New Seagate 7200.11 drive stutters.. help!

[fzkl]

I recently moved from 2 X seagate 250GB 7200.10 HDDs in RAID 0 to a single Seagate 1.5 TB 7200.11 HDD. I intend to pick up 2 more of the latter and do a RAID 5.

My 1.5 TB is almost full now and I have begun to notice off late that occasionally while playing videos off the drive, the video pauses for a split second with some noise coming from the drive. The noise from the drive matches the duration for which the video is stuck. My drive isn't heavily fragmented and this behavior is beginning to worry me.

I am trying to figure out of this is a common behavior in single drive configurations. I already feel the lack of response from the drive since moved from RAID 0 to a single HDD and can't wait to move to RAID5. However, I am now worried that the seagate drive might have an issue. I checked for new firmware updates and it looks like I have a CC firmware on this drive which according to seagate doesn't need a firmware update.

Please let me know if you have had similar experiences or any clue about why this is happening. Should I just return the Seagate and buy another brand of drives or is this me realizing the pinch of moving from RAID0 to single HDD?

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

You shouldn't be filling hard drives all the way. That is probably why it's stuttering. Does it stutter when it's half full?

 

[Viperoni]

You shouldn't be filling hard drives all the way. That is probably why it's stuttering. Does it stutter when it's half full?

???



OP, try to describe the noise. Metallic, clicking, tapping, scratching... ?

 

[fzkl]

There are two partitions, 150GB for the OS of which 50 GB is free and another of 1.1 TB of which 155 GB is free. I doubt if there are page swaps causing the problem. I have about 4 GB of RAM.

The noise is clicking and doesn't sound fatal, I have heard similar sounds on drives I have owned previously. What worries me is that it happens only when the video stutters.

 

[RebateMonger]

Have you exmained the Windows System Event Log for errors related to "Disk" or "NTFS"?

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

???



OP, try to describe the noise. Metallic, clicking, tapping, scratching... ?

http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Gen...3;jsessionid=4FCFFCD1399673AD18F1A8EE3B8F4D2C

 

[Voo]

http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Gen...3;jsessionid=4FCFFCD1399673AD18F1A8EE3B8F4D2C

Just a link without any explanation isn't that helpful.

At least I can't think of any reason why a full hard drive (not ssd) should be a problem, the performance is worse if you have to use the inner zones of a drive (which shouldn't be that bad and if you didn't defrag your drive appropriatly could also get if it was half empty), but that's all.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Never buy a seagate 7200.11 drive. They are pretty much designed to fail. It's probably failing on you.

Just Google search 7200.11 failure to see what I mean. Try to see if you can do a return and get another drive.

 

[abaez]

I've had two since spring and I haven't had an issue, so it's not all 7200.11's.

 

[Seven]

A lot of 7200.11 are faulty. Better stay away from it. Seagate dumped their 7200.11 quick by releasing the 7200.12..

 

[pjkenned]

... Yea so obviously the two 1TB 7200.11's and 16 1.5TB 7200.11's that I've had running for the last 8-12 months with less than 20 minutes of total downtime must be designed to fail.

The 7200.11 issue was a firmware issue. It was fixed months ago. All hard drives fail at some point period. Other than the firmware issue, the 7200.11's were just normal drives.

If you Google search 7200.11 you'll be searching the archive that will find you the long fixed firmware issue. You'll also find normal failures... but again... hard drives are bathtub curves.

OP: You may have had a bad drive, where did you buy it from? Was it shipped? What was the packaging like?

Have you looked at other processes running? What OS? What driver are you using? Are you running in native IDE mode, Raid/AHCI mode?

Streaming video content is a sequential read, which the 7200.11's were really good at, plus with the 32MB buffer doing sequential reads, even high bitrate blu-ray iso's shouldn't be an issue off a single drive.

If you run raid 5 with the 7200.11's you may want to try a Dell Perc 5/i. Cheap on ebay and GREAT raid 5 controllers that work with the 7200.11's especially if you use less than 8. Here's a bench which shows pretty much the max transfer rates. http://www.servethehome.com/?p=16 Greater than 5 drive raid 5 chokes on the PCI<->PCIe bridge, but under that it's the best cheap controller out there (The BBU's for my Adaptec's cost more than the Perc 5/i's + BBU's). I still use them on an old nvidia 680 board since they work well with nvidia/amd chipsets.