Yet ANOTHER Seagate ST3000DM001 going bad

[GracieAllen]

Regular, ordinary, PC running Windows 10 professional

I've got two 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives (ST3000DM001) for image storage. Recently one of them has started acting strange, throwing errors in the event logs - generally complaining about inability to talk to the drive. So, I ran CHKDSK 3 days ago and told it to fix things. It found 200 or so bad sectors and, in theory, fixed them. Switched the unreliable drive to use as a backup, and did a backup. It started throwing errors again immediately and it took several tries to get the backup done.

Ran CHKDSK again, and this time it found ANOTHER 355 bad sectors.

I tried running Seatools for Windows, but it hangs and never even tries to test the drive.

I figure it's bad and getting worse, so I went out to Seagate to check the warranty and get a replacement. Serial number comes up "out of warranty". This drive was purchased in July of 2014, and it SAYS it's a "Certified Repaired HDD", which I suspect means Seagate has already had to replace it once 'cause it failed (I remember getting a warranty replacement from Seagate sometime probably around a year ago, but not sure of the exact date... I THOUGHT Seagate warranteed these things for 3 years, so I'm curious why this one shows out of warranty at around 18 months.
I tried to find the specifics of the warranty for the original and the "Certified Repaired" drive, but never found anything, other than the website that says "Out of warranty".
Has Seagate change their warranty? Do they just not warranty their "Certified Repaired" drives?

[pcimage]

Usually the warranty of the "repaired drive" is in line with the remaining warranty left on the drive it replaced, which I think is 1 year on these shit drives.

[pepe]

i have several seagates, no problem with them so far. however, the 9YNxxx series were bad indeed, the surface errorded just by sitting in the drawer

[GracieAllen]

I ordered a Toshiba 4TB X300 drive yesterday to replace the Seagate. I've pulled the OTHER 3TB Seagate out of service as a data drive and will only be using it for occasional backups.

[GracieAllen]

Well... The SECOND ST3000DM001 appears to be having problems too. 2 days ago IT started throwing errors when being written to. So, a short while ago I contacted Seagate to see if they'd like to do something (stop laughing).......

They DEFINITELY show as out of warranty, and the support person said since they've ALREADY been replaced once, they were out of warranty in June/July (apparently a year after replacement)....

So, add me to the list of customers with dying Seagate drives and a bad taste from being given the big FU by support...

[thatdellguy]

Seagate Tips:

1. DON'T buy any 2TB or 3TB DM/DL Seagate drives. They are known to fail quite often and are nasty and expensive to recover.
2. DON'T use any refurbished Seagate drives. They fail even quicker. Sell them to some sucker on eBay.
3. Expect a higher quote for DR with a Seagate drive.
4. DON'T purchase external Seagate drives. They are often harder to locate donor parts.
5. If your laptop/desktop has a Seagate, swap it out for another brand.
6. In my opinion, only an idiot would buy a Seagate these days and expect it to last.

[day1data]

Seagate Tips:

1. DON'T buy any 2TB or 3TB DM/DL Seagate drives. They are known to fail quite often and are nasty and expensive to recover.
2. DON'T use any refurbished Seagate drives. They fail even quicker. Sell them to some sucker on eBay.
3. Expect a higher quote for DR with a Seagate drive.
4. DON'T purchase external Seagate drives. They are often harder to locate donor parts.
5. If your laptop/desktop has a Seagate, swap it out for another brand.
6. In my opinion, only an idiot would buy a Seagate these days and expect it to last.

+1
Agree !

++1 Agree.

Just as i read this post this morning look what walked in the door.

Yet another DM POD (Pile of dust)!

[HaQue]

Seagate now own SandForce.. They seem to love technology that is difficult to recover..

[GracieAllen]

Yes, we know that now... Not so much 24 or so months ago... What's discouraging is that with so many of these drives failing, that Seagate refuses to do anything to replace their defective equipment, regardless of age in this case. But, I reckon Seagate figures there are enough new customers that losing a bunch of existing ones isn't sufficient problem. Nor, apparently, is getting a reputation where statements like "Don't buy any "2 or 3TB DM/DL drives" can be found in a variety of places on the Internet.

I've always had high regard for Seagate's quality and support. It's sad, although maybe just a sign of the overall deterioration of customer service, that they're no longer interested in demonstrating their integrity.

[HaQue]

IMHO:

To get higher capacity drives and keep up with things like Moores Law, you need to:

-Lower tolerances significantly.
-Have smaller write surface / cells
-More surfaces / platters / die
-Use less parts
-Use cheaper materials
-MUCH more sophisticated technology to cope with errors that are PURPOSELY built in (MLC, TLC NAND For example)
-Sell more Units because of smaller profit margins and increased R&D / Fab costs
list could go on...

but for this to work, you need the environment of the disk to change to keep pace:

-More controlled environmental conditions
-People being more careful with drives (massive uptake in portable drives leading to damage)
-Better power regulation and protection
-The devices that the storage go into to be suited and matched to the type of storage (many devices are on 24/7 with drives that are not designed for it .. WD Green , Seagate consumer drives etc.)

if these 2 things matched maybe drives wouldn't die so much. But environment has not changed at all, if anything getting harsher. drives however have.

Seagates seem to just not handle this world, or the designs are very ambitious. I've heard that someone farting in India can taint the air enough for a Seagate in Japan to head crash.. Not sure if that's exaggerated or not!

It is like making a tow rope for a 1 tonne car with a 1 tonne breaking strain, and expecting it to last anywhere in the world. you sell a million of those and you are guaranteed to have some unhappy customers

[GracieAllen]

If I understood the post correctly, I think you're right...

And you may SELL a million of those tow ropes. BUT, if those "unhappy customers" spread the word, you're gonna have a REALLY hard time selling the NEXT million... You're gonna have to find a LOT of ignorant NEW customers 'cause the ones you screwed aren't going to buy again. AND, even when you FIX the tow rope and make it work PROPERLY, you're STILL gonna need a LOT of NEW customers 'cause again, those people you screwed AREN'T going to buy your product even when it's NOT a POS!

On the OTHER HAND, even if you sell that bad tow rope, and REPLACE the bad ones EVEN WHEN THEY'RE "OUT OF WARRANTY" you won't have to find AS MANY ignorant new customers 'cause most of your customers will be pretty forgiving as long as they believe you're going ABOVE what's required to TAKE CARE OF THEM... In this case, instead of taking care of a trivial 2-disk problem a few months out of "warranty", Seagate has added me to the long list of people no longer ignorant...

[supersteamboy]

2b and 4 tb segate drivers are pretty decent. i never had a problem with them

somehow almost all branded 3tb drivers have a short lifespan. never buy 1tb and 3tb drivers. they fail all the time

5,6 and 8 tbs are still too early to say

[supersteamboy]

Seagate Tips:

1. DON'T buy any 2TB or 3TB DM/DL Seagate drives. They are known to fail quite often and are nasty and expensive to recover.
2. DON'T use any refurbished Seagate drives. They fail even quicker. Sell them to some sucker on eBay.
3. Expect a higher quote for DR with a Seagate drive.
4. DON'T purchase external Seagate drives. They are often harder to locate donor parts.
5. If your laptop/desktop has a Seagate, swap it out for another brand.
6. In my opinion, only an idiot would buy a Seagate these days and expect it to last.

my segate NAS 2tb has been in service for almost 2 and half years now without any problem.

the only driver that failed me was my green WD 2tb which operated for only about 3000 hours

[labtech]

Recently purchased an 8TB Seagate Archive model (shingle technology) through Newegg.
First power on testing when it arrived showed block reads with slow down.
It will be "fun" going forward.

[jono-ats]

Seagate has terrible customer service. It must be horrible working in that department.

Western Digital's customer support outshines them all.

[plazma]

Thank all of you for actually telling people the truth.

Ive tried in vain other places to let people know my experience of high failures once seagate started to release shingled drives, incidentally this was the same time warranty went down from 5 years to 2 and then shortly after 1 years (coincidence?!?).

Every time i do some clown comes along with no real world experience quoting this report or that, stating seagate drives are no worse than others (normally with reports from the pre shingled era).

Eventually whist on an idle search i found this thread, wow people like me who know the truth and have seen it first hand i will happily +1 to the stay clear of seagates.

What is really annoying is they are touting their new 8tb drive and many (paid/sponsored) reviews that are high up on the google rankings make out smr is a new magical invention... Where as seagates been making sub par smr drives for years.

Having just sat here with a system and pull out a seagate dm drive that had been struggling (but thankfully not failed completely yet) to read/write at any reasonable rate. Just booted the system back up again with a WD Black and oh look the system performs at expected speeds again.

Also to speaking from experience about seagate RMA repaired drives, i had never seen a hard drive catch file before (this is in many many years of doing IT), that was until a recertified seagate drive decided to try and start a fire last year. Thankfully as the sata power connector melted, shorted and the power supply died and prevented it from being worse, so rather than run the risk of a firey death in future i just bin dead seagates now, rather than run the risk of getting back another potential fire hazard.

Swapped to WD a few years back and oddly enough ive not seen a bad WD thats had a premature death (or burst into flames)... strange that...

Sorry to thread dig, i just wanted to say thanks for being the one place ive found with people with actual experience with seagates that dont leap to their defence like they are on the payroll.