# And another drive bites the dust



## Guest (Sep 29, 2011)

Lost another RAID member this morning, sigh. Only 6 more to go. Stupid 1.5TB Seagate drives. Out of 12 drives I bought when I built my pair of RAIDs, 6 drives are dead now. Replacing them all with 2TB Hitachi 7k300's as they die. Seagate is incredibly slow processing RMA's these days too, I sent out 4 drives to them weeks ago and haven't gotten confirmation that they are going to be replaced yet.

Does anyone know if the 1.5TB drives seagate are sending out as replacements are any more reliable than the bad ones they are replacing, or is it an issue with all of the 1.5TB seagates?


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## monokitty (Jan 26, 2002)

mguertin said:


> Seagate is incredibly slow processing RMA's these days too, I sent out 4 drives to them weeks ago and haven't gotten confirmation that they are going to be replaced yet.


Interesting.

I process Seagate drive RMA's all the time at work and most drives are replaced and shipped back to us in under 3 days, in 98% of cases, from the date I make the RMA. They'll send back drives with a sticker on them that says, "Certified Repaired." (But they're entirely different drives - they don't repair the ones you sent them; at least, not to ship back to you personally.)


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## Guest (Sep 29, 2011)

Hmm that's interesting for sure. I've usually always gotten faster turnaround than this. If I don't hear from them by end of the week I'll contact them for an update.

Are the replaced drives any more reliable do you know? Just trying to figure out if I'm going to bother putting them back in my RAIDs or doing something else with them. That run of drives was so bad I stopped buying any new seagate drives -- even if they are better it's less than impressive that they actually let all those known problem drives out the door in the first place and didn't recall them or put some other kind of advance replacement program in place for them :/


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## John Clay (Jun 25, 2006)

I've done 10+ Seagate RMAs in the past 3 months, and zero WD RMAs. The Seagate RMA process is pretty slow for consumers; it's faster if you're a vendor. Typical turn around was 5-6 business days for the advanced replacement RMAs I did.

I realize it's a tiny sample, and may not be demonstrative of the quality of Seagate as a whole, but it's good enough for me. I won't be buying, or recommending, any Seagate products anytime soon.


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## Guest (Sep 29, 2011)

I didn't do the advanced replacement this time around, I probably should have (I've always done that in the past).

I agree that my experience is a small sampling, but when I look at the stack of dead Seagate drives I have (4x500G and now 6x1.5TB) I don't have much faith going forward. Like I said, sadly I'm going to have a small stack of "new" Seagate drives if they ever finish this RMA but I don't trust them ... maybe I'll just set them up as 4 hot spares while waiting for my other Seagates to blow up.


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## screature (May 14, 2007)

mguertin said:


> Lost another RAID member this morning, sigh. Only 6 more to go. Stupid 1.5TB Seagate drives. Out of 12 drives I bought when I built my pair of RAIDs, 6 drives are dead now. Replacing them all with 2TB Hitachi 7k300's as they die. Seagate is incredibly slow processing RMA's these days too, I sent out 4 drives to them weeks ago and haven't gotten confirmation that they are going to be replaced yet.
> 
> Does anyone know if the 1.5TB drives seagate are sending out as replacements are any more reliable than the bad ones they are replacing, or is it an issue with all of the 1.5TB seagates?


I assume the dead and dying Seagates are 7200.11? I have a couple and they are still working for me but when I needed more storage I read a couple of reviews about the 7200.12 series and how they addressed the issues of the 11 and they seemed positive. So I now also have a couple of the 12 series. No issues as of yet but as I said I haven't had any issues with the 11s either despite their known issues.


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## Guest (Oct 2, 2011)

Yes, they are all 7200.11 drives. I'll never purchase Seagate drives again, or at least not for the foreseeable future. Their lack of quality caused me, and is still causing me, years of grief and some nasty data loss. With appropriately priced and reliable competition I feel zero need to deal with them any longer. That of course will leave me with a stack of replacement drives from them which I don't trust as far as I can throw them.

Had they owned up to the fact that they were sub-standard and had a lot of potential to fail and recalled them I might have felt differently, but it's very irresponsible for them to know that the whole line is a dud and leave them out on the market to fail and just deal with after the fact.


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## screature (May 14, 2007)

mguertin said:


> Yes, they are all 7200.11 drives. I'll never purchase Seagate drives again, or at least not for the foreseeable future. Their lack of quality caused me, and is still causing me, years of grief and some nasty data loss. With appropriately priced and reliable competition I feel zero need to deal with them any longer. That of course will leave me with a stack of replacement drives from them which I don't trust as far as I can throw them.
> 
> Had they owned up to the fact that they were sub-standard and had a lot of potential to fail and recalled them I might have felt differently, but *it's very irresponsible for them to know that the whole line is a dud and leave them out on the market to fail and just deal with after the fact.*


I agree. I will most likely continue to buy Seagate drives when the price is right as I have never had a Seagate drive fail on me in 20 years... not to say that they lasted that long they were just decommissioned as larger sizes became available.

They had a bad series and as you said didn't make any efforts to pull the series and reimburse people accordingly, if I had your experience I would certainly no longer buy from them as why would you when you have options.

As I said the 7200.12 series reviews are better, maybe just use them for off site archival backup where they will have infrequent use and at least that way you can get some use out of them... just a thought.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

We're gunshy of Seagate as well especially in the face of the reliability of the Hitachi which we sell 95% for our pro users. ( a few WD Velociraptors in the mix ).

4 TB coming soon :yikes:


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## monokitty (Jan 26, 2002)

screature said:


> ...and reimburse people accordingly, ..


They're honouring their warranty. That's enough.


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## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

Lars said:


> They're horning their warranty. That's enough.


If your need is for a reliable HD, then neither horning or honouring a warranty is enough. For this many bad units a recall is on order. Get the crap out of the system rather than hoping to save a bit of money on the handful that do not fail. Otherwise you risk losing your most valued customers.

FWIW I have a couple of older Seagates that continue to work flawlessly, but my externals only run when I am either backing things up or accessing backed up files.


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## monokitty (Jan 26, 2002)

eMacMan said:


> Get the crap out of the system rather than hoping to save a bit of money on the handful that do not fail. Otherwise you risk losing your most valued customers.


Agreed. But screature is implying they need to do more than honour the drive warranty, which is false.


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## steviewhy (Oct 21, 2010)

sudo rm -rf /


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## RideOn (Apr 10, 2003)

Lars said:


> Agreed. But screature is implying they need to do more than honour the drive warranty, which is false.


They may not NEED to do more to stay within the terms of their warranty but their customers may need to have more confidence in their products before they will purchase them again.

When the advertising/specs state that the MTBF to expect is 300,000 or 500,000 hours and the drives are failing after 2 or 10 hours of use and your failure rate is over 50%, I don't expect to put any data on that I intend to access again.

I had some of the 1 TB drives, did the firmware update and they still failed quickly with no advance warning and no opportunity to recover the data. Putting them on sale for $50 is not going to help convince me to buy another. I can buy bricks locally for a lot less.


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## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

RideOn said:


> They may not NEED to do more to stay within the terms of their warranty but their customers may need to have more confidence in their products before they will purchase them again.
> 
> When the advertising/specs state that the MTBF to expect is 300,000 or 500,000 hours and the drives are failing after 2 or 10 hours of use and your failure rate is over 50%, I don't expect to put any data on that I intend to access again.
> 
> I had some of the 1 TB drives, did the firmware update and they still failed quickly with no advance warning and no opportunity to recover the data. Putting them on sale for $50 is not going to help convince me to buy another. I can buy bricks locally for a lot less.


I can recall when the Deathstar line imploded. Dealers I trusted either refused to carry them or issued a verbal disclaimer about the reliability when selling them. Seagate needs to be quite a bit more aggressive about dealing with this issue.


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## screature (May 14, 2007)

Lars said:


> They're honouring their warranty. That's enough.


IMO it would have been better if they had also pulled the series from distribution. I didn't phrase what I trying to say correctly... For clarification... 

They should have done both, honour the warranties (which they are) and pulled the series.


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## screature (May 14, 2007)

eMacMan said:


> If your need is for a reliable HD, then neither horning or honouring a warranty is enough. For this many bad units a recall is on order. Get the crap out of the system rather than hoping to save a bit of money on the handful that do not fail. Otherwise you risk losing your most valued customers...


Absolutely... I completely agree.


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## 20DDan (May 2, 2005)

Lars how on earth do you get the drives replaced so fast? I usually have to wait 2 weeks to get the replacement HD back. Do you choose the advance replacement option?



Lars said:


> Interesting.
> 
> I process Seagate drive RMA's all the time at work and most drives are replaced and shipped back to us in under 3 days, in 98% of cases, from the date I make the RMA. They'll send back drives with a sticker on them that says, "Certified Repaired." (But they're entirely different drives - they don't repair the ones you sent them; at least, not to ship back to you personally.)


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## IllusionX (Mar 10, 2009)

i use standard replacement, where they issue an RMA, send the drive at my own cost, and wait for a drive to arrive. Typical turn around, once they receive my drive is about 3 days. There was one drive that took a month, i also received a notification that they ran out of drives, and will wait until stock is back (i got a brand new drive back).

btw, i don't understand why some people make a fuss out of it because the 7200.11 are bad. This was a known issue, and should not be generalized for all of their drives. There are firmware upgrades for the 7200.11 to address the issue which did work for me.

Each manufacturers have ups and downs with reliability. You can't really escape it and it will always turn around. At some point, you swear by a brand, and once it fails on you, you'll never buy it again. Hey, have you considered that other brand also had failures too?


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