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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] hp H222 SAS controller
From:       Mick <michaelkintzios () gmail ! com>
Date:       2013-07-15 7:39:14
Message-ID: 201307150839.34368.michaelkintzios () gmail ! com
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On Sunday 14 Jul 2013 23:35:50 Paul Hartman wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> 
wrote:
> > On 08/07/2013 17:39, Paul Hartman wrote:
> >> On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 9:04 PM, Paul Hartman
> >> 
> >> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> ST4000DM000
> >> 
> >> As a side-note these two Seagate 4TB "Desktop" edition drives I bought
> >> already, after about than 100 hours of power-on usage, both drives
> >> have each encountered dozens of unreadable sectors so far. I was able
> >> to correct them (force reallocation) using hdparm... So it should be
> >> "fixed", and I'm reading that this is "normal" with newer drives and
> >> "don't worry about it", but I'm still coming from the time when 1 bad
> >> sector = red alert, replace the drive ASAP.  I guess I will need to
> >> monitor and see if it gets worse.
> > 
> > Way back when in the bad old days of drives measured in 100s of megs,
> > you'd get a few bad sectors now and then, and would have to mark them as
> > faulty. This didn't bother us then much
> > 
> > Nowadays we have drives that are 8,000 bigger than that so all other
> > things being equal we'd expect sectors to fail 8,000 time more (more
> > being a very fuzzy concept, and I know full well I'm using it loosely :-)
> > )
> > 
> > Our drives nowadays also have smart firmware, something we had to
> > introduce when CHS no longer cut it, this lead to sector failures being
> > somewhat "invisible" leaving us with the happy delusion that drives were
> > vastly reliable etc etc etc. But you know all this.
> > 
> > A mere few dozen failures in the first 100 hours is a failure rate of
> > (Alan whips out the trust sci calculator) 4.8E-6%. Pretty damn
> > spectacular if you ask me and WELL within probabilities.
> > 
> > There is likely nothing wrong with your drives. If they are faulty, it's
> > highly likely a systemic manufacturing fault of the mechanicals (servo
> > systems, motor bearing etc)
> > 
> > You do realize that modern hard drives have for the longest time been up
> > there in the Top X list of Most Reliable Devices Made By Mankind Ever?
> 
> An update: the Seagate drives have both continued to spit more
> unrecoverable errors and find more and more bad sectors. Including
> some end-to-end errors indicated as critical "FAILING NOW" status in
> SMART. From what I have read that error means the drive's internal
> cache did not match the data written to disk, which seems like a
> serious flaw. The threshold is 1 which means if it happens at all, the
> drive should be replaced. It has happened half a dozen times on each
> disk so far (but not at the exact same time, so I don't think it is a
> host controller problem -- and other disks on the same controller and
> cable have had no issues). They have also been disconnecting and
> resetting randomly, sometimes requiring me to pull the drive and
> reinsert it into the enclosure to make it reappear. It happens even
> after I disabled APM, so I know it isn't a spin-down/idle timeout
> thing. Temperatures are actually very good (low 30's) so they are not
> overheating.
> 
> I think I will try to trade them in to Seagate for a new pair under
> warranty replacement. And then probably try to sell the replacements
> and be rid of them.
> 
> Meanwhile, during that experiment, I bought 2 brand new Western
> Digital Red 3TB drives last week. No problems in SMART testing or
> creating LVM/RAID/Filesystems. I have now been running the destructive
> write/read badblocks tests for 24+ hours and they have been perfect so
> far, exactly 0 errors. They are more expensive (3TB for the same price
> as the 4TB seagate) and slightly slower read/write speed (150MB/sec
> peak vs 170MB/sec peak), but I value reliability over all other
> factors.
> 
> These Seagate drives must have some kind of manufacturing defect, or
> perhaps were damaged in shipping... UPS have been known to treat
> packages like a football!

I've been watching this thread with interest, because I've been trying to find 
out which HDD I should be buying for a new PC.  For every person reporting 
problematic Seagates there's another person complaining about Western Digital 
being too noisy, failing, or in the case of the black versions, far too 
expensive.

Amidst all the anecdotal aphorisms against one or the other manufacturer, I 
saw mentioned that the likelihood of failure doubles up when you go from 1TB 
to 2 TB.  If true, I guess that the 3TB would have fewer failures than 4TB 
drive.

For what it's worth I have had a number of Seagates failing on me, but since 
this was in the 90's.  On my laptop a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 (ST9500420ASG) 
is running fine for the last 3.5 years so, I was thinking of taking a punt on 
a 'Seagate Barracuda 3.5 inch 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB 6GB/S Internal SATA'.  But 
what you're mentioning here gives me cause to pause.

-- 
Regards,
Mick

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