My Seagate 4TB HDD from Dec 2020 has suddenly died, Any suggestions?

[tonyE]

Currently running 8 HDD's on one machine and 6 on the other for right now. I could fit another drive cage on the "big rig" I suppose but I'm well over 50TB on it now. I'm mostly leaning toward 10TB NAS drives right now when I can...which is not often. I've had good luck with Seagate NAS drives and if they are in warranty they say free data recovery if they crash.

I don't buy into the WD are better than Seagate drives btw. (couple posts above.) RecentlyI stated I had a Toshiba NAS drive fail early, but after checking it actually was an HGST 4TB NAS drive.
They all become boat anchors in the end.

But I thought you were preserving your retirement money?

One of the issues with running so many drives inside a case is heat and power consumption. And here in Calimexistan our power is extremely expensive as well, so using less power is a HUGE plus.

Putting them off the case in a separate enclosure like the Mediasonics and enabling power management cuts down the heat, vibration and power, all of which extend the lives of your drives (SSDs too).

The 10TB NAS drives are very pricey still. With a Mediasonic case and four 6TB drives in a RAID5 you'll get a reliable 18TB of storage. If you wish to spend money, though, 4 10TB drives will give you 30TB. But I haven't seen any used 10TB NAS drives yet.

Mostly, buying lots of used network drives works because they tend to come from a corporate user that is upgrading and tend to be time and design coherent devices... plus they have common use lives. It turns out those are the highest quality drives you can buy used, they are not being sold because they have problems but because they are being replaced with larger displacement drives...

I've been buying WDC drives for quite a few years now. I guess it's what you get used to. I do have some very old Seagate PATA drives in the Ubuntu Apache server... and those have been running for close to 18 years now.

BTW, How the hell did an HGST NAS drive fail? Those are, in my experience, some of the best in the market!

 

[tonyE]

I am surprised by reports of unused spinner HD's dying. Apparently the lubricant dries up over time.

Maybe once someone invents a decent 3D printed LP record, you can use them to store data too

I once decided to buy Windows 98 in floppy disks because my laptop didn't have a CD drive. It came in a stack of almost 20.

It tooks hours to install.... "replace drive 12 with drive 8"... crunch... crunch... "replace drive 8 with drive 4".... crunch crunch..... for hours and hours and hours and hours...

Needless to say, I went out and bought an external CD drive after that.

 

[minimumtumbleweed]

The larger WDC drives are based on HGST drives. Heck, most likely they are just rebranded.

Yeah, in general getting very large drives is somewhat risky. I've wanted to get 8 GB+ sized drives, but the 4 GB ones are just better quality.

 

[AYanguas]

...
BTW, How the hell did an HGST NAS drive fail? Those are, in my experience, some of the best in the market!

I had bad experiences with Seagate drives in the past. I used to buy WD RED, always good, and now HGST, due to the net reports and recommendation from others. Yes, they were acquired by WD and now rebranded as WD.

But my recent purchases of two WD (HGST) Ultrastar 18TB were bad. I tested the first one, full format (24 hours), write big files everything OK. Then, watching a film the player got freeze. I noticed that reading big files gave disk errors ("Current sector pending count" first and then lots of "Reallocation Event Count"). If I copied a big file it was working OK, but when reading the file, by copying it to another place, then consistently the "bad blok" errors appeared. It looked like if the disk firmware couldn't do a proper buffer management, and when reading many blocks of data, the buffer was overflow and the data lost, thus the driver giving "bad block" error to the Windows OS. It didn't happened with small files.

I didn't tested the second one. I returned both to amazon and got the money refund. They came with very little padding, boith in a big cardboard box, so maybe they were bumped during transportation, I thought. But really a weird bug: Good writing and error reading of the files, that occurred consistently across multiple tests I did.

Then I bought a single HGST HDD 18TB to other vendor in amazon, wishing they would package it better, beeing a single drive. This one was good and it is now running well.

Then again the second purchase of another HGST 10TB drive to the same vendor. Tested it to start and it didn't startup. No spin-up. It was DOA.

Asked for a replacement to that vendor and got a second HGST 18TB that now works well.


TWO MANY HGST drive failures occured to me recently, that make worse any statistic. Fortunately they failed at initial testing and I didn't lose any data, only some time...

 

[Pontoneer]

My wife has similar issues she has ten tabs open hasn't cleared her browser in a month and can't figure out where the music is coming from, and being in Floriduh also I run around unplugging it all when I hear the faintest lightning grumble.

I remember a few years back my ex was complaining her iPhone was dog slow and she needed a new one - when she let me look I was astounded that she had hundreds , maybe thousands , of pages open in her browser !!!! She couldn't understand my horror at this ; it took an age to close them all down , then the phone was fine again .

Even on my computer , I will seldom have more than four or five pages open , and usually only one or two .

 

[Sonik Wiz]

Sheesh Boo Boo...
Talk about storage problems:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...at-least-7-billion-gigabytes-of-flash-memory/

 

[mandrix]

But I thought you were preserving your retirement money?

-------------.

BTW, How the hell did an HGST NAS drive fail? Those are, in my experience, some of the best in the market!

These drives were not all bought at once, and some were financed via PP credit. As long as I pay in the allotted time period, no interest charges.
What I do or not do is between me and the unrelenting bookkeeper . Sometimes known as "the boss". lol. She actually does run the books for a business so not a far fetch.
The stock market took a big crap as I left two jobs and finally retired, each time creating a huge hole in my retirement. What's left was long ago spent on hospital bills.

Though I did work in a self built pc in a Case Labs case w/two pedestals.... Also in earlier days when Overclockers wanted to delid their Intel cpu's (cut down on heat) I used take the better performing ones, delid, clear out the (then) crappy Intel TIM, replace with liquid metal TIM, and relid them, prove the OC potential them resale them with the motherboard I used. Didn't get rich but it kept me current on Tech for a while. I still have two I delidded for myself still running, a 4770k and a 6700K.
Now there are kits and anyone can do the same thing with little skill involved-not that it's brain surgery in any case. Understandable some don't want to touch their investment for fear of screwing something up I suppose. Me always the tinkerer.
----
Not sure about the HGST drive but when it went it was quick with no warning, else it lapsed my attention. Since then I monitor the drives even more closely, and it's saved my data a few times.

Not a newcomer to the pc world. When I started in R&D as a lowly tech many years ago, I had a Stride pc running the old P-Pascal OS, that ran some equipment I was in charge of. No one had a personal pc except the Manager and the guy who supervised the Analytical dept. He was the one that introduced me to Windows 1. He was already programming for his lab equipment and jumped into Windows as well. I never matched his skill level with Windows or anyone's probably, C was not my fort. (before anyone corrects fort with forte, know that forte is a musical expression) I was a pretty good DOS programmer but eventually did get the first Visual Basic after sitting on the phone for hours to MS on release day...all apropo of nothing, I tend to ramble on.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

BTW, How the hell did an HGST NAS drive fail? Those are, in my experience, some of the best in the market!

It happens. I've had one fail, out of about 16.

Not sure about the HGST drive but when it went it was quick with no warning, else it lapsed my attention.

Same here. I popped a standby drive in its place and all's good. Was replaced under warrantee.

 

[jimfisheye]

If you run a NAS and treat the drives as consumables and replace them on schedule, things are pretty robust nowadays. It's just some of us cheapskates that try to milk extra life out of some things.

The occasional almost immediate warranty failure comes up with a bad part here and there. That's what it's for. Catching the outlier. And these kind of failures usually happen right away.

As far as the risk of letting something sit on a shelf for a long time. Mechanical parts - especially things that spin and use bearings - can be prone to settling and getting stuck. Just a general comment. Hard drives might use some design concepts that address that. Still a general comment.

Power on/off power surge. It's not unlike turning on a hose. There's an initial surge and another when you power off. Circuits actually have designs and components that are only there to address this and actually prevent the thing from blowing up when you switch it on. Everything that dies usually does so on power up. Or it died on the surge when you last shut it off. So... general comments around that too.

Flash memory has a unique design requirement that it needs to be powered up every so often or it fades and erases. So you have to play along.

 

[tonyE]

Sheesh Boo Boo...
Talk about storage problems:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...at-least-7-billion-gigabytes-of-flash-memory/

Building a "fab" ( fabrication plant ) takes BILLIONS of bucks and years of design, planning, building and calibration).

The process uses a very high frequency "optical" system based on lithography, with layers and layers of photosensitive materials being built up one at a time. In those fabs, the "light" is driven from a high power laser in a lower floor from the "scanner" machines.

Look at the EUV write up... when those droplets don't turn into plasma right, they make a royal mess of the mirror and you have to shut down the light source and clean it out. It takes a loooong time to do that and it's pricey.

https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/light-and-lasers

 

[kap'n krunch]

Shit, my 2006 and 2007 ipods are still alive and I have dropped them countless times, even recently! Wish they’d make HDs like that!

 

[GOS]

Shit, my 2006 and 2007 ipods are still alive and I have dropped them countless times, even recently! Wish they’d make HDs like that!

See what you started here bru.....over 100 posts. Good stuff though.

 

[kap'n krunch]

See what you started here bru.....over 100 posts. Good stuff though.

I always try to start interesting threads...and also enjoy how they derail!

 

[tonyE]

Shit, my 2006 and 2007 ipods are still alive and I have dropped them countless times, even recently! Wish they’d make HDs like that!

Well, I can't think we dropped ours, but we got a 60 and 120 ( gigs? ) from that time period.

Recently, I found them, powered them up, charged them ( batteries still work! ) and those things are still working.

Crazy...

 

[mkt]

I can't remember if this was already mentioned

More info here
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2021

 

[Marplot]

Interesting data, while I have never had issues with Seagate it makes me feel better about my switch to WD over a decade ago.
Thanks.

 

[GOS]

Interesting data, while I have never had issues with Seagate it makes me feel better about my switch to WD over a decade ago.
Thanks.

Currently, also using WD on my main NAS.

 

[DuncanS]

Currently, also using WD on my main NAS.

Me too, I have 2x4TB WD Reds in the small NAS, and 4x10TB WD Red Pro in the large one.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

HGSTs all around.

 

[tonyE]

HGSTs all around.

Can you even get a new HGST branded drive?

WDC fully acquired it six years ago when it was given the go ahead from the Chinese to merge the product lines ( an issue with competition... go figure that one out )...

The WDC Ultrastar and Enterprise "gold" are the current result. I'm not quite sure if the larger Red/Red Pros... but R&D was merged about 7 years ago.