Seagate 8tb drives, am I unlucky? (ST8000DM004)

Werewolf

Werewolf

Werewolf

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Panting like a fiend
Just wondering if I'm being unlucky, about 18 months ago I bought 4 8tb seagate drives for a couple of new builds (in four separate purchases from 2 retailers over about 6 weeks), so far I've had a 50% failure rate with the same symptoms, basically reading/writing to them becomes intermittently slow at first, then slows right down until the drive starts getting "reset to raid port" by controller. Running seatools self diagnosics either shows no reported problem at first, then it'll just self abort as the issue gets worse.
Finally they just stop being recognised by the computer as being there at all (they don't show up in the bios, they don't show up in another computer, they don't show up on an external caddy).

With both failures it was at about the point they hit 75% of capacity.

These are drives with the specifc details of
Model: ST8000DM004
PN: 2U9188-300
FW0001

My guess is it's the control board on the drive is failing for some reason, given it seems to be able to still read for a while, but just slows right down.

I'm wondering if it's me be very unlucky, or there is a possible problem with a batch of them, I'm having flashbacks to some Samsung 120gb drives I bought way back, IIRC i had about 9 RMA's in 3 years for the 4 I bought (I've not actually had a drive fail at under 5 years old in ~10 years now).

They are all warranty expiring in 12/2025.

On the plus side Seagate's warrenty turn around is very fast, they received one drive and basically sent the replacement out same day.


I've had the computer pulling off data from one of the drives for the last week until it finally died this morning, at data rates of a stunning 500bytes per second at times :p (I've got almost everything backed up on other drives).
 
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The currently failing drive that I inteded to pull today (as it disappeared after my last reboot), is now showing again having rebooted a few minutes ago, so i'm currently trying to pull a few more files off it.
 
There have been a few stories published in the last few months (e.g. at THG here) about dodgy drives being sold as new, but if you're having no issue claiming the warranty I'd imagine that is not the problem.
 
Not sure if its due to all the attention being on SSD/M2 drives being the norm now but mechanical drive seem to have gotten a lot less reliable in my experience its like they don't really care about them anymore they rarely seem to last more than a couple of years at best
 
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Tetras said:
There have been a few stories published in the last few months (e.g. at THG here) about dodgy drives being sold as new, but if you're having no issue claiming the warranty I'd imagine that is not the problem.
Click to expand...
Cheers, yeah i've been seeing that it's caused me to hold off a number of "good" looking buys, I tend to buy from a handful of trusted suppliers :)
Well I say "trusted", I wouldn't trust a couple of them with RMA's for stuff I can't operate the PC without*, but HDD's are easier/faster to RMA to the manufacturer most of the time.

Blackjack Davy said:
Not sure if its due to all the attention being on SSD/M2 drives being the norm now but mechanical drive seem to have gotten a lot less reliable in my experience its like they don't really care about them anymore they rarely seem to last more than a couple of years at best
Click to expand...

I do wonder if where they're pushing the technology to increase the capacities they might be pushing the bleeding edge a little much.

I noticed that Seagate for example include 2 years of data recovery with a lot of their drives which to me either suggests they're very confident in the drives, or they know that most people won't send back a drive for data recovery because it's got personal stuff on it they don't want others to see.



*One sat on an RMA for about 6 weeks before admitting they couldn't find it in their warehouse when I finally started losing my patience with them (I had the delivery proof). I steered clear of them for 10 years and only use them for the odd cable/drive if OCUK don't have it in stock.
 
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I’ve got an 8gb Seagate sat on my table where it’s been for well over 6 months as I don’t know what to do. It’s out of warranty so can’t get it replaced but when I run SeaTools on it it finds nothing but install it and after a week or 2 it starts retrying and then disappears.

Thought initially it was the SATA cable so changed it but had the same issue. So it’s just sat there on my desk, every now and again I plug it in and run SeaTools.
 
I've had nothing but issues with Seagate's range of these, just pulled another that failed. I am finding in general running my much loved but aged machine is getting trickier.

Tying to find a suitable SSD to switch to, just sacrifice some capacity, but I'm coming to realise the sata SSD market is quite limited these days.
 
I made the mistake of purchasing 15 of these for my server build when they were new on the market and i had to RMA every one of them, they eventually sent me barracuda pro drives as replacements as i had to send the replacements back for the same issue. it would lock the OS requiring a reset.

they cannot be overwritten, formatting, erasing and I even tried low level formatting. They would all fail with the same symptoms after copying around 2 - 3 TB of data onto them.

I now only buy Exos drives from Seagate or WD enterprise drives
 
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