Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

2015-01-12

Seagate barracuda

2 Days ago shortly after i woke up, i heared a squeek, klick, squeek, … noise from my computers. A quick run of smartctl didnt reveal anything majorly wrong, and the noise stopped for a moment. when it started again, i systematically tried putting disks in sleep mode with hdparm to identify which if any hdd was making these noises. But no hdparm command affected the noise, then slowly waking up, i realized that i actually had more disks in the box than i got results from smartctl, also a look in syslog confirmed that ata2 was not healthy, teh first failed command was at 12:25:54, ata2.00: failed command: IDENTIFY DEVICE, a minute later ata2: reset failed, giving up. Restarting the box and reconnecting the cables did not help either.
My last smartctl output of it from 2 month ago listed it at 20687 Power_On_Hours and 2504 Reallocated_Sector_Ct, none of the values was above their thresholds.
This disk was used for half my fate clients before i moved them to a more powerfull box and it itself was a replacement for a failing 1tb samsung disk, well ironically the samsung disk that the 1tb seagate disk should replace still works though with 3458 pendng sectors.
Iam not sure if iam imagining it but it seems like the quality of disks is getting worse each year
Though luckily this one had nothing important on it, or at least nothing i remember ;)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Michael @ 21:39

6 Comments »

  1. You’re not imagining and it’s not only about disks. Minimizing costs, maximizing profit, that’s what it is all about. There is a little to no consideration for durability and quality beside “it should work during warranty period, but barely longer”. What’s worse it’s not unheard of to ship product with better components to get some traction thanks to good reviews and later silently replace them with cheaper ones in consecutive revisions. As we’re talking about disks, here is one of the examples:
    http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kingston-and-pny-caught-bait-and-switching-cheaper-components-after-good-reviews

    BTW Seagate used to be good overall in the past, but from my observations for a long time already (like 10-15 years) only enterprisey Seagate series preserved most of their good traits. Nowadays I’m sticking with WD for HDDs and Samsung for SSDs. I only wish my 840 Pro will remain as durable as in the following test:
    http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

    Comment by przemoc — 2015-01-13 @ 12:02

  2. Yes, i also used seagate disks a really long time ago and dont remember issues. More recently my choice was samsung for HDD and samsung or intel for SSDs. My new fate box uses a 850 PRO and no issues so far. Samsung sadly doesnt make HDDs anymore AFAIK. It seems the choices are decreasing. Ive replaced the failed barracuda by a 3TB ultrastar already, lets see how long these last.

    Comment by Michael — 2015-01-15 @ 17:31

  3. and this is why we backup, backup, backup! And never forget to actually test the backup.

    Comment by Udo Sauer — 2015-01-14 @ 09:28

  4. I do have backups of most of my stuff, that disk didnt because most of what was on it was moved elsewhere already as the box it was in was already a bit old. The new replacement disk also went into my newer box …

    Comment by Michael — 2015-01-15 @ 17:38

  5. flooding in thailand again, you would think that the hd manufacturers would relocate.

    Comment by compn — 2015-03-02 @ 14:36

  6. Oke thank you pack the info is very helpful for us, success is always…

    Comment by jual tenun — 2015-03-16 @ 06:23

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