On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 7:49 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I also found this after the reply from Ian. > > https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/ > > No wonder they had it on sale. Heck, why didn't they just say it was a > good door stop instead of a hard drive??? >
Yeah, the only reason I'd want to use that model drive is if I had a raid5 composed of entirely different drives and for some reason the discount on the Seagate 3TB drive let me bump it up to a raid6 (and to be sure I'd never put more than one of those in an array). It is basically a doorstop. I had two of those go in the span of a year. One was replaced under warranty. The next was the warranty replacement. That one was no longer under warranty, but after a scathing Amazon review Seagate actually commented on the review asking me to contact them about a replacement. I didn't bother - I really was tired of swapping out drives at that pace and didn't consider the considerably-higher risk of a double failure worth it. i'd have to check - I think I picked a 4TB Seagate NAS drive to replace it. Somebody suggested not buying Seagate. The thing is, EVERY manufacturer has had drives like these. Well, the Hitachi drives Backblaze goes on about would be an exception, but they're SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive and I don't think it is worth the premium in a RAID. For a single-drive system I'd strongly consider them. I think I heard they were bought out at some point, so we'll see if their reputation holds. And that's the thing with brand reputations. These days MBAs milk reputations. Some finance guy realizes that people will buy this year's drives based on last year's reputation and cuts some corners and collects a huge bonus. Three years later everybody is dealing with drive failures. Every vendor does it. That one Seagate model was about the worst I've personally seen, but who knows what model is being sold today that in three years will turn out to be just as bad, and it could come from any of the vendors. I do try to look at the Backblaze stats for what they're worth, but I think the general advice applies well. Make sure you have an appropriate level of redundancy and backup strategy. Make sure to mix models of drives in your RAIDs. The whole point of a RAID is to keep the price down by increasing your tolerance of failures. And the whole NAS drive firmware thing really bugs me because they charge a premium for a few bits in flash memory that should be user-configurable anyway. Some of those drives have better vibration resistance, which bugs me less. However, the bottom line is that they probably will improve your RAID performance in the event of a failure, and they probably do tend to cut the corners less on them. But who knows, maybe the drive that fails next year will be the super-premium edition. All of this goes to one of my drivers for using btrfs (and in this regard zfs will do just as well). The checksumming means that I'm not really trusting the drive or its firmware at all, and I scrub my arrays weekly. Sorry you ended up with a bad drive... That model IS considerably cheaper than most of the others... -- Rich
