3 seagate drives failed within 3 months
 

In October 2005 I purchased 3 drives for a RAID5 array...

- one was DOA
- another reported a S.M.A.R.T event within 24 hours (imminent failure)

Both were replaced without fuss by the store I purchased them from.

Now another one has failed.

I thought I was being smart by setting up RAID5 - and I guess I was because it means I don't lose my data each time - but for fucks sake I think I chose the wrong brand and model. 3 drives either dead or on the way out in the space of 3 months.

Luckily I also bought an additional spare after the first two were replaced, so I can replace it immediately. FWIW they are seagate 300Gb SATA drives.

wow does that ever fucking blow.

Check your power supply???

what happend to them or what is happening?

http://media.sensationcontent.com/rowan/faileddrive.gif

:mad:


sfera: First was completely DOA (doesn't spin up), the second reported a S.M.A.R.T. event in the BIOS startup and then the array manager in 'doze, the third has been pausing intermittently over the past day or two and when I did a sector scan the array manager popped up to tell me it's fucked.

I dunno if it's worth complaining to Seagate to try to get a full refund and then go with another brand/model. Seems to be just too risky to continue with this model.

do you have a shitty cheap ass power supply?

make sure you've got enough cooling going on in there

i lost 3 WD drives at once when 2 of my fans died out, RAID 5 lost :(

Cooler Master 350W, came with the Cavalier case.

Computer itself is stable as a rock...

Your post makes me think that now is a good time to shut down and replace that drive. BBL. :winkwink:

What are the complete specs of the system?

Maybe the store you got them from got a bad batch? Seagate are some of the most reliable and quiet drives you can get.

Yeah I was gonna say how was the cooling, heat is the main cause of hard drive failure, but he said the drives failed right after he installed them so it doesn't apply.

bump up your power supply to 400w+ Antec or something... I had multiple drives on my system and it was underpowered, the drives were failing like dominos...

That just sucks. Hard drives make it hard to be a host these days, doesn't seem to matter what you buy they fail in large numbers. Best drives are really almost anything SCSI for quality or on the SATA side the Western Digital Raptor series which spins at 10k rpm and they just came out with a 150GB version, too. On the SATA side the drives we have had the best luck with has been Hitachi, quite a comeback after the days of IBM quality.

Brad

yup

god I love my 550 Watt Antec TruePower-II mmmmmmmmmmm

Same here, had a nice 400 running one of my systems, had 5 drives running raid and a 6th running system drive, plus the graphics etc... after lossing 2 drives in about a week upped the power to a 600 not a problem since.

Back again on my laptop...

Yeah, I think it's time to upgrade cases. I've been worrying about the location of one of the drives - sitting on its side out of direct airflow - so it wasn't much of a surprise to find out that was the one that had failed.

The PSU is proprietary so the only choice if I want less heat and more watts is to change case. Sucks because I bought it at the same time as the drives.

As for batches of drives - they are actually all different batches, made in different countries... China, Singapore, and Thailand. I thought this was great because it means there's less chance of multiple concurrent failures. Given that the average failure rate so far is one dud per month so maybe that's not so great. :winkwink:

damn bro..

My seagates have been running smooth so far

who cares about the drives. i'm just in this thread for jdavis' sig:

http://www.lofx.net/boobs.gif

never been a fan of seagate. Had 2 drives go back in 1 year. Switched the Maxtor and western digital.

3 consecutive harddisk drive failure sucks man. I am not familiar with seagate sata but i haven't experienced any failure from my seagate baraccuda.

The problem is that quality can vary over time, even from model to model.

For every person who says that they've had a shitload of consistent probs with brand X there will be plenty who say theirs are fine. I've used other Seagate drives before and never had any issues... the only other brand which has crashed recently (in the last 5 years) was an IBM Doorstop, err, Deskstar. I purchased it at a time when IBM was at or near the top of many people's recommendation list.

I'm backing up my entire RAID array contents at the moment because the storage manager is recognising the new drive as a "non-RAID hard drive" rather than accepting it as a replacement. It's supposed to be seamless, there's no way to manually force it to accept that as a new member. What the fuck else is going to go wrong today?

(The drive it's backing up to is also a Seagate. :winkwink: )

were all the drives plugged into the ide channel ? what motherboard were you using , not sure how many drives you have in the pc , but a 350watt psu should be right , most of the time you'll be lucky to hit 300watts

The "350 Watt" Rating isn't its actual power output, it is simply a MAx. For example on a 350 Watt Codegen the sustained power output is 185Watts, a 300 Watt is 165 Watts.

its not the wattage of the PSU that matters its the amps that really make the difference
A 400 or 550 Watt pSU will run more stabily, and run a lot cooler as it can supply the power to the components more efficiently, but it isn't always necessary.

If you have having power related problems, such as computer locking up, reboots when it feels like it won't turn on all the time, then its time to look at a new PSU, but if your comp is running fine. Then don't touch it

were all the drives plugged into the same ide channel ? what motherboard were you using , not sure how many drives you have in the pc , but a 350watt psu should be right , most of the time you'll be lucky to hit 300watts

check out this site to get an idea of power consumption that your pc uses
http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

damn didn't read that it was a raid setup
but as i saidif you are having power related problems, such as computer locking up, reboots when it feels like it won't turn on all the time, then its time to look at a new PSU, but if your comp is running fine. Then don't touch it

They are SATA drives (on individual ports), and the comp has been rock solid for the past 3 months. I've seen one blue screen in all that time. :)

It's probably more likely to be a heat related issue. It's a desktop case - rare these days, but I wanted that style because originally I was planning to stack 3 of them and that way they'll consume less of a footprint. The mistake I made was not realising that a desktop case has less room overall, which means that you can't simply stack the hard drives like you do with a tower. One is in the HD caddy (with a fan directly blowing onto it), one is in a 5 1/4" drive bay (still has good airflow) and one is on the side of the chassis with only a vent as airflow. That's the drive that failed.

There's no way to add in an extra internal fan near the "hot" drive, but I guess I could mount one on the outside of the case... or just change to a tower case that can house them properly.

I've removed the drive from the RAID setup and it's now formatted as a standalone... fucker didn't skip a beat during formatting or a disk scan. I wonder if I'll be able to get it replaced. :1orglaugh

You should put them in an external scsi box that has it's own power supply. they are cheap.