Seagate Acknowledges Problems With 1.5-TB HDD 239
AnInkle writes "Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda has been available for a couple months from multiple retailers. But shortly after release, reports of random freezes appeared on several sites. The hang apparently occurs in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista when streaming video or transferring files at low speeds. After a couple of weeks of silence, Seagate has finally officially acknowledged the problem. In a response to The Tech Report, they say they're investigating the 'issue' affecting 'a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives.' Acknowledging the 'inconvenience' is a start, but most users expect at least average performance and prompt service from the capacity king of data storage." In a related story, reader Lucas123 plugs a ComputerWorld piece examining the question of Seagate's plans to stay relevant at a time when SSDs increasingly capture OEM mindshare.
Half baked (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc. The only reports of success appear to be from people who are using it for an archive disk and thats it. Some people claim the problem can be avoided somewhat by disabling the write cache, but naturally you get a serious performance hit from that (especially since the memory cache is 32MB!)
Reading the forums, it appears that Seagate has not only thus told people that the drives aren't meant for a RAID environment, but even gone so far as to tell people that RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives". Hmm. Seems that time has changed this definition (FOLDOC and Wikipedia seem to claim the change in name as well).
I'm rather disappointed since now that I have a taste for a 1.5TB drive, I'm not looking to buy "just" a 1TB. Hopefully one of these companies can resolve this.
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
This link [wikipedia.org] might be of use to you in that regard.
Echoes of Intel... [tomshardware.com]
Re: SV35.3 (Score:2, Interesting)
thats why i buy only from seagates sv35 line of hard drives optimized for video streams.
and they arent more expensive than the regulars and come with larger warranties and 1tb capacities.
Re: SV35.3 (Score:2)
Re:Half baked (Score:2)
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's. I have had to do data recovery on many drives this past year and over 1/2 were seagates.. Seagate used to be the drives that NEVER failed. and now they are sending low grade refurbs for any warranty replacements and the warranty replaced drives have only 90 days on them so that nice 5 year warranty turns into a 90 day warranty when the drive dies and is replaced.
I only do HD video editing so I can get away with tiny 750 gig drives, but I dont like having them fail on me like segates have been lately.
As for the SSD drive remarks.. I cant see SSD drives getting near the capacities and speed I need for HD video editing within the nest 3 years.
Re:Half baked (Score:2)
I only do HD video editing so I can get away with tiny 750 gig drives,
I have a full-height 20MB hard drive I can smite you with. Get off my lawn!
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
"I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's"
Your sample is not representative ... "I had x and y fail on me, therefore the maker of x and y is crap". I used to buy western digital, and over %50 of the drives failed before 3 years. Seagate backs their drives with 5 year warranties compared to everyone else, if anything I think that's a statement of confidence in their ability to create drives that outlast the competition. All hard disks are destined to fail at some point due to moving parts and after prolonged use, even flash drives have a limited lifetime (even if it will never see failure during the time it is used). This is just the nature of the beast.
The biggest improvement's in hard disk life in my experience has been in adding active cooling to the disks themselves. Ever since I've added active cooling, I've noticed a mark decrease in failure before the 3 year mark, and I tend to go through a lot of hard disks.
Re:Half baked (Score:3)
comments on newegg or any self-selected forum are also meaningless as a much higher percentage of people with problems will comment, than those without problems.
Re:Half baked (Score:3, Funny)
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc.
Maybe they got their firmware from Comcast...
Re:Half baked (Score:3, Informative)
Just check the reviews of these drives - indeed, most 1TB drives as well as the Seagate 1.5TB drives - on Newegg or TigerDirect. These drives die regularly - they have an astronomical rate of failure, regardless of what the manufacturers claim. Some are DOA from the store (some people blame this on the OEM packaging - but the reviews vary from drive company to drive company, suggesting the packaging is not the culprit.) Of course, I know that negative reviews on such sites tend to outweigh positive reviews - but when you see the overall ratings dropping low, it's best to bypass that make and model, especially if there are a lot of reviews in total and the percentage of negative is way up there.
I was considering these drives for a client, but based on my research, there's no way I would touch them with a ten foot pole. Seagate 1TB drives aren't much better according to the reviews. Samsung drives seem to be better - considerably more positive reviews than negative. Even Hitachi 1TB drives are getting better reviews than Seagate or Western Digital these days - and I've stayed away from them since back when IBM sold them their defective Deskstars.
If you need more than 2TB in your box, best make sure you have enough drive bays to hold multiple 1TB or 750GB drives, because using 1.5TB is not a good idea. Either that or go for an eSATA external enclosure or NAS box with multiple drive bays. I'm considering an eSATA enclosure or an iSCSI SAN for the above mentioned client since some of his machines are Dells with not enough bays for the storage space we need for an individual workstation.
Re:Half baked (Score:2, Interesting)
What I'd rather have - SEAGATE!!! (Score:2)
Reliability. I'll take it over speed. I'll take it over capacity. Most of the time.
Give me a 500 GB drive that's guaranteed for 10 years and I'll be a customer.
Re:Half baked (Score:2)
I own 8 one TB drives for home use (mostly photo storage. I shoot gigabytes at a time when I have a day out with the camera). I had bought:
4 x 1TB Samsung (internal on a file and print server I bought in June...lots of fans, temps good, and I don't overclock)
2 x 1TB Western Digital Mybook (exeternal)
2 x 1TB Western Digital Mybook home (exeternal)
Two of the Samsung drives have died already. I had them replaced supposedly under warranty but had to pay $15 per drive for Seagates (which are slower SATA 1 drives) so I'm not thrilled with the company I used to build my latest file and print server.
I'm starting to question the wisdom of having gone with TB disks in the first place. Smaller disks haven't been as problematic. Although I was starting to think it was an issue with Samsung drives since I have had the drive on my Dell laptop, which was also a Samsung, replaced twice. The second time I requested a different brand and got Hitachi...which again is slower but seems more reliable (it doesn't make pinging noises for a start).
Reliable storage seems like a hard ask these days. I backup anything truly important to more than 2 disks (and keep one copy off site).
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
Patterson, David; Gibson, Garth A.; Katz, Randy (1988). "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" (PDF). SIGMOD Conference: pp 109â"116.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-391.pdf
right....
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe that even after being shown incontrovertible proof by the guys who created the acronym and described in detail how the first 5 levels work, we still have some dipshit here saying "if it ever did".
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
For whatever reasons the otherwise smart chaps who devised RAID decided to use that word, at no stage was it a characteristic of RAIDsets that they were made of inexpensive disks.
The term "inexpensive" in the RAID acronym is used to mean relative to the cost of a single disk with equal performance. It doesn't mean cheap it means cheaper.
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Funny)
Regardless of whether the disks are inexpensive or not, wouldn't you agree that an array of disks are going to be independent no matter what?
Redundant Array of Codependent Disks?
Reliability, Reliability, Reliability (Score:2)
Inexpensive has no meaning in RAIDs of today, if it ever did.
If a single pair of disks matching the performance of my RAID could be had (for say, twice as much money) then yes, my disks would be "inexpensive". But such a disk set doesn't exist (or didn't at the time), and saving money was certainly not our intention.
Yeah, saving the money was the intention. Reliability was the issue at hand. You had very high quality drives that were ludicrously expensive and these crapola microcomputer drives that were cheap, but too unreliable. But if you wrote data to two of them and had a hotspare you could get as reliable total storage for an order of magnitude (or two) less money.
The same is true today. Show me a 1TB drive that has the same MTBF as the mirror+hotspare above. You can do it with an SLC SSD, but you're, again, two orders of magnitude more expensive. Don't get me wrong, I'm all hot for a terabyte of solid state storage, but the $30K pricetag makes it the wrong choice for 99% of storage needs.
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)
I actually talked with Randy Katz about RAID, as I was in one of his classes at Berkeley. As late as last May, it still meant "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Though.. (Score:5, Funny)
I think it shouldn't matter the definition, either way Seagate has no excuse. That out of the way..
But the whole theory of RAID doesn't dictate anything about price nor, in my opinion, even require them to be 'disks'. Maybe 'inexpensive disks' is the term coined by the originator, but I think the originator should recognize the more general applicability of the concept.
For ultimate wrongness with respect to the declared meaning, how about a RAID-0 of high-capacity SSDs. A non-redundant array of expensive non-disk things.
Re:Though.. (Score:2)
A non-redundant array of expensive non-disk things.
A whorehouse?
Oh, I thought you said "non-dick things."
Re:Half baked (Score:2)
back in my time.. the I in RAID always means Inexpensive. but time has changed and people want to stick with the same ancronym, so they come up with another explanation.
Re:Half baked (Score:2)
Re:Half baked (Score:5, Insightful)
The name hasn't changed. RAID has never had anything to do with the price of the disks. You've always been able to make a RAID set out of expensive disks, and the biggest RAID packages usually are made up of expensive disks.
Yes, you could, but then you'd be missing the point. MAny did miss the point, in fact.
Independent Disks is a sort of marketing revisionism because they were tired of customers pointing out that "this isn't really inexpensive, is it?".
Re:Half baked (Score:2, Insightful)
It used to be you used three cheap 4 gig drives instead of a single nine. That was when 4 gig drives were "cheap". Capacity/Spindle never kept with the rate of growth of the data we keep, now we have to build SANs out of shelves and shelves of disks. We don't do it because it's cheaper than buying single multi-Exabyte drives, we do it because it's the only way.
When you build a SAN in a datacenter, one typically installs the largest, fastest (not disregarding application usage patterns of course), and implicitly most expensive spindles you can get. Like hell would you install disks a generation old (inexpensive) and use twice as many shelves (and power) these days. What little meaning "inexpensive" ever held, it has well and truly gone.
Re:Half baked (Score:2)
I certainly agree that RAID is necessary, but strongly disagree with a number of implementations I've seen in practice.
For example, I have seen racks of FC SCSI RAID with 2-4 disks per controller all to act as a 1Gbps NAS. They SHOULD have used IDE drives twice to 10 times as large (and not all that much slower) AND at half the cost (if that expensive). The savings would have bought an extra rack full of hot spares easily. Since the LAN was the bottleneck anyway, it's just wasteful. That sort of thing is quite common BTW.
Seagate is good (Score:4, Insightful)
As for SSD drives, I'm not exactly sure what everybody's worried about here. I don't see any affordable SSD drives, let alone any in the 1TB range.
Re:Seagate is good (Score:2)
I've never had too many problems with seagate, and consider them to be a great brand. I also like western digital, but when I have a choice, I go seagate for the 5 year warranty.
I've always disciplined myself with the thought, "It's not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, but when...". But oddly enough I have had tremendous success with long term hard disc usage. In fact Maxtor is the only brand that's failed thus far. 7 years of usage was pretty good tho!
Re:Seagate is good (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Seagate is good (Score:3, Interesting)
How many were made in Hungary? I'm betting very few to none. We had a huge lot of 20 gig drives die on us, all from Singapore (or something?) but none of the Hungarian ones died. To me this means it was not a design issue, but rather a quality in production issue.
-nB
Re:Seagate is good (Score:2)
Re:Seagate is good (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep reading about people going Seagate over Western Digital "for the 5 year warranty".
If you think that WD doesn't offer a 5 year warranty on any drives you are wrong. If you think there is only "the" 5 year warranty instead of "those" 5 year warranties then maybe I'm going to be a grammar nazi too.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488 [wdc.com] will get you started on 5 year warranty drives from WD.
WD1001FALS = 1TB
WD7501AALS = 750GB
WD6401AALS = 640GB (I'd recommend this drive)
WD5001AALS = 500GB
People are so quick to look to the top end but there is a reliability/speed/power/noise benefit to buying the sweet spot drive. Cost is in the eye of the beholder as the 640GB drive is lower in purchase price but won't be the best price per GB. Myself I'm willing to use the smaller drives, but then I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive without being low on disk space.
As a single drive or in an array as long as you don't run out of space you gain performance using smaller drives so long as you buy carefully. In RAID more spindles equal more speed. As a single drive you can pick and choose the highest density platters (320/333/334 as the desired platters currently vs the 250GB platters that are still floating around the supply chain in so many drives)
Re:Seagate is good (Score:2, Funny)
"I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive "
That must require pretty awesome balance!
Re:Seagate is good (Score:2)
With home server equipment, data density is the biggest requirement, 640GB drives are useless when you need a 4-5TB array and only have 5 drive bays to do it in.
I have a pair of the seatage 1.5TB drives, neither have caused a problem for me so far, both of course are under windows 2003 Home Server (not on the list of affected OSs), good to see them admitting to a problem though, too many companies these days just wont.
And no, don't bother questioning the storage requirement I listed, backups (incremental backups of about 4 PCs) redundant storage (it keeps copies on at least 2 different drives of everything) account for a large amount of space, but also a whole lot of peace of mind.
Re:Seagate is good but check this out. (Score:2)
Segate doesn't honor its 5 yr warranty directly if the drive came via OEM (HP for example).
To claim on those, the drive (the whole box in some instances) has to be sent back to the OEM including freight charges.
The OEMs don't necessarily honor parts warranty like Seagates unless the fault occurs within their standard warranty period of 12 months.
Re:Seagate is good (Score:2)
IDK.
I can recommend the WDC WD3200JB. My oldest one has given me roughly 5 years of continuous service.
Re:Seagate is good (Score:2)
Heh.
I have an 80 gigger in my laptop. If we ignore the 690GB in my media server and ~400GB on the video game machine, then I'm doing just fine with 80GB! ;)
Stupid thought of the day (Score:2, Informative)
Sony Vaio Laptop. Someone in my company almost bought one. Thankfully they came to me for advice before sinking money on their "new" personal machine.
I pointed out the following: the SSD drive was a mere 32 GB.
A standard installation (infection?) of Windows Vista (and no XP-downgrade option, Sony won't give you the drivers) eats up a good 12 of that. Office 2007 (yeah yeah I know, I work with what they use), another 6 easily. Miscellaneous preloads, drivers, "service" software, and of course the (ugh) "restore partition" eat up another 4-5. Swap file eats another 1-2.
Functionally, their "32 GB SSD drive" has about 7 GB of usable space before it maxes out in which they have to fit all their programs, utilities, miscellaneous pictures/video of the kids, games... or they can buy a normal laptop and we can get them a 500 GB internal drive and they're good to go for a decently long while.
And THAT is why the SSD's, even though OEM's would love to use them for marketroid reasons, are going to be a long time in making anything obsolete. I wouldn't use anything less than a 500GB drive for a machine today, whether laptop OR desktop, and the largest commercial SSD currently is a mere 128 GB.
Re:Stupid thought of the day (Score:3, Informative)
Throw in some external storage in the form of a USB drive and I've got a system that boots in ~10 seconds, restarts in ~15, and cut my compile time by a factor of 10.
Not to mention all the apps open a lot more quickly. I don't know if I can go back to a non-SSD setup honestly. I've got one at home and I almost never use it anymore...need to switch that one over.
Re:Stupid thought of the day (Score:2)
Vista uses a few gigs for the install as opposed XP, and the recovery partition for Vista adds another few gigs.
Re:Stupid thought of the day (Score:2)
whether laptop OR desktop, and the largest commercial SSD currently is a mere 128 GB.
Wrong
250GB OCZ SSD [ocztechnology.com]
Re:Stupid thought of the day (Score:2)
I wouldn't use anything less than a 500GB drive for a machine today, whether laptop OR desktop, and the largest commercial SSD currently is a mere 128 GB.
The 'work' related documents section of my unit, including email comes in well under 30GB. And that includes a selection of ISOs, installers, and other 'large' files I keep around related to work.
So for me, a 32GB SSD is too small. A 64GB SSD is adequate. And a 128GB SSD will easily last me the life cycle of the laptop, for work. For personal use, yeah, I have music, movies, games, etc, and 500GB is probably the minimum I'd consider on my 'primary personal computer'. (As it is I have 2TB (4x 500GB drives, 2 internal, and 2 external esata (and usually powered off).
But a laptop that's mostly for work? Anything over 64GB is fine.
Additionally, on our office PCs the average hard drive use (thanks to being heavily into things like citrix etc) is less than 10GB. A sales rep with a 32GB SSD laptop would be just fine, as would nearly all office admin staff and most execs. The price of SSD only has to come down a bit more for it to be worth it for us to start using them... HD fails are easily the biggest issue with have with laptops, and among the biggest issues we have with the desktops too.
Re:Stupid thought of the day (Score:2)
I, too, call Shenanigans on that.
Through much trickery and chicanery (most of which involved attending one of Microsoft's developers conference), I got a full copy of Office 2007. They didn't actually print discs, like they did with Visual Studio 2005, they just provided a download link and a password.
The downloaded Office 2007 Professional installer is 385MB. They installed size is 429MB.
I also can't believe that Vista eats up 12 GB of hard disk space. My friend and I bought netbooks with 8GB solid state drives. I put Server 2003 on mine, and he installed Vista (the fool! on a netbook!). Obviously Vista can't take up 12 GB of space on an 8 GB SSD, but I'll admit there was some devilry involved with cutting out drivers he didn't need from the installer and slipstreaming SP1 in.
But, granted, 32GB is incredibly small. Even if you could boot Vista from floppies, you're still left with only 32 GB usable space. That's tiny, tiny, tiny. I survive with 8 GB on my netbook only because A) Server 2003, Office 2007, and a few other programs amount to only 4 GB, B) I have a 16GB SD card and an 8 GB flash drive I use for anything interesting and C) my home desktop is has terabyte RAID 0.
There are a few advantages to SSDs, though: no moving parts. I work at the help desk at college, and the "help desk" is evidently French for "student laptop repair." I'm one of two students allowed to touch them, and about a third of the laptops I've worked on have had failed hard drives. Not exactly a scientific sample, but a SSD won't have a head crash if your roommate drops a subwoofer on the keyboard. (No joke, his W, S, and F keys were missing.) They're also quiet - I mean, how much noise does your flash drive make? Quiet, durable, and presumably good thermals make for good laptop material.
Still, maybe a warranty and a 500 GB drive are worth the savings. Or maybe two 500 GB drives and a backup.
Started going downhill after acquiring MAXTOR (Score:2)
Seagate appears to have started going downhill after acquiring Maxtor. First there was the infamous AAKS firmware bug that was discussed at length here in /. that made a specific model of Seagate drive underperform. In various web forums, people have also started complaining about more noise when Seagate harddrives perform seek operations, along with other firmware related bugs affecting burst speed performance. Seagate also now appears to be behind Western Digital in terms of performance on its line of desktop hard drives. All these happening after the Maxtor acquisition.
Re:Started going downhill after acquiring MAXTOR (Score:2)
Re:Started going downhill after acquiring MAXTOR (Score:3, Insightful)
Capturing Mindshare... (Score:4, Interesting)
Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no idea - wake me up when an affordable SSD can hold 1TB or so. Until then I'll stick to spinning magnetic media everywhere but maybe my laptop.
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:2)
Database admins are also showing interest.
SSDs may well become the standard but when a 1 TB drive is only $100 it really is hard to look longingly at an SSD.
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd worry about a SSD being destroyed too quickly with certain database loads.
If its mostly read then yeah the SSD would kick butt but throw in frequent writing and I'd get worried.
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:2)
We've done database servers with SSD and RAID1+0. Amazingly fast, and the power savings aren't bad either.
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:2)
Depends on the SSD, the database, and the usage pattern. I wouldn't want to run a frequently-updated database on MLC flash, that's for sure. But at work we just put out production database on a Fusion-io ioDrive [fusionio.com], which quotes a 24-year lifespan with 5TB of writes a day. The performance is amazing. Of course, now everything is CPU-bound...
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:2)
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:2)
Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?
Anyone who cares about the performance of the parts in their computers has been thinking of SSDs for some time now, and in a positive light. The same "mindshare" that WD Raptor's [wikipedia.org] built will eventually turnover to one SSD or another.
Re:Lifespan... (Score:2)
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper than platter drives to make them better.
Re:Lifespan... (Score:2)
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper than platter drives to make them better.
Thumb drives are cheap and use cheap chips. It's my understanding that SSD's are made with flash that is better made for frequent writes. If it wasn't, i don't even see why they make SSDs, since CompactFlash cards already use a standard IDE interface.
Anyone have some info on this?
-Taylor
Re:Lifespan... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lifespan... (Score:2)
They have started to use MLC chips in a lot of things to drive the cost per GB down faster, and MLC has a lower rated write lifetime.
Re:Lifespan... (Score:2)
Swap is a compromise, and ram is cheap now. You don't actually need swap at this point if you get enough ram. The only exception being Linux distros apparent obsession with using the swap file/partition for hibernation by default.
Get enough RAM and you can make your storage decisions based on the things that actually matter, speed, space and reliability over time.
Re:Lifespan... (Score:2)
what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS?
All that depends on the OS and demand.
I've got 2 linux boxes, one with 1GB ram and another with 2GB and they have never used any swap space.
Lots of ram + SSD with no swap partition will make linux work ok if you don't open excessive amnts of apps at the same time.
No hope with WinX however.
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:2)
In my mind, hence the name :D
Re:Capturing Mindshare... (Score:3, Interesting)
Give it time, SSDs were nowhere on the consumer market before the last year.
Also, I notice hard drive capacity just isn't increasing at the rate it used to (early 2000s). I think last year the biggest was 1TB already and now it's just hovering at 1.5TB. OTOH, for about $49 two years ago got you a 1GB usb drive at walmart (micro cruzer). Same brand 8GB/16GB costs $25/$59 respectively. Can get a generic 32GB online. Not a bad rate of increase.
I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, you'll see a jump from mechanical to SSD bigtime. I think it will happen within 5 years.
Capturing Advantages... (Score:2)
"I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, you'll see a jump from mechanical to SSD bigtime. I think it will happen within 5 years."
I suspect even sooner you'll see hybrid HDD/SSD drives.
What I would do... (Score:2, Insightful)
The comments on that page are pretty harsh. I've never had a problem with Seagate and would still put it with WD as my favorites, but I am curious as to what is causing this, more cache needed?
Re:What I would do... (Score:2)
Possibly buggy firmware. Its only when reading files slowly so it must fill the read buffer and then forget to refill it when it gets empty?
My theory anyway from the limited information.
Harsh Comments (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply put, the cost of failure for a storage manufacturer is an order of magnitude above the rest of the industry. People don't just lose money, they lose memories, they lose costly business information. Of course you and I know that we should back up our data. But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too.
Harsh Constraints. (Score:2)
"But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too"
Yeah, I've lost several years of insightful posts from MaxwellEdision. Seriously it's easy to say backup. But when the drives in question are Terabyte drives. What are you going to back them up to, and if it's another Terabyte drive then you are right back to the reliability problem that prompted the backup policy in the first place?
Re:Harsh Constraints. (Score:2)
That's something I can sympathize with. DVD's hold 4.7GB (unless you go dual layer, but those are still expensive for a still small storage spac). While that was once just plain huge, these days to backup my system I'd need dozens of them.
LTO3 (or now LTO4) drives are nice - I use them at work for database backups. The problem is the drives (and the controller cards to support them) are insanely expensive. Buying one would cost several times the purchase price of my computer.
What I've had to resort to is very limited backups. I burn DVD's of the really, really important stuff. That stuff that I just can't afford to lose. Beyond that though, I still have a lot of information that I consider VALUABLE that I can't backup (at least not on a regular basis).
Re:Harsh Comments (Score:2)
Of course you and I know that we should back up our data. But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too.
I just lost 2 one TB drives last month. By far the largest loss in terms of storage I've ever had. The only things I didn't have backed up were some VMWare Linux images I set up to get a feel for different distros about 6 months ago. I didn't lose a single photo or anything else of consequence.
If it's worth storing, it's worth backing up to a second drive, and it's also worth periodically backing up to an external drive.
The real problem with these (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem with these drives, or the scary problem, is the folks using these in RAID arrays, or things like the Drobo. The drive freaks out, so the array marks it bad. You pop the drive out and put in a new one, or even the same one again, to start a rebuild. But another drive freaks out during that process, array says "oh crap, another bad drive!" and your data goes to /dev/null. Even though no data was ever actually lost... just bad drives.
Re:The real problem with these (Score:3, Informative)
Thats with RAID 5, RAID 6 can reduce the possibility of data loss even further and if your data is critical then RAID 10 would be *extremely* to fail completely.
Re:The real problem with these (Score:2, Insightful)
If the rebuild time exceeds the average time of the problem behavior it doesn't matter what RAID level you use or how many drives are involved.
With Terabytes of data RAID 5 and RAID 6 will take way too long to rebuild and your array will fail during rebuild.
Even with RAID 10, if the behavior occurs in less time than synching the mirror takes you are screwed.
Re:The real problem with these (Score:2)
Re:The real problem with these (Score:2)
What a beautiful image.
Re:The real problem with these (Score:3, Funny)
I prefer to calculate biting satire...
Other Seagate 7200.11 drives? (Score:4, Insightful)
The 1.5TB drive is part of a family of Seagate drives, the 7200.11 drives. Supposedly the only differences between the different drives in the family are the number of platters and the size of the cache. So if there's a bug, I would expect the same issue with the smaller 7200.11 drives. (If not, the the root cause is probably related to the increase in power draw from spinning the fourth platter.)
Do not think so (Score:2)
I just got some of the 7200.11 1TB seagate drives about a month ago - one I use with an eSata case to hold an Aperture (photo editing) library, the other I use as a drive to store and replay HDTV streams captured OTA from an elGato receiver in a Firewire case. I have yet to see any lockups or freezes like those described, and I'm using them in ways that would seem to be worst case.
So, I'd go ahead with the purchase.
On a large lot.. (Score:3, Informative)
On a lot of 60, a random subsample of 10:
- 7 have been nothing but blissful
- 2 throw random errors enough to stall a raid array
- 1 just hangs the controller after some amount of time.
Not saying the percentages bear out over the long haul, but people saying "WFM" are probably telling the truth, as are those complaining of errors.
Early adopter syndrome (Score:2, Informative)
New Firmware Bugs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:New Firmware Bugs (Score:3, Insightful)
Bugs in hard drive firmware are completely unexpected. We aren't talking about a nVidia driver here. Hard drives are expected to perform flawlessly when new.
The official statement is slightly misleading... (Score:3, Insightful)
"We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions."
"Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18."
The official statement is slightly misleading...
1) When the problem occurs all hard drive operations stop until the OS times out the ATA command - typically 30 seconds. This results in the computer freezing for 30 seconds.
2) The problem can result in data loss if using a RAID system. Depending on the OS/RAID configuration the problem may cause a RAID system to think the drive has died. The RAID system automatically removes the drive and continues to run degraded (as designed). 20 minutes later when another drive exhibits the problem the RAID system drops the second drive and dies.
3) The problem may be a systematic problem rather than a small number of drives - all drives have I tested running the SD17 firmware have exhibited the problem.
Glad I didn't buy these (Score:2)
SSDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's what nerds do:
They go to newegg.
They go the the hard drives section.
They pick narrow it down to SATA II.
They sort by lowest price.
They middle-click a few Seagates that are around their capacity requirement.
They double check the 5 year warranty.
They make sure any bad reviews are from idiots who don't know what they're doing.
They pick one based on cost and capacity.
OEMs like SSDs because of the margins they can get, sure. But until DELL stops selling HDDs, Seagate and Western Digital and Hitachi have nothing to worry about in that department.
Besides, it's not as if Seagate is skipping SSDs.
Re:SSD's capturing the 'mindshare' (Score:2)
You're correct, they are intriguing for portable devices, but at this point they're still way too expensive for most people. I'm fine with a disc which is only 120gb or so as long as it's reliable, but I don't think that SSDs are at a reasonable price point.
As for desktops and servers, they need to be a lot less expensive before they're going to be going in any of my computers. For the most part I'm happy with my ZFS mirrored disks. And they're both ATA133.
Re:SSD's capturing the 'mindshare' (Score:2)
I'd be willing to wager that half of all computer users don't even know what SSD stands for.
I don't have access to the proper statistics, but I'd be willing to bet that a substantial number of people walking into Best Buy wouldn't be able to tell you what HDD stands for.
That said, I agree that it'll be a while before SSDs really take the crown away from plain old HDDs. They're simply too expensive per GB for most uses.
Re:SSD's capturing the 'mindshare' (Score:2)
Yep (Score:2)
I almost lost my coffee on that "mindshare" bit. Apple is pretty much at the forefront of yuppy technology "mindshare," and the SSD isn't standard - even on the Macbook Air. Not much of a chance the unwashed masses are looking at SSD any time soon, unless they're buying a workstation laptop replacement.
The tech is not at all price per gig competitive, and only Intel has an SSD that outperforms traditional hard drives on speed and battery life by any significant margin.
The coolest thing SSD could provide is a RAID-like array (with a REAL controller) in the size of a 2.5" hard drive, splitting up the memory banks for stripe, mirror, or combinations of the two, since the platters seem like they have reached a horizon for getting smaller. Some intelligent file systems could be laid on top of that, and could simply prompt when you first set up your computer for your chosen arrangement, and even switch later on if your storage needs change.
Re:Large storage solutions? (Score:2)
Re:Running Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
CIte your authority. NTFS is partially journaled as well.
I smell a rat.
FS like ext3 can be partitioned in any number of usable ways for streams; a 1.5TB drive isn't that large.
And it wasn't that long ago that NTFS couldn't be used on a volume larger than 4GB.... then 32GB.
And additionally, take your 235 Microsoft patents violated and cite them, too.
What issues? (Score:2)
We have an 8.8 TB ext3, no problems. It admittedly takes a while to mkfs, but that is a small small slice of the lifecycle of a filesystem. This FS has been in service for over two years.
Re:What issues? (Score:2)
I think the parent is either a dark humorist, or a shill for Microsoft. Ambiguous, but seems to be a lipfarter propagandist. Now that the election is over, there are many out of work.
Re:What issues? (Score:2)
How's the speed with deleting large (4-10gb) files?
Re:Running Linux? (Score:2)
And it wasn't that long ago that NTFS couldn't be used on a volume larger than 4GB.... then 32GB.
What?
Are you talking about Fat16/Fat32??? From what I remember, the 32gb was an OS imposed limit on XP...... until sp2 maybe? I don't remember exactly....
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm [ntfs.com]
Re:Running Linux? (Score:2)
Different versions had different capacity. The current version can handle exabytes, depending on several different factors in terms of cluster and extent size. Layout efficiency is debatable, and there is little done in typification and therefore decent research on performance of the current NTFS vs ZFS vs ext3 vs Reiser and other file systems, even ancient ones and experimental ones.
Th NTFS has limitations on the number of files/folders, but it's irrelevant here.
So is the original post.
Re:Running Linux? (Score:2)
I'm just guessing, but I'd guess that that would count as a 'very large partition' yet I've had no problems with journaling over the last year.
Cite a source, or at least.. some kind of elaboration on the "serious issues"
I'd like to read about it, not saying its false or anything, just I've been looking into other options.
Re:Running Linux? (Score:2)
I've been using ext3 & LVM with mdadm on a raid5 array that is 6+1par+1hotspare x 1TB drives.
You'd be better off running RAID-6 or RAID-DP. Less risk for the same amount of disks. Sorry, I'll take any excuse to say RAID-DP.
It's always fun to bring up DP in a meeting with a straight face then follow it up with, "as in RAID-DP, why what did you think I meant?"
Re:spend a couple hundred and act like sooo entitl (Score:2)
Entitled to a product that functions as advertised? Wow, people are so spoiled!
Seriously, is it so unreasonable to expect a drive to not hang randomly during normal usage?
Re:spend a couple hundred and act like sooo entitl (Score:2)
I don't understand this attitude either.
Are we as customers supposed to EXPECT failure now? WTF? Seriously?
I want my product to function as advertised, whether it's a $6.99 hand-cranked radio from Wal-Mart or a $3000 Mac Pro.
If there is a problem with the product, I have every right to call the company out on it, criticize them, and make a stink.
Yes, problems happen. But we shouldn't *expect* them.
If everyone were like the GP, imagine how crappy quality would be in.. well, everything!