Is it time for a eulogy to Seagate? My last job at DEC was in their storage division, which got renamed to Avastor and then promptly sold to Quantum. Back in the day, any time Seagate came out with a new product, our engineers eagerly got hold of one and disassembled it, in search of the secrets behind being #1 in the industry.
I still use Seagate as alternate-vendor for my home servers (alas, I no longer maintain data center servers--AWS has killed off that whole business). But not for much longer, it seems. On Saturday morning at 2:30am, my local Nagios gave the alert: disk dropped out of the array. It's one of two batches of the 3TB units that came out around 2012-2013 (I can remember how long the industry sat on a 2TB "standard", not coming out with higher capacities for what seemed like forever, probably just two years or so but it's the longest capacity plateau I can remember over the past 30 years). Normally my ritual is to pull out the failed drive, RMA it, and then over time swap others out a couple at a time as my capacity needs require upgrades. This time, array recovery was hobbled: I was able to resync about half the partitions, but I discovered many more Offline_Unrecoverable type-198 errors: I'd suffered a *triple-disk* failure in a 5-drive array! After dealing with that crisis (somewhat), I looked at my other server and sure enough, found errors on two of the Seagates there too. Lesson learned: add smartctl error and temperature monitoring to my Nagios arsenal. Every time. But is the other lesson to not buy Seagate? Their consumer-grade warranty stood at 5 years up until around 2012, when they led the whole industry downhill into a 1-year standard warranty with an "enterprise" warranty of 3 or 5 years. Backblaze is paying attention, and publishing reliability numbers from its data centers Consumer Reports-style: take a look at http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives. Sure enough, my 3TB Seagates are called out as worst-of-the-worst. Western Digital bought out the Hitachi storage division, which worried me a lot at the time, but so far hasn't compromised its top-tier quality. So I'm tossing out a bunch of Seagates in favor of Hitachi. But regrettably, that means my servers will have similar-vintage drives in years to come. At least I have Nagios watching them! RIP, Seagate? Do you share that sentiment? (And, are you monitoring all your drives' temperature and error counters?) -rich _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
