Following my terrible time with Western Digital drives, when I built my new system I thought I would try something different, so went with a couple of Seagate 3TB drives for general slow speed local storage. Specifically I went with the:
Seagate 3TB (ST3000DM001-1CH166) 3.5 inch 7200RPM 64MB Cache SATA3 Hard Drive
Yesterday when I upgraded to Windows 10, one of these drives disappeared from 'This PC' and could not be found. I checked various software possibilities and then tried re-seating the SATA and power cables. None of the cables appeared loose, but after poking around and rebooting, the Seagate drive magically re-appeared, so I figured it must have been a loose cable after all.
Today that same drive has disappeared again from my system. So my local storage E: drive is not accessible or visible in 'This PC' in file explorer. So I thought I would do some research into the reliability of these drives and to my horror found this Q2 2015 Backblaze HDD Reliability article:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/
They list the Seagate 3TB (ST3000DM001-1CH166) as having a failure rate of 9.8% in the first 3 months, and 28.2% within 18 months. :blink:
This is not a one-off experience either, it's been a pretty consistent failure rate over the past 4 consecutive quarters. So now I am think that this is actually a HDD failure I am starting to see, not a 'loose cable'. Unfortunately I bought mine on 22 Aug 2013 which is just before Backblaze started to buy some, so I did not get the benefit of their experience in my purchasing decision. So I'm going to pull the 'failing' drive and buy replacements for both the Seagate drives. I've got a external USB HDD caddy, so I'll see if I can pull data off the drive whilst it is still alive and whilst it is out of the case, investigate its warranty status.
Fortunately I have backups of everything, so nothing is lost, just the irritation of having to deal with a drive failure.
My 2 cents: :my2cents:
If you have one of the drives in the Backblaze report that looks horrible, then get rid of it before it fails on you. :angry:
An interesting article from The Register. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/) That being said I use WD internal and external although not through any solid research but because they were cheap :g:
i have a seagate barracuda 2tb in my pc and i've never had any problems.
I bought 4 x 3TB Toshiba drives (DT01ABA300) to start building a home server, but I had checked up on them first and they are actually Hitachi built and Toshiba labelled.
Apparently very good reliability.
Quote from: smilodon;405159An interesting article from The Register. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/) That being said I use WD internal and external although not through any solid research but because they were cheap :g:
Yep, I saw that one in my internet trawl, but the article talks about the skewing of manufacturer data, so I skipped it as I was looking at the specific drive model data, which is not the same as the summary manufacturer data. Interestingly if you read Henry Newman's linked post (on which your link bases a lot of his argument), Henry gets torn a new one by most of his posters because he too has badly misinterpreted the data! Bottom line, I still need a new hard drive!
Quote from: Sneakytiger;405163i have a seagate barracuda 2tb in my pc and i've never had any problems.
A single drive doesn't make a survey. I have a second Seagate which is an identical model to the failed drive which I also have not had any problems with!
7TB is en route to my home. Just missed delivery for tomorrow, but 4GB arrives Sunday and another 3GB on Monday.
HGST H3IK40003272SE 0S03356 IDK Deskstar 4TB
HGST H3IKNAS30003272SE IDK Deskstar 3TB
Turns out it might not have been the drive failing. I installed the new drive and it too disappeared, so it is a either a port on the motherboard going or the cable. The cable is embedded in the hot-swap drive bay of my case, so I changed the port it was connected to (from Port 5 to Port 4) and so far this afternoon it has not yet dropped. I'll leave it on for 24 hours and see what happens, if it drops again then I'll need to see if I can somehow swap out the drive bay connections, but I suspect that it might be easier to buy a new drive bay (£18 (http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/900d-hdd-sata-hot-swap-cable)) than mess around with trying to manually swap a cable that has been constructed into a hot-swap bay. We'll see, no need to just yet as the new 4TB drive is still connected and running smooth.
The only PITA so far has been Dropbox that requires all files to be redownloaded. At least Google Drive has the sense to realise that I copied all the Drive files back onto the new hard drive, does a comparison and then accepts them with the need to download/upload again.
Google Drive - 150GB checked and resync'd in under an hour.
Dropbox - 90GB and still going strong after 2 hours and less than 10% complete. :doh:
Google 1 - 0 Dropbox