Seagate 7200.11, especially 1.5TB

[nordicpc]

Hey everyone,
After having another Seagate 1.5TB drive begin to develop bad sectors, making all but one out of a dozen or so that turned out defective within weeks, I wanted to check in and see if anyone else has noticed this issue. Rather than re-post the whole thing, I'll just point you guys to my blog: http://nordic-pc.com/node/420

As noted in the blog, I've also always seen this weird behavior with seek errors and read errors being insanely high after just a few minutes of use, and while ECC seems to kick in and get the data out, is this not a strange behavior? Why haven't I seen a story about this, or at least a mention in a review, when it has seemingly been going on for years? I'd really like to start believing in Seagates again, especially after seeing the 1TB 7200.12 speeds, but I just can't till I know what other people are seeing.

Thanks for your input.

-Nate

 

[GundamF91]

I used to have Seagate, but stopped buying them after 7200.11 versions. It seems Seagate quality has gone down the toilet.

 

[RebateMonger]

It seems like all the drive makers have been having problems with higher-than-expected failure rates with the newer (500 GB +) hard drives. With the 7200.11 drives, Seagate got a double-whammy with both firmware issues (fixable) AND apparent hardware issues (non-fixable).

Every drive maker has their disasters at times. I can think of infamous "bad" drive designs from Quantum, Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, and IBM. Hopefully Seagate has fixed their recent problems with the new 7200.12 series.

 

[Red Irish]

Originally posted by: GundamF91
I used to have Seagate, but stopped buying them after 7200.11 versions. It seems Seagate quality has gone down the toilet.

:thumbsup:

 

[nordicpc]

I'm familiar with the firmware issues, but the issues I'm speaking of have actually been around since the 7200.10 series, and maybe earlier. I don't have any more 7200.8's or 7200.9's to look at.

The issue can only really be seen in the SMART data for the drives. If you look at it with any sort of tool, you'll see that they all have very high Read Error Rates and Seek Error Rates, that are being corrected by ECC. Eventually, most of the drives I've seen start to develop Reallocated Sectors very quickly, meaning that sectors on the drive's platters are actually failing and being moved to the spare area on the drive. This not only causes performance degradation, but also leads to data loss when the drive runs out of spare space.

Anyone have any thoughts on the high read errors or seek errors?

 

[bradley]

I bought a few 1TB 7200.12 drives. They have all been working great these past two months. Apparently, the 7200.11 were the first generation using new code, the 7200.12 being second generation. So perhaps Seagate has worked out all the kinks. So far the 7200.12 has been getting much better reviews than the 7200.11.

 

[nordicpc]

Can you open up a SMART monitoring tool like Crystal Mark (http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en) and see if they still have the seek errors and read errors? I'd love to see that go away.

 

[bradley]

Figured I would post a sobering follow-up. Two of the three Seagate 1TB 7200.12 started to develop a few reallocated sectors. One drive in particular tested with HDTune speeds all over the map, tons of spikes and dips. I awoke the next morning to Windows 7 warning me about an imminent hard drive failure and plentiful raw read errors:

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Raw Value Status Value Worst Threshold TEC
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Raw Read Error Rate 138674477 OK 105 99 6 N.A.
3 Spin Up Time 0ms OK 95 94 0 N.A.
4 Start/Stop Count 161 OK 100 100 20 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count 2845 FAIL 31 31 36 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate 171677639 OK 82 60 30 N.A.
9 Power On Time 3040 OK 97 97 0 N.A.
A Spin Retry Count 0 OK 100 100 97 N.A.
C Power Cycle Count 166 OK 100 100 20 N.A.
B7 (Unknown attribute) 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
B8 (Unknown attribute) 0 OK 100 100 99 N.A.
BB (Unknown attribute) 6 OK 94 94 0 N.A.
BC (Unknown attribute) 16 OK 100 99 0 N.A.
BD (Unknown attribute) 227 OK 1 1 0 N.A.
BE Temperature Difference from 100 588578851 OK 65 50 45 N.A.
C2 Temperature 35 C OK 35 50 0 N.A.
C3 Hardware ECC Recovered 138674477 OK 33 28 0 N.A.
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 2 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C6 Uncorrectable Sector Count 2 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C7 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 0 OK 200 200 0 N.A.
F0 Head flying hours 3456 OK 100 253 0 N.A.
F1 (Unknown attribute) -2011350558 OK 100 253 0 N.A.
F2 (Unknown attribute) 1081326207 OK 100 253 0 N.A.


Needless to say, I filled out an RMA, with this being my last Seagate for a long time. Next stop for me is SSD by the end of the year.

 

[AdamK47]

I've had my 1.5TB 7200.11 for about 10 months. I had the freeze issue that all early drives with the old firmware had. Flashing the firmware with a new version fixed that. The drive has been great since then. No issues at all.

 

[F1shF4t]

Originally posted by: nordicpc
Can you open up a SMART monitoring tool like Crystal Mark (http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en) and see if they still have the seek errors and read errors? I'd love to see that go away.

Seagate HDDs report those values differently. Every seagate drive I have owned in the last few years had those very high SMART values. From Wikipadia:

Indicates the rate of hardware read errors that occurred when reading data from a disk surface. A non-zero value indicates a problem with either the disk surface, read/write heads, or the heads are not centered exactly over the track. Note that Seagate drives often report a raw value that is very high even on new drives, and does not thereby indicate a failure.

Unless there are issues with the HDD or you're getting reallocated sectors I would not worry about it.

 

[Binky]

Be careful about what you read and believe on the internet. People with problems are MUCH more likely to post about their experiences. If you see 100 bad posts and 100 good posts, it does NOT mean that the failure rate is 100%!

Seagate had a major problem with the firmware on the 7200.11 drive model. This is well known. All I see now are anti-seagate posts and it seems like it's a little out of control.

I've got several very old 7200.8 drives and they are all perfect workhorse drives that have run great for years. I've got a 7200.12 that is relatively new and performing well. I've got 2 of the newer 1tb LP drives from seagate and they are great so far.

I also have 3 WD 1tb green drives and a samsung 400gb. These are all doing well, but again, this doesn't prove much.

 

[n7]

CrystalDiskInfo reports caution regarding Reallocated Sectors Count on a number of my Seagates (1 TB & 1.5 TB), & yet Speedfan's SMART info says everything is just fine.

I tend to rely on Speedfan's info not CrystalDiskInfo's, as Speedfan has noted bad/reallocated sectors accurately for me every single time (& the manufacturer's utilites will also fail then), unlike Crystal's info which i think is reading things a bit off, or perhaps interpreting it incorrectly.

 

[dj2004]

I've had mine (CC1H) since Feb. 2009 and right now it has a data value of 17 in the reallocated sector according to Everest. Of course, when I purchased the drive, it had none, then it suddenly hit 13 or 14, then in a few months, 15, then a month or two went by and it hit 16, and as of today it is 17.

 

[kosmarnik]

The shop was out of Samsungs and I just took the Seagates 1.5tb (CC1H), totally oblivious to all this.
While filling the drives they started making the familiar clunking noises of a sick HDD, hopped on the intrawebs and saw I did a very bad shopping decision.
After a week all 4 are still working, but I'm concerned, esp after hearing the funny noises, but the noises didn't repeat.
What does bother me is a steadily increasing number of High Fly Writes.

At what point should I get worried about HFW?

Here are the links to my SMART data:
HDD #1: http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrep...tVerification=5DFA5534
HDD #2: http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrep...tVerification=70E36D54
HDD #3: http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrep...tVerification=40D8AC92

 

[Emulex]

just defrag then and run sdelete on the empty sectors constantly. keep them fresh. its how raid controllers work usually 3-15 second idle timeout then they start scrubbing

 

[kosmarnik]

One of 4 drives died after a week. Great, I'm taking all of them to the store to exchange them for some proper Samsung HDDs. Seagate really dropped the ball on this one.