9/26/2006
Don’t Buy Seagate
So my Myth box which was less then two months old had a HD failure on Sept 11th 2006. It was a Seagate 7200.9 300gb SATA2 drive. Replaced the drive with another IDENTICAL drive. Guess what I’m watching right now? SeaTools report to me that the new HD is bad. This time I will RMA the drive and I’m NOT happy at all. That gives those drives an average life span of 32 days. These drives have a warrenty of 5 years, how in the world they could fail so quickly is beyond me. I know people will suggest I did something to the drives but I handled them with nothing but care. The only thing they did was compile and record TV for me, both drives were in my MythTV boxes. Initially two separate systems, however they’ve ended up in the same case in the end. They even spent most of their lives in two different buildings. The initial drive spent most of it’s time in my old apartment where as the new drive spent most of it’s time in my new apartment. Unless the drives really can’t handle Linux then there must be some kind of bad batch going around.
The RMA process requires you to ship it back in official Seagate approved shipping material or they can at their option void your warrenty. They list of lots of packing materials that are not appropriate for shipping hard drives, in fact the very same materials that NewEgg.com used to ship the drive to me in the first place. Since I don’t have my original packaging material, which wouldn’t be good anyway. I have to purchase packaging material for $10.00 then ship it to them at my cost using a carrier that provides tracking info (read: FedEx/DHL/UPS). Once they receive my drive then they will ship out a replacement. Or they’ll two-day me a drive and pay for return shipping and I can use the packaging the replacement comes in for $24.95. It feels like a rip off to me. They sold me a bad product, not once, but twice and I have to pay them 1/4 of what I paid for it to have it replaced in a reasonable matter.
In addition they have some annoying bugs with their RMA forms. First big one is you HAVE to disable pop-up blocking, however only on the initial screen where they test if you have a pop-up blocker do they pop up a pop-up. Then you’re forced to go through the same information several times, however it does pre-fill it out for you (like your address on 3 screens in a row). Except it transposes everything one line down, so your name appears in the Address 1 line and your apartment number in the City line so you have to correct it. This is also coupled with the fact that the script tells me “Elapsed Time 0:0:1″. I guess I have time morphing skills.
This is coupled with the RMA I’m currently doing for my video card from my office computer with eVGA. Once that’s complete I’ll write about that process.
Filed under: 11 Responses to “Don’t Buy Seagate”
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September 26th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Sorry to hear about your bad luck with the drives. However, you might want to consider the possibility that the problem is with some other component. A cautionary tale: earlier this year, a 250gb Maxtor IDE drive died in my desktop machine at work. We had a pile of those drives, lying around, so I replaced it with another. Within a week, that drive had died as well. I decided we’d probably ordered a bad run (the serial numbers of the were sequential) and I RMA’d the drives, and put some random Western Digital drive I had lying around into the machine. Of course, the WD drive was eaten within several days.
It was an old machine, and we just got rid of it, so I don’t know what the actual problem was. Bad power supply? Something wrong with the IDE controller? I have no idea, but I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t the hard drives.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:45 am
I am on Seagate drives only about 5 years now, and 3 week ago i bayed me new SATA 320Gb drive. Everything is working well. This drives are not that noisy, and do not hit that much. I love them.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:55 am
Unfortunately, I have to validate your experience. My issues have been with their 160GB models though. I’ve had two of them fail.
September 26th, 2006 at 6:04 am
Actually I’m very happy running 3 Seagate drives for 3 years now (300,200,80). And all of them are under heavy usage. Sometimes you just have bad luck. :/
September 26th, 2006 at 7:47 am
It’s all your fault, don’t use Linux on normal hard disks! Here’s what an online computer shop wrote in response to an RMA request:
Our hardware only supports FAT and NTFS. Other file systems like those of Linux and Unix need special hard disks due to their aggressive writing patterns. Thats a common fact everyone should know by now.
Because of these reasons we assume that the usage of an OS not certified by us led to these damages. Your warranty is therefore void, sorry.
See http://www.debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=64210 (german)
September 26th, 2006 at 11:32 am
Maybe you shouldn’t buy at NewEgg.com, if they ship stuff using inappropriate packing materials. And maybe you should tell Seagate about your NewEgg experience…
September 26th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
That’s definetly contrary to my experience with drives.
I’ve got 6 seagates of varying sizes, and I’ve only seen failures caused by flaky IDE controllers and bad power supplies.
Throw the drive into a Linux box, and run this:
smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sdX
smartctl -d ata -t short /dev/sdX
(wait at least the required number of minutes)
smartctl -d ata -l selftest /dev/sdX
Paste all of that output up in a blog post. I suspect SeaTools may be leading you on a wild goose chase.
September 26th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
I should add, that besides the 6 seagates I presently have online, I have another 7 drives that aren’t seagate but are online, and then 6 other drives just around this room, but not connected to any machine.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
I have to agree with Charle’s comment. It’s probably some bad hardware on the computer somewhere. If its an IDE drive, try swapping out the ribbons. I’ve actually had that one affect me before, strangely enough.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
That sucks! I just bought a Seagate 250GB hard drive, IDE, not SATA for my MythTV box. That would really suck if it died on me. I’m going to set up remote backup of the system as soon as I get home today.
September 29th, 2006 at 12:46 am
robbat2: First command gives me a bunch of Pre-Fail warnings. Then it tells me at 88 days and 22 hrs the drive experienced an on-line failure. There’s a lot of those as well. Then it finally tells me that the drive has experienced a complete read fail with 70% of the drive remaining.
After the last two commands it says the same complete fail error message and tells me the drive has 70% still.