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My first (almost) DOA HDD. :(

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HankB

Member
Joined
Jan 27, 2011
Location
Beautiful Sunny Winfield
I probably lead a charmed life. I've had very few problems with drives (excepting a couple Seagate 2TB drives...) but that changed this week. I bought a 3TB HGST drive to use for external backup. It partitioned and formatted w/out difficulty and I started to backup. It got stuck at about 2.5GB transferred. The next morning Linux reported problems with it and it was no longer responding. I thought perhaps it was an issue with the USB drive sled I was using (though it has worked with difficulty for a number of other drives. I tried plugging it in directly to a SATA port. It was not seen by the BIOS. I submitted a claim through Amazon and get
Within 48 hours, Price Slayer will review your request and respond to you by email. If your return is approved, Price Slayer will email you a return label. Print your label and send all items below to Price Slayer.

I guess that's a formality. I'm, pretty sure it will be approved. If I so much as submit an unfavorable review, the sellers on Amazon have bent over backwards (usually shipping a replacement) to get their rating up.

Maybe I'll hold off a bit before getting a replacement. I've got other backups.
 
Well it happens. HGST is the best in the business right now. At work, we had a large enough number of Seagate/Samsung drives fail that I would not buy one. With that said, every company has a failure rate and I guess you fell into that category. Sorry for your luck. :(
 
Well it happens. HGST is the best in the business right now. At work, we had a large enough number of Seagate/Samsung drives fail that I would not buy one. With that said, every company has a failure rate and I guess you fell into that category. Sorry for your luck. :(

That's IMO what made it notable.

I contacted the seller (Price Slayer on Amazon), got a mailing label and returned it. As soon as USPS reported tracking information, they refunded my money at which time I purchased a replacement from them. I've done a couple backups on the replacement and am happy to report that it is running without drama. :D

In the mean time I checked in on my off-site backup which has a Samsung Spinpoint F4 and WD green (EARS) and found that the WD drive has failed. It's got about 2 1/2 years of operating time on it so it's well past warranty. That was boot drive (/dev/sda) and this is Linux S/W RAID so I dare not reboot the box.

I purchased two more 3TB HGST drives to replace the 2TB drives now in service. My policy has been to use different brand drives to isolate myself from a bad run/model but I cannot find another drive in that class that I prefer over the HGST drives so I'll have a matched pair for a change. (Unfortunately Price Slayer did not have any more of these drives so I bought from another Amazon vendor.)

Interestingly the WD reported no remapped sectors:
Code:
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   153   153   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       99891
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   168   165   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       6591
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1049
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   070   070   000    Old_age   Always       -       22497
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1046
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       34
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always       -       925688
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   111   102   000    Old_age   Always       -       39
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   196   196   000    Old_age   Always       -       1371
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   199   199   000    Old_age   Offline      -       399
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   022   022   000    Old_age   Offline      -       47652

Errors reported are
Code:
Error 9 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 22077 hours (919 days + 21 hours)
  When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

  After command completion occurred, registers were:
  ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
  -- -- -- -- -- -- --
  04 61 02 00 00 00 a0  Device Fault; Error: ABRT

  Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
  CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Powered_Up_Time  Command/Feature_Name
  -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --  ----------------  --------------------
  ef 10 02 00 00 00 a0 08  26d+12:07:24.828  SET FEATURES [Reserved for Serial ATA]
  ec 00 00 00 00 00 a0 08  26d+12:07:24.823  IDENTIFY DEVICE
  ef 03 46 00 00 00 a0 08  26d+12:07:24.823  SET FEATURES [Set transfer mode]
  ef 10 02 00 00 00 a0 08  26d+12:07:24.820  SET FEATURES [Reserved for Serial ATA]
  ec 00 00 00 00 00 a0 08  26d+12:07:24.816  IDENTIFY DEVICE
 
We use Seagate in my business.... Never in my life have i seen such a crap shoot of a company.. I have literally had seagate HDs MELT at the sata connector lol.. personally i use HGST 5 2GB in raid 5 for my storage..
 
Try it in windows if you can. Ive got a few drives that are tempermental in my linux box- to the point of being unusable - that have been running flawlessly in my windows machine. SMART data is good in windows and Ubuntu didnt see anything wrong with the disks either... but still didnt want to use them :shrug:
 
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