Important notice about the SeaGate Baracuda line.

[smoth]

your drive could self brick.
Seagate's explanation:

Description
An issue exists that may cause some Seagate hard drives to become inoperable immediately after a power-on operation. Once this condition has occurred, the drive cannot be restored to normal operation without intervention from Seagate. Data on the drive will be unaffected and can be accessed once normal drive operation has been restored. This is caused by a firmware issue coupled with a specific manufacturing test process.

Root Cause
This condition was introduced by a firmware issue that sets the drive event log to an invalid location causing the drive to become inaccessible.

The firmware issue is that the end boundary of the event log circular buffer (320) was set incorrectly. During Event Log initialization, the boundary condition that defines the end of the Event Log is off by one. During power up, if the Event Log counter is at entry 320, or a multiple of (320 + x*256), and if a particular data pattern (dependent on the type of tester used during the drive manufacturing test process) had been present in the reserved-area system tracks when the drive's reserved-area file system was created during manufacturing, firmware will increment the Event Log pointer past the end of the event log data structure. This error is detected and results in an "Assert Failure", which causes the drive to hang as a failsafe measure. When the drive enters failsafe further update s to the counter become impossible and the condition will remain through subsequent power cycles. The problem only arises if a power cycle initialization occurs when the Event Log is at 320 or some multiple of 256 thereafter. Once a drive is in this state, there is no path to resolve/recover existing failed drives without Seagate technical intervention. For a drive to be susceptible to this issue, it must have both the firmware that contains the issue and have been tested through the specific manufacturing process.

Corrective Action
Seagate has implemented a containment action to ensure that all manufacturing test processes write the same "benign" fill pattern. This change is a permanent part of the test process. All drives with a date of manufacture January 12, 2009 and later are not affected by this issue as they have been through the corrected test process.

Recommendation
Seagate strongly recommends customers proactively update all affected drives to the latest firmware. If you have experienced a problem, or have an affected drive exhibiting this behavior, please contact your appropriate Seagate representative. If you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services. Seagate will work with you to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business.

[smoth]

for those of you who may be wondering. My project drive just did this. Meaning that all spring related work is on hold.

I will not resume any spring related work until I begin to resolve this issue.

[Gnomre]

I know this isn't the same problem but I might as well share my own horror story. Fuck seagate.

I had a 1.5 TB barracuda that kept falling off the face of my computer's world. I'd have to scan for new hardware to pick it back up and it'd work fine. Eventually it started doing that about once a week and so on in increasing frequency.

After trying countless other sata cables (most from other currently working hard drives, others brand new), different sata ports on the motherboard, and even sticking it in 2 other different computers to rule out the chipsets and power supplies, the computer would only pick it up during the boot process, and later on, sometimes not even then. Even when the computer would pick it up, it generally would fall off again within a few minutes, or at the most a couple hours.

I had long since given up on trying to store anything on that drive so I wasn't losing anything but 1.5 TB of space and the $100 or whatever it was investment in the drive.

First I tried filing a warranty claim on their website, but without an error code from their "seatools" utility it wouldn't let me. So I tried and tried to get a computer to pick it up, and when I did, I ran the tests on it. It took a couple tries but I managed to run all of their tests, and they reported no problems, so I decided to just call and explain it to a human.

I tried calling 3 or 4 times at different times of the day over the course of 2 or 3 weeks and I was on hold for a total of around 1.5 hours. I'd give up waiting after 20 or 30 mins each time. When I finally got through, to their credit, the woman I spoke to was nice enough and seemed to know a little bit of what she was talking about, though I had to ask her to repeat a lot of things because I could hardly understand her. After I explained the situation and all the troubleshooting I had attempted, she just asked for the serial number and issued an RMA number and emailed me an address to ship it to.

I had the option of paying $10 for them to immediately (more on that in a moment) send me a new drive along with a prepaid shipping label so I could return mine in the same box, or I could just buy whatever shipping I want but I'd have to wait until they received it until they sent a new one. I opted for the latter, using one of those "if it fits it ships" boxes at the post office. I sent the drive on Feb 24, and they received it on March 2 or something like that (I received confirmation from both the USPS and seagate themselves on that).

I finally got an email late last week saying my new drive had shipped and will arrive here tomorrow, damn near a month after they received mine. I didn't receive any explanation on why it took so long.

I should have never deviated from Western Digital in the first place, but at the time it just seemed like too good of a deal to pass up. I guess in about 6-8 months I'll find out if the new drive is worth a damn or not, but either way, I'm never buying from seagate again.

[smoth]

It's a godamn shame as seagate used to be THE hd manufacturing company. Did a quick search to find out if maxtor is still out there making shitty drives and I found this: http://www.maxtor.com/home-en-us.html

Maxtor is now Seagate.

Two great companies. One incredible family of products. Now at Seagate.com.

You want top-of-the-line hard drives ÔÇö for backup, for portability, for networking. You've got it, now more than ever.

We've combined the best of Seagate and Maxtor to create the ultimate portfolio of hard drives. You'll recognize some old favorites and get to know some new ones. The very best of the very best. That's what's waiting for you ÔÇö at the new Seagate online store.

it all makes sense.

[jK]

just buy the premium ones (those 24/7 ones)

[SpliFF]

I work for an IT company and we handle a lot of drives. Overall I've seen significantly more WD drives fail than Seagate. Having said that the average lifespan of consumer drives across the board has fallen over the last 15 years.

The sad truth is most desktop drives only last about 5-8 years, less in laptops and places where they get too hot.

If you want reliability you need SCSI / SAS. These "enterprise level" drives almost never fail but you pay a huge price premium.

The most cost effective solution to reliability is backups. Sadly almost nobody does them! The cheapest approach is a tool like Ghost which can backup your drives to DVD (spanning and compressing the data). Alternatively you can do regular syncs to a portable drive but that means you need a lot of extra storage sitting around.

[Hoi]

Backups, backups, backups.

My project files are spread on 3 seperate hd's (one external), and the most important files are also on a usb stick. Feels a lot safer.

[Cheesecan]

Ahh the off by 1 programming error.

This ladies and gentlemen is the result of Java schools not training programmers in the proper use of assembler and C anymore. :D

Maxtor are/were not that bad btw. I mean at least their customer service was nice. When my 4.3gb quantum fireball failed, I did a RMA and got a brand new 40gb fireball back. :D /me was a happy young lad. They had 3 or 5 year warranty iirc - more than most today I would think.

[Forboding Angel]

Maxtor is shit.

Spliff's experience is interesting, because over the last 10 years or so, most of the drives I see fail are the obviously shitty brands (toshiba, fujitsu, etc), and the more mainstream brands like seagates, and IBM (Hitachi... They had this wonderful idea years back of using ceramic platters... Yeah that idea sucked).

I honestly can't recall over 10 wd drives failing. It's the main reason I've used WD for so long. I have a wd drive I use for external storage that I've had for somewhere around 7 years and it's still going strong.

Experiences in harddrive reliability tend to be widely varied, HOWEVER, WD has something over the many of the competition. A: Nearly all of their drives have a 5 year replacement warranty. B: WD supports advanced RMA. This means that if your drive fails, you submit an RMA request, WD overnights you a new harddrive, and you put the dead one in the box and send it back, meaning that your downtime is next to nothing.

The moral of the story is raid 0 bitches, that and this simple fact: If you keep a piece of computer equipment cool, it will last 10x as long as it would normally (a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but it gets the point across to dumbass end users. Keep your shit cool!).

[AF]

Grah your drive craps out the same day my machine starts failing POST, hope you get your data back

[Licho]

This just happend to a friend of mine few days ago .. proffesional disk restore company offered to recover data at very high price ($700) but I read your post today, told her and she asked seller about it and indeed its this case - they sent it for firmware update for free..

So thank you, lucky coincidence :)

[SpliFF]

The moral of the story is raid 0 bitches

That's raid 1 (mirroring) bitch. Raid 0 (striping) actually doubles your chance of losing your data.

[smoth]

lol pwned.

btw:
port 1 - game drive (1 tb)

port 2 - Operating system (small drive)

port 3 - data(pictures movies etc)(1 tb)

port 4 - external sata interface

port 5 - bd drive

port 6 - burner drive

so I have no free ports. I used to have a raid 1 but I ran out of space so I decided to break up the raid putting my games on a new larger drive..

that is why I have no raid. FWIW.

[SirMaverick]

If you keep a piece of computer equipment cool, it will last 10x as long as it would normally (a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but it gets the point across to dumbass end users. Keep your shit cool!).

Doesn't really count for disk drives.

One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels. Such correlations have been repeatedly highlighted by previous studies, but we are unable to confirm them by observing our population. Although our data do not allow us to conclude that there is no such correlation, it provides strong evidence to suggest that other effects may be more prominent in affecting disk drive reliability in the context of a professionally managed data center deployment.

More than one hundred thousand disk drives were used for all the results presented here.

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

[Forboding Angel]

The moral of the story is raid 0 bitches

That's raid 1 (mirroring) bitch. Raid 0 (striping) actually doubles your chance of losing your data.

Oops, that's what I get for posting at "Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2011 2:40 am". Also, Easy to forget seeings how I don't use it myself (I know I know, hypocrite, but everything I need is online anyway in some form or another or backed up to a different location).

If I could afford it, I would have raid all over the place, but I simply just cannot afford to do it.

@sirmav, regardless of what you posted, heat kills. Spinning platters at 7200 rpm (I'm assuming just normal joe blow drive here (I'm also assuming you wouldn't use a 5400 unless you had a reason to)) is going to generate a nice bit of heat.

Have you ever felt the top of an HDD that was working hard (for example, after a defragment) in a case with only 1 or 2 fans in the back or summat? They get very very hot. It doesn't matter how you cut it, heat will decrease the lifespan of a harddrive.

[yuritch]

As I was taught at the uni, raising temperature of components by 10 degrees Celsius reduces their lifespan by about 50%. That was about general electronic components though, not electro-mechanical ones like hard drives, but should still apply.

[Caydr]

Seagate turned to shit once they started making everything in China a few years ago. It's been nothing but problems, I've had 2 faulty hard drives from them just in that period and there's an ongoing disaster regarding their Expansion line of externals. Western Digital and Samsung, those are the only reasonably safe brands now.

On the plus side, it's a good way to tell if the computer you're thinking about buying is shit. Manufacturer thinks Seagate is a safe bet? What else do they think is good enough for you?

As I was taught at the uni, raising temperature of components by 10 degrees Celsius reduces their lifespan by about 50%. That was about general electronic components though, not electro-mechanical ones like hard drives, but should still apply.

A short while ago Google did an experiment in their data centers, seeing how ambient temperature would affect hard drive lifespan. Temperature, within reason, apparently makes no difference for hard drives.

[Neddie]

I've personally never had a problem with Fujitsu or Hitachi.

[Caydr]

Hitachi, home of the infamous Desk Death Star? Might be old news now but hard drives are so vitally important it's not worth the risk IMO. Other components, you're usually just out the cost of the component if something goes wrong. Hard drive, you might lose years of work... I RAID my drives to hell and back but I'm still not buying from a questionable company... just not worth it.

Obviously they've had major quality control issues in the past, better to stick with consistently reliable manufacturers for a while.

[Neddie]

As ever, the past overshadows the present in the eyes of the pessimistic and reserved.

The problem is that none of the manufacturers produce reliable drives. I find a drive purchase is essentially feeding a manufacturer so they can in theory improve their drives, rather than assurance that you're getting a good drive.

I give each manufacturer a single pass just because they all have significant failure rates. WD screwed me twice, Seagate screwed me twice.