How bad is the SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, AS comsumer grade drives

[thermite88]

For many years, I ran a RAID-5 system using MegaRaid card and 4 SCSI-wide drives at 10K rpm under W2K. It was absolutely stable.

I know that I need to upgrade the OS when MS stopped supporting W2K a few years ago. I cannot keep the MegaRaid/SCSI because there was no Vista driver for the card. A newer SCSI Raid card can easily double my hardware update. SATA HD are now cheaper, better, faster, more reliable, right?? No, absolutely not true. I got all new hardwares and Vista Ultimate in May 2007.

18 months and 3 replacement hard drives later, I still do not have a stable system. The drives in question are SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, 320GB, 7200RPM drives with model number ST3320620AS. I got these (4 of them) drives after reading early glowing reports of them and now come to regret it. When I finally called Seagate customer service to complain about the unreliable drive, I heard a whole bunch of excuses. I told the tech that I used a Lian-Li 1200 case with plenty of cooling. He finally said that the AS series of SATA drives are consumer grade and not supposed to be used in server environment. Even I am running a single end user computer at home, I am NOT SUPPOSED TO USE RAID-5 with these drives. RAID-5 is for server only.

The Windows Vista Ultimate is not helping either because it locked me out and complaint about invalid license whenever I tried to recover from a hardware failure. It is almost as bad as running an Apple computer.

Is the AS comsumer grade hard drive really that bad? What can I do with my $320 HD investment? What reliable SATA hard drive will you recommend for RAID-5 under Vista Ultimate?
:disgust:

MOD EDIT: We've got a forum for this kind of topic. Moving to Memory and Storage. - Zap

 

[Mark R]

Seagate sell special 'raid edition' drives for use in RAID arrays - these are more expensive, although they are essentially the same drive with modified firmware.

The problem with consumer level drives, is that the drive will attempt to auto-recover bad sectors at any cost, which can take up to 10-30 seconds. This is not desirable for a RAID system, because the RAID controller will see the drive stop responding for 10 seconds, think the drive has failed completely and break the array, leaving you with no redundancy until you rebuild the array.

Server type drives are much less fussed about bad sectors - if they can't read a sector, they don't attempt auto-recovery, simply issue a 'sector bad' message to the RAID controller. The controller can restore the sector from parity, while keeping the drive in the array.

 

[imported_verteron]

I had been a Seagate supporter due to their 5 year warranty, until about two years ago. First, I'd recommend you go with Seagate's ES2 series drives like Mark K said, they don't cost much more anyway.

The main problem I have with the AS drives is that they corrupt data, and it isn't a repeatable disk error. Once the OS buys the farm, the drive's tests all pass. Maybe just reformat and then Seatools will not find a problem. After replacing a dozen or so under warranty for other customers, I had one fail on one of my workstations. I had cloned it from an IDE drive and it ran for only three months. Luckily, I still had that IDE drive(I thought I was replacing it with a better drive), so I cloned it again, and it worked for another month. Knowing about this problem already, I RMA'd the drive. The refurbished drive did no better. I grabbed a WD Raptor drive that I use for testing and cloned over to it. That was 3-4 months ago and not a blip yet. So it isn't the software, not the SATA controller or the cable. It must be the drive. I don't buy any Seagate drives any longer unless they are the ES2 type.

Western Digital does have their own enterprise class drives, but Newegg reviews are not that great for them and I haven't had a Seagate ES drive fail on me yet. So, I use WD Raptor drives for performance, and Seagate ES2 drives for security. I haven't had the chance to evaluate the WD enterprise drives, so I can only recommend what I know.

Since Seagate not only has a major reliablilty issue with these drives, they obviously don't catch it on the the refurbished drives either. So, either their QA sux, or they don't even understand the problem yet. These drive set no speed records, and aren't the quietest, so since the warranty will not get your data back, nor can it guarantee that you get a "good" drive in return, there is no reason to purchase one. So 'How bad is the SATA Seagate Barracuda?' Very bad. woof

Too bad Google's hard drive study did not name any manufacturers.

 

[Blain]

Why didn't you buy WD "RAID Edition" HDs for your array?
They are specifically designed for a RAID environment.
But they will cost a few bucks more than the Seagate drives that keep going out on you. :roll:

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Just a case in point: Western Digital RE-x (RE-2, RE-3) drives have a specific option enabled on them, TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery), that is designed for RAID configurations. Bascially it limits the time the drive will try to recover from an error. A normal drive will try for a longer time, resulting it the dropping of the drive from the array.
Consumer drivers != "RAID" level drives.

Right now I'm using 8 750gb SE16 hard drives in a WHS box. Previously it was 400gb RE2 hard drives in RAID 5.


It's not that the AS drives are bad--they aren't designed for RAID configurations.

 

[Blain]

Do the SE16's give you any raid specific problems?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Blain
Do the SE16's give you any raid specific problems?

They aren't ran in a RAID configuration in Windows Home Server. So I can't say. Would I run them in a RAID config--sure. I've found that having a good RAID controller (Promise is crap; Areca is wonderful), a good PSU, and a line conditioner (UPS) help with stability more than the type of hard drive.

 

[Blain]

I understand some UPS can clean the incoming power.
Do you use a line conditioner or a UPS?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Blain
I understand some UPS can clean the incoming power.
Do you use a line conditioner or a UPS?

UPS with a line conditioning. "AVR" as APC calls it. I have this one on the home server. It's the second one I've had, after the last one died. They do have a lifetime, and need to be tested from time to time.

EDIT: My solution of UPS + good PSU + good controller came after killing many Antec PSUs and many hard drives. At the time, I was running a dual Xeon configuration with 10 hard drives, and the stable solution was the above with two power supplies. I will always give my machines a lot of overhead when it comes to PSUs from now on.

 

[thermite88]

Originally posted by: Blain
I understand some UPS can clean the incoming power.
Do you use a line conditioner or a UPS?

No, I believe in a high quality PS which should provide good isolation from the power line garbage. At work (an aerospace company) or at home, I never use a line conditioner or a UPS and not convinced of the value of it. My computers are not the "mission critical" type. But I back up regularly and try to have data redundancy in my computers, thus, RAID-5. Living in a major metro area in the US, it is hard for me to believe that there are enough power line garbage that a good PS cannot handle.

I consider myself fairly computer savvy. But I never read any warning from AnandTech or Tom's Hardware when they heaped praises on the Seagate 7800.10 drives. There are zero mention of the fact that they are NOT for RAID. From the replies from Mark R and verteron (Thanks, guys), it is an established fact that Seagate designed this trap for their "consumer" customers to market unreliable drives.

So, the question is still:

What is the best configuration to get data redundancy from 3 (or 4) Seagate AS hard drives? Is it even possible?

It is difficult to just throw $300+ investment out of the window and start over again.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

What RAID controller are you using for RAID 5?

Originally posted by: thermite88
18 months and 3 replacement hard drives later, I still do not have a stable system.

If a $320 investment was causing me that much trouble, I'd drop it in a heart beat.

 

[thermite88]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
What RAID controller are you using for RAID 5?

The Asus P5B-E Southbridge ICH8R and Intel Matrix Storage Management.

Yes, I know about better solution out there. Before this upgrade, I used a LSI MegaRaid card and 4 SCSI wide drives. Unfortunately, I read too much Anandtech and Tom's hardware to believe that the Intel native RAID support for SATA is good enough.

Seagate is quilty of false advertising. They proclaim boldly at the product webpage:

"The Seagate® Barracuda® 7200.10 drive is the industry?s first 3.5-inch disk drive to utilize revolutionary perpendicular recording technology, and is the world?s most proven and established desktop disk drive.

Good For

Mainstream PCs, performance PCs, gaming PCs, workstations, desktop RAID and personal external storage devices."

If a $320 investment was causing me that much trouble, I'd drop it in a heart beat.

Haaa!!! No, not until I publicize that Seagate is failing their "consumer" customer and the review sites have failed their reader for not giving any warnings.

The computer at home is a hobby for me and it is always fun to try to get the most performance out of it. I could have stick with the SCSI drives if I did not read that much of Anandtech and Tom's hardware. Shame on me for not knowing more and earlier about this different grades of SATA hard drive. (Yes, it is always good to blame the victim.)

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: thermite88

Originally posted by: Blain
I understand some UPS can clean the incoming power.
Do you use a line conditioner or a UPS?

No, I believe in a high quality PS which should provide good isolation from the power line garbage. At work (an aerospace company) or at home, I never use a line conditioner or a UPS and not convinced of the value of it. My computers are not the "mission critical" type.

It's your money...

 

[Red Squirrel]

The seagate barracudas are great drives for their price but yeah, they do perform poorly in raid 5. I had 3 drives in my software raid, a samsung 1TB, Seagate 1TB and a hitachi 1TB. (yeah bad idea I know, to have all different makes ) The seagate always dragged along slowing down the entire system. I saw the load go as high as 10 while backup jobs would run (and never finish as the system would just halt, it would be writing at like 1 byte per second).

The samsung actually seemed to perform the best but is 100 bucks more. The hitachi was decent and just a bit more expensive, so I ended up buying two so I have all hitachis now.

 

[thermite88]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: thermite88

Originally posted by: Blain
I understand some UPS can clean the incoming power.
Do you use a line conditioner or a UPS?

No, I believe in a high quality PS which should provide good isolation from the power line garbage. I never use a line conditioner or a UPS and not convinced of the value of it.

It's your money...

Yet, I won't spend on an UPS which has no bearing on our current discussion. "Show-me" how it can affect the Seagate drives.

 

[thermite88]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
The seagate barracudas are great drives for their price but yeah, they do perform poorly in raid 5. I had 3 drives in my software raid, The hitachi was decent and just a bit more expensive, so I ended up buying two so I have all hitachis now.

What did you use to setup the software RAID-5? Any other lessons learned in setup other than selecting drives? Thanks.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Doing RAID 5 properly is always an investment; using the onboard controller is going to hinder the performance enough by itself. You seem very dedicated to getting these drives working, despite all the advice offered that makes other suggestions. If you are dead set of using the drives you have that are giving you problems in RAID 5, then I would build a WHS box, and de-raid your current system. While not as efficient at up-times as a stable RAID 1,5, or 6 config, it will be work better than an unstable RAID config.

Good luck.

 

[NXIL]

Hey Thermite,

read through your thread here, and some thoughts come to mind.

You said:

No, I believe in a high quality PS which should provide good isolation from the power line garbage. At work (an aerospace company) or at home, I never use a line conditioner or a UPS and not convinced of the value of it.

Yet, I won't spend on an UPS which has no bearing on our current discussion. "Show-me" how it can affect the Seagate drives.

Not true...even a great power supply can't always compensate if the power coming in is dirty, and there are all sorts of problems with the US power grid--consumption is going up, and the grid has not been updated for a long time.

Power CAN affect hard drives, big time; there was one PC testing lab (Maximim PC? HardOCP?) that had one circuit in their lab that also serviced the fluorescent lights--that circuit fried a lot of hard drives and motherboards. They fixed it, and problems with drives and motherboards in that section of their lab ceased.

I think a good quality UPS is important to help filter out surges, spikes, voltage dips, etc. (Note: was reading about some people having problems with their routers, and when they put them on UPS units, problems stopped....they can apparently be very sensitive to the quality of power fed them.)

http://www.dtidata.com/resourc...ilure-surge-brown-out/

http://whitepapers.techrepubli...ract.aspx?docid=314325

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/M...ss#Electricity_control

Big drives and RAID: technology is changing, big drives not so great for RAID: here is why:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=164&tag=rbxccnbzd1

Also, I think everyone pretty much agrees that onboard RAID sucks.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=116&tag=rbxccnbzd1

[Google search will find lots of articles about problems with on board raid.....][OK, I just saw your post where you concur with that....]

What reliable SATA hard drive will you recommend for RAID-5 under Vista Ultimate?

Maybe that is not the right question? Hey, you are a rocket scientist type guy (aeronautical engineer? cool!), and, maybe it's time to start thinking outside the RAID 5 box, and consider:

ZFS:

http://uadmin.blogspot.com/200.../why-zfs-for-home.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Note: Apple, who you are apparently not too fond of, is adding ZFS to upcoming versions of its server OS, and probably the consumer OS as well. (I use OS X, Windows XP, Win 2K (which is still my favorite, actually), and Vista, which I do not like--and apparently your Vista doesn't like you, either, since you say it is reporting you as a pirate..... Note: OS X doesn't "phone home" like Vista does, so I am not sure what it is about Apple/OS X that you don't like.....I think it is better than Vista, and so do a lot of others who are switching over....

What is the best configuration to get data redundancy from 3 (or 4) Seagate AS hard drives? Is it even possible?

As Choco says, maybe WHS? But, doesn't seem like Microsoft is treating you so good....maybe Solaris/Open Solaris for your storage? Linuyx/BSd with ZFS?

Or, another consideration: I definitely do not mean to insult you, but, is RAID5 your back up plan? It's not a great backup strategy.....actually, I guess you write some pretty high powered software, so no doubt you know that, but, maybe using those seagates to ghost/back up your data and rotate them so that some of them are off site in case of fire, hurricane, earthquake (yes they happen in the midwest) flood, theft, power surge, etc.....Also, even a high quality power supply has a finite life--possible for a power supply to go, and take a lot of what is connected to it with it, from motherboard to hard drive....anyway, that may be the best configuration may be:

One Seagate in the PC, and three external Seagates in housings, use eSATA/USB to run full backup at night, rotate them, keep at least one off site, i.e. in your office; complete backups Monday, Weds, Fri, two on site at your house, one off site....hey, it's not if, it's when a drive is going to blow up. With three back ups, no matter what, you will have 99% + of your data, if not 100% all backed up.

HTH, really, hope this helps.....you seem very frustrated, so, maybe time to step back and rethink the problem a bit....sort of like that coke-bottle shape fuselage in the 60's (50's?), swept wings, wing root drag, NACA cowlings--all cool stuff.

GL!

NXIL

 

[thermite88]

Thank you, everyone, for the lengthy and sincere advises. I really appreciate them. Yes, I am an engineer and a sturborn one.

I built my first PC compatible in the mid 80's with a single SCSI drive. Over the years, I eventually migrated to a SCSI-wide RAID5 which I used with W2K until 2007. The SCSI setup were NOT very compliicated and very stable and have no compatibility problem once put into place. I built a few gigs with EIDE drives for the kids, and found them to be much less responsive.

I read quite a bit at various web site and search the Seagate pages before I assumed that the SATA drive was fast and as reliable as the SCSI. I am wrong.

I may eventually buy a set of SAS drives and the controller with it. (No, I am not running a "mission critical" computer at home. It is JUST A HOBBY THING.) That will be the topic for another post.

What I really want to do with the 4 Seagate AS drives are building a "somewhat stable" Windows Vista system using the onboard controller. I will appreciate any specific suggestion and experience along this direction. (No, I am not sticking with RAID5 for these Seagate drives.) I don't want to throw away the Seagate drives since they are already and only 18-20 months old. I already decided a long time ago to give up RAID5 for these drives.

I am thinking using one as a single drive for OS and programs and two to setup a RAID-1 for the data. The fourth drive will be put away for backup. I have a DDS3 (SCSI) tape drive and an external USB hard drive for my backup in addition to the internal DVD writer. Will this work? Or there are better ideas. (Any reference of using Seagate SATA in RAID-1?)

P.S. I like to stay with Vista because of all the application software investments. I don't write software and hate programming.

 

[NXIL]

Yes, I am an engineer and a stubborn one.

I am personally a big fan of stubborn, persistent, meticulous engineers....think bridges that don't fall down, airplanes that fly, water that is clean, etc....thank you.

Good luck getting it all configured!

NXIL

 

[thermite88]

OK, guys, I am back. I am in the process of deciding on a replacement set of either the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID or WD Caviar Black. The 500 GB drives are priced about the same from different vendors. Both are slightly less than what I paid for my Seagates in 2007.

The Samsung is the choice by Tom's Hardware editors and the WD Anandtech's choice for RAID.

I tried the Seagates in single drive mode using AHCI. Making a little progress that the Vista 32 completed installation and all the upgrades except Service Pack 1. The installation of any of the language packages failed too. I still constantly get blue screen of death. It happened whenever the disk access light came on for a long time and, then, another memory dump and reboot. I tried putting the SATA speed jumper back on and it did not improve the system stability.

I still have two of the Seagates in somewhat working condition. One is lost by USPS in return to Seagate who decline to help. Another one is a DOA replacement from Seagate. I have been on the phone half a donzen times to get a pre-paid mailing label. Seagate always said that they will email it, but never did. The 5-years warranty is good, but no substitute for reliable drives.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: thermite88
OK, guys, I am back. I am in the process of deciding on a replacement set of either the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID or WD Caviar Black. The 500 GB drives are priced about the same from different vendors. Both are slightly less than what I paid for my Seagates in 2007.

The Samsung is the choice by Tom's Hardware editors and the WD Anandtech's choice for RAID.

I tried the Seagates in single drive mode using AHCI. Making a little progress that the Vista 32 completed installation and all the upgrades except Service Pack 1. The installation of any of the language packages failed too. I still constantly get blue screen of death. It happened whenever the disk access light came on for a long time and, then, another memory dump and reboot. I tried putting the SATA speed jumper back on and it did not improve the system stability.

I still have two of the Seagates in somewhat working condition. One is lost by USPS in return to Seagate who decline to help. Another one is a DOA replacement from Seagate. I have been on the phone half a donzen times to get a pre-paid mailing label. Seagate always said that they will email it, but never did. The 5-years warranty is good, but no substitute for reliable drives.

You may see that I caught your remarks -- for which I'm grateful, of course -- on another thread I started here about those pesky little gray jumpers.

We had the same experience. I checked the reviews on the 7200.10's when I built my "WOPR" quad-core system with 3Ware hardware RAID5 controller in 2007. It looked like a good buy.

To date, I've had no problem with the 4-drive array. I occasionally run the 3Ware 3DM software to verify the array, but there have never been any disk errors or problems on that system. Instead, it was my newest purchase of the 320GB "AS" model for the two-drive RAID0 (where I'd forgotten to remove the jumpers) that went south before Xmas.

After that, I revisited customer reviews for the 7200.10 model and saw a pattern of problems that would've steered me toward either a different manufacturer or a different model.

But like I said -- with the 3Ware 9560SE controller -- haven't had any problems, and this array was built once and only for the first time in July, 2007. I think I benched it to show a sustained read-throughput of well in excess of 200 MB/s.

But now, I'm looking more and more to limit power consumption. I've even thought about using notebook drives in a large array with a high-performance controller. I guess I'd better look into that idea more carefully -- given the remarks of others here about "special SE__ models for server/RAID."

Within the hour, I'm going to run my VISTA 64 performance-index update to see what score the replacement WD Caviar Blacks give me for the system that went down before Xmas. People said they were noisy, but the drive mounts I have in both systems pretty much eliminate noise. Fact is, the Seagate 7200.10s that caused me trouble would make clicking noises, but these Caviar Blacks don't do any such thing.

 

[thermite88]

I ordered 3x the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID HE502IJ 500GB drives. Total cost including 2nd day UPS Air is just under $250. The 7 years warranty tilted to its favor. I hope that I will not need it.

Finally, I received an UPS pre-paid shipping label to send my DOA replacement Seagate 7800.10 320GB to them.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: thermite88
I ordered 3x the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID HE502IJ 500GB drives. Total cost including 2nd day UPS Air is just under $250. The 7 years warranty tilted to its favor. I hope that I will not need it.

Finally, I received an UPS pre-paid shipping label to send my DOA replacement Seagate 7800.10 320GB to them.

You mean the "7200.10" model -- I'm sure. The latest of these are labeled 7200.11 and I think there's a 7200.12 model-line.

If they're actually that good about the pre-paid shipping, then I had better take the time to request an RMA for my dead 7200.10.

But as I said, my RAID5 with these in the other machine seems to take a licking and keep on ticking.

 

[thermite88]

Originally posted by: thermite88
I ordered 3x the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID HE502IJ 500GB drives. Total cost including 2nd day UPS Air is just under $250. The 7 years warranty tilted to its favor. I hope that I will not need it.

Finally, I received an UPS pre-paid shipping label to send my DOA replacement Seagate 7800.10 320GB to them.

I hope that this the final chapter of my post. I have a RAID5 system using 3 Seagate 7800.10 320GB running stably in the past month. After 18 months and 4 under warranty exchanges, I finally got 3 of these drives that passed the SEATOOL for DOS long SDT test. Once I did, the RAID5 setup was a breese.

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID HE502IJ 500GB drives were a flop. I went to RAID5 setup directly and it failed during Vista formatting. All 3 drives failed Samsung's ESTOOLS test. All were properly recognized by ESTOOLS. 2 refused to run the test. The only one that ran the test failed with RAM error message. I was very disappointed with the Samsung warranty. No direct dealing with Samsung. The drives must be returned to the seller. It took me 10 days to get an RMA number from NEWDIRECTION. They have received the drives 10 days ago and still no receipt nor refund. I called them and was asked to be patient. I am unlikely to buy from them again.