes me nervous. Ive had 2 WD drives crash, luckily (knocking on wood) ive never had a problem with Maxtor or Seagates 300GB or below.

Ive learned from my mistakes and I back up my back ups regularly. I bought a HDD case from frys for $80 and holds up to 4 HDD up to 1TB. Its easy to copy and move to the other drives

Are they striped, mirrored, or both? If they are just striped then the chances of data loss are actually much greater since any single drive failure will render the array unreadable.

I've replaced the 550W PSU with an 850W one. Let's hope this is the last failure.

Phil's post is right on. You also might want to consider looking at your case and power supply. If the case isn't cooled properly that could contribute to a hard drive failure. Also, if it's a bad power supply regulating voltages that could lead to hard drive failure. Most likely, if all the drives were purchased in a lot it's probably a bad lot due to shipping - I've had that before on a lot of 10 drives I purchased once. They must have played football at UPS with it or something...
Brad

I've used and abused a LaCie drive for about a year or more and never had a problem with it.

Bad story. I am using Western Digital and it works fine for me.

Hi Brad,

3 out of the 4 were purchased on the same day, but they were manufactured in 3 different factories (countries even). Still, it's possible they were delivered on the same truck later in their travels... or at least handled by the same "players" :)

In terms of cooling, they're in a full tower with a dedicated 120mm fan for each of 3 HDs (two bays in total), plus an additional 4 chassis fans. Their cases run cool to the touch.

I've (hopefully) pre-empted the next failure by replacing the PSU, see a few posts above. I have also placed the PC on a dedicated UPS. If a HD fails again after incurring these additional costs then I'll be taking it further...

For over 15 years, I've bought nothing but Western Digitals for my home use..

And in all that time, i've only had one drive crash on me... one.

And that one was a 420 meg after about 12 years of constant use.

I'm a loyal Western Digital and Logitech man.

:2 cents:

Never had problems with them

I've never had a problem with Seagate drives. And the Seagate drives I have are their betas (Lots of Family Members that are engineers for Seagate). So long story short, I'm using Seagate HD's that have been beat to hell and I've had no problems. It has to be something else if you're going through HDs like that!!

I had a similar problem 4 drives failed within 18 months..............the culprit Power Supply

I have something like 10 Western Digital drives and never had a problem. Drives will fail more easily if they get too much heat, so manufacturer is probably something to think about -- but the heat! Keep things cool. Your equipment will be all the better for it.

I have had the totally opposite experience. I will never buy a Maxtor again and WD's have been good to me (knock on wood).

Also,

I also have an exhaust fan on my computer, a voltage regulator and surge suppression. No spikes get to my computer. I have had the thing still on during lightning storms. The regulator chatters but, the machine never burped.