Seagate Hard Drive Issue?

[Radix-64]

Can someone recommend a good hard drive that will last longer than a few months? I've had two new Seagate hard drives that crashed--the first after 2 months, the second after 4 months. Anyone had a similar experience?

 

[MrLinux]

If they were the drives that currently have known firmware issues, you should have updated them before they died; if not, to have two drives die in months, I'd suspect you have something else wrong with your system, might be worth checking the drive cooling, PSU voltage and cabling.

 

[Ancient_1]

My 2nd Seagate 1.5 died today also. I have had problems with all 3 I bought starting after a couple months. All have been upgated with latest firmware and it even brought one that was dead back to life for a few weeks.

I have been waiting to rma the 1st drive hoping that maybe they would fix the problems and could get a reliable drive back, but with the 2nd drive failing I will need to do very soon now like tomorrow and hope the 3rd drive will last until I get the replacements.

 

[myriad46]

Let's get some more information, shall we?

1. What are you using the drives for? System drive? Storage?
2. When you get them, are you doing a full format, quick format or just using them out of the box?
3. When they "die", what does that mean?
4. Where are the drives when they die? In your case, screwed down properly? External case?

 

[Radix-64]

Thanks everyone for your helpful comments. Here's more information. Both drives were out of the box and included internally from the factory inside a new HP desktop computer. After two months, the first Seagate drive stop functioning and the computer gave a message that the drive was non-functioning. Then a few months thereafter, the second Seagate drive that came internally with the computer stopped functioning (no boot up, completely dead).

 

[aford10]

So the 2nd HD was never functioning? Are these IDE or SATA HD's?

Western Digital is widely known as the best quality HD's, specifically the cavair black line.

 

[jitpublisher]

Are you sure it's the drives, I have had problems with SATA cables in the past when I thought I had a drive going bad, and it turned out replacing the cable took care of it.

 

[Radix-64]

Hi all, the Seagate HD that came with the HP were are SATA 500GB, 7200.11 series.

 

[aford10]

What did they do when they died? Did you try a format?

 

[Radix-64]

Thanks again everyone for adding your input...the help is much appreciated!

The Seagate HD that came with the HP desktop were arranged in a RAID 1 configuration...drive would brick and then no longer be recognized. The bricked drive could not be reformatted or mounted in any way. There were two internal hard drives and both went down the same sad path on the shiny new computer.

Any advice that you can share or any similar experiences out there? Any and all comments welcome!

 

[aford10]

They may have gotten booted out of your array. Did you delete ad disable the array in the bios before trying to format?

 

[VERTULDO]

i bought a seagate barracuda7200.10 recently.... the thing is, my ecs pm800-m2 mainboard can not detect it, but it was tried to other mainboard and it worked... help please

 

[aford10]

You should start your own thread for this ^

 

[Radix-64]

Hi, I went to NewEgg and replaced both Seagate HDs that came from the factory with the HP with two new Western Digitals (HD 640G|WD 7K 16M WD6400AAKS).

All was working fine for a while. Then got an error message from the Intel Matrix Storage Console that one of the HDs is reporting a SMART event and the solution is to promptly replace the hard drive.

When the Seagate HDs bricked, there was no warning message from the Intel Matrix Storage Console...they just died and you couldn't access them to reformat nor update, so having a warning this time is somewhat better.

Mr Linux has recommended checking drive cooling, PSU voltage and cables...and Jitpublisher suggests replacing the SATA cables...and Aford10 recommends delete ad disable the array in the bios before trying to format...

Should I start with the SATA cable replacement first given this error message or do I format the drive?

What do I check for when checking the cooling and PSU voltage?

Not sure what the next step should be, but need some quick advice before the drive goes dead.

Thanks so much for any advice!

 

[aford10]

It's very unlikely that the drives are dropping like flies. You should try repairing your array first. It's likely just a degraded array.

I had an MSI mobo and the array became degraded frequently. Nothing was wrong with the drives, it's usually just bad raid controllers. Personally, I ended up swapping mobos and keeping the same HD's.

 

[Radix-64]

One of the WD replacement drives with the warning just died.

Something else I noticed is that the dead Western Digital HD, gives out this constant buzzing noise before it died. It started with that buzzing noise about a few days before I got the warning message. To verify that it was the WD HD, when I disconnected the dead WD HD and rebooted, no noise.

Could you give me some tips/steps on how to repair an array?

 

[aford10]

If the array is degraded or fails, you can enter the raid bios setup upon powering up the computer. It's similar to entering setup for the motherboard's bios. The option to enter the raid bios should appear right before the option to enter your motherboard bios setup.

Once inside the raid bios, you can delete, add drives, and rebuild existing arrays.

It's possible that you just had bad luck with 2 HD's. Here is a one of the best HD's you could get
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

If you start having similar troubles as before, unplug it. There would be something else going on that is killing your HD's.

 

[astroboy_72]

SEAGATE HARD DRIVE DIED, TOO: I have a Seagate harddrive that also died. I purchased in March 2008 with a brand new system. Mine suddently died in January 2009. There was no warning or signs of any trouble or noise. Everything was working beautifully. Then one day, I tried to turn on the PC and it would not boot up at all. I tried several times. Nothing.

I took it to the original place where I bought it and they advised that the drive was dead. They said they could have the drive replaced, but couldn't retrieve the data and that I'd have to go somewhere else to get data retrieval.

I just got word last week that they were not able to retrieve anything from it.

Unfortunately, I don't have the model number with me right now. It sounds like there may be a bad batch of Seagate drives. This bad drive has now cost me a lot of money and endless hours of time. I thought I could rely on Seagate, but now I'm completely disheartened. I'll see what Seagate will do for me for data retrieval to restore my faith in them again.

 

[aford10]

Seagate has had some known problems lately. There's really no reason not to go with Western Digital HD's. They are the best quality and reliability.

 

[unnameduser]

Seagate says this:

A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

By a small number I hear that they mean a number well over 10% like maybe 25%. I want to save the money on a Seagate, but they suck right now. They use to be very good but not anymore.

 

[unnameduser]

I just got the official number from Seagate and they say that the fail rate average from their newer and slightly older drives is around .35%. My guess is they don't count firmware problems as fails. The fail rate of even one disk in a RAID 0 is .698775% even assuming that .35% is the extent of the failure. If one disk fails then all data would be useless.

 

[Radix-64]

Very interesting stats. Wonder what it would be if Firmware issues were in the percentage count.

 

[sicilian]

same thing happend to me built my pc in october, 1 barracuda 750 went around christmas, then i bought another and it went this mnth... both times stuck on gigabyte screen...just got the call on the 2nd drive today which i had a complete diagnostics done on my pc, and they said its a bad drive. And it seems both serial numbers fit the firmware checklist...

 

[sepenn]

I am going around and around with them. My 7200.10 worked fine for 3 months and then I began having a transfer rate issue. After following their recomendations, the drive stopped working and prevented bootups, even though it was used as a data stoage drive. I paid Seagate 22.00 and received a rebuilt drive but that one would not even format. I used their "Seagate Wizard" software (as recommended) and it came to a total stop citing Sector Errors and when I attempted to reboot to try again it as before, prevented a complete boot.

I returned the replacement drive to then but have not heard a word from them. When contacting support via "Live Chat" the man was extremely rude and tried to say that my computer was at fault but when I mentioned that there were 3 other drives in the machine and they, being Western Digitals, were working just fine he became silent and that was the of conversation leaving me hanging in air.
SEAGATE SUCKS

 

[mrgreenbytes]

My 500gb 7200.11 was an external that i used for some time. This morning, it started spinning then slowed down,then sped up ...it kept this up and down for a bit then stopped. It will continue doing this every time I plug it back in. I am wondering if anyone else has had luck recovering their data since this post last had a post. I am wondering what my other options are since I called one recovery firm and their estimates started around $700.