<Rant> Blasted spinny things dying!

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Quasduco

Active Member
Nov 16, 2015
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Get an email from my FreeNAS box yesterday saying I had a whopping 16 Offline Uncorrectable Sectors. Not the end of the world, should have a few days to get a replacement in...

Start looking for replacement drive deals, so far nothing thrilling.

Happened to be looking at the drive stats on FreeNAS, when I see something far longer than the million NFS export messages flash by on the bottom log scroll, so I expand the log. The POS went from just a 'start thinking about finding me a replacement' to FreeNAS saying the drive is spitting so many errors, the drive is being ignored, array degraded!

Drive (Original set of 4) is a 3TB Seagate Desktop Drive. Light usage (media, software, etc., storage), total time powered on 1.5 years, with a whopping 64 start/stop cycles.

Best part is, this is the second of the set of 4 to need replacement in the last 2 months... All bought new, of course out of warranty thanks to Seagate cheaping out on warranty...

So, now have to find yet another drive to replace this one, and then I guess get ready for the other 2 to crap out...

So, uh, if anyone spots a deal on either a Hitachi or a WD 3TB 7200 drive (would say Toshiba, but have no experience with them outside of laptop drives), please share!
 

Scott Laird

Active Member
Aug 30, 2014
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3TB Seagate drive? Is that an ST3000DM001? Good luck then; 1.5-3 years is about how long they last.

I have a dozen dead ones sitting around, and a half dozen or so left running at home. Horrible drives.
 
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Quasduco

Active Member
Nov 16, 2015
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3TB Seagate drive? Is that an ST3000DM001? Good luck then; 1.5-3 years is about how long they last.

I have a dozen dead ones sitting around, and a half dozen or so left running at home. Horrible drives.
Yeah, good call. They really are trash reliability. Sad thing is, they actually were good performance...
 

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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had 2 of 4 fail in 6mo... "friend" who started at seagate convinced me to try them again... nope still shit on consumer drives.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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Had a backupsystem with a Raid-Z3 of 15 x 3TB Seagate disks.
Was the first time, that I had a 3disk failure in a ZFS pool what nearly meant a dataloss.

They worked about 1.5 years without problems and then within half a year
they died one by next. I trashed them all.
 

TuxDude

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2011
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I seem to be one of very few people left that still like Seagate drives - and even I stay away from the 3TB models. Been buying their 4TB NAS drives whenever my home server needs one for quite a while now (both to handle growth, or if an older/smaller drive fails its replaced with a new 4) and have yet to see any issue with any of those drives.
 

Quasduco

Active Member
Nov 16, 2015
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Sadly, I got a replacement for the first one to die with another Seagate, but it only cost like $15, so how could I not?

After that, though, I think Seagate and I are done for...
 

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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I seem to be one of very few people left that still like Seagate drives - and even I stay away from the 3TB models. Been buying their 4TB NAS drives whenever my home server needs one for quite a while now (both to handle growth, or if an older/smaller drive fails its replaced with a new 4) and have yet to see any issue with any of those drives.

Unfortunately my rotation cycle of ... Maybe I will try them again, happens right as they make another lemon model.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Had a backupsystem with a Raid-Z3 of 15 x 3TB Seagate disks.
Was the first time, that I had a 3disk failure in a ZFS pool what nearly meant a dataloss.
That is super interesting. What power supply?

BTW - I was talking to one of the folks that writes IEEE storage reliability articles for the big storage vendors a few years ago. His advice was that with triple parity you had a better chance of a HBA, PSU or other issue taking out your array than disk failure.
 

fractal

Active Member
Jun 7, 2016
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would now be a good time to backup and upgrade? 4TB drives are still good for price / TB although they are rapidly being replaced by the 6's.

I make lemon scones with my lemons. I don't store my data on them. Reading this thread makes me think you are throwing time and good money after bad..
 

herby

Active Member
Aug 18, 2013
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I remember in Backblaze's reliability reports the 3TB Seagate's were terrible but 4TB did pretty well. Maybe not Hitachi/WD good but not bad considering the price if you have redundency .
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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That is super interesting. What power supply?

BTW - I was talking to one of the folks that writes IEEE storage reliability articles for the big storage vendors a few years ago. His advice was that with triple parity you had a better chance of a HBA, PSU or other issue taking out your array than disk failure.
The array worked well for 1,5 years. Then problems started to become worse and worser over time as one disk by the next fail (not completely but produce errors), with a resilver time getting longer and longer in the end.

It was definitly not a PSU problem but a problem with the 3TB Seagate Constellation. I read a report with the presumption that the hd dust filter was the problem as it fails after a year resulting in extreme failure rates.
 
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unwind-protect

Active Member
Mar 7, 2016
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Those 3 TB Segates are garbage. Specifically they develop hard rear errors and if you don't scrub regularly they are guaranteed to take your array down.

Now try to get your warranty from Seagate. They'll say they have left the factory ca. anno 1684 and it is expired.