New 4TB Hard Drive Problems

dreigns · 11 Sep 2015 at 21:01

Ok not new to this stuff got many drives from 2 - 3 tb's and a few 4tb's. Last week bought three new Seagate ST4000DM001 4tb drive's to add to my server pc for media streaming unfortunately two where dead on arrival didn't even show in windows so sent them back but one did so I thought that was fine.
Anyhow didn't set it up or anything as wanted to do them all at once but today was a little bored so started to set it up to copy stuff overnight which is where the problems start.

The Drive shows up in windows fine and you can even give it a drive path but
the drive wont format no matter what I do the drive will do one of two things.

1 ) Freeze and become unresponsive.
2 ) Or windows will say it is unable to format the drive ?

I have tested on another drive it installed and formatted fine.

I have used the seagate tools and tested the drive it passed all test's only one I haven't tested is the long generic test so was wondering if anyone had anything else I could try before filling out another RMA

eyezpy · 11 Sep 2015 at 22:19

Try formatting it in another system or in an external caddy?

dreigns · 12 Sep 2015 at 07:15

eyezpy said:
Try formatting it in another system or in an external caddy?

done that i'm afraid does the same and stops responding its the weirdest hard drive problem I have ever had and I havre a lot of hard drives over the years

dreigns · 12 Sep 2015 at 11:37

Well I have RMAed it.
It was very strange the drive would only work with Exfat file system and not NTFS which is weird to say the lest as all my other drives 2-4tb use ntfs so that makes me not trust the thing

sybaris · 22 Sep 2015 at 22:12

I have given up with Seagate. They used to be rock solid but now they are rubbish... total rubbish for reliability. Had 2gb and 3gb that have been DOA. Now use WD.

demon8991 · 22 Sep 2015 at 22:53

Seriously, why do people buy Seagate, notoriously bad reliability.

Get yourself a full refund for all of the drives and grab yourself a WD Red/Red Pro or a HGST Deskstar. You can get them in 4TB and 6TB capacities, might be an idea to get two 6TB drives instead of 3 x 4TB drives.

sybaris · 23 Sep 2015 at 16:25

Back in the day I had 40 or 50 Seagate drives and they ran for around 30,000 hours before being retired and not a single failure. Nowadays I wouldn't touch one. Not sure what happened to Seagate but they don't build drives like they used to.

thebennyboy · 23 Sep 2015 at 17:20

I've got a Seagate SSHD in my laptop which is running like a charm. I also have two 3TB Seagate drives in a RAID1 array on my main PC which has been running fine and has never missed a beat. I seem to have been lucky with my Seagate drives.

ukxenon · 26 Sep 2015 at 06:51

WD all the way