When did Seagate start to suck?

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I have seen these "hard drive coolers" at tiger direct, maybe newegg has them... If you have heard of them what are your thoughts on them? Good? Bad?

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The coolers that I have seen (and tested) are the attach to the bottom of the HDD type.. they are certainly a help.. effective?.. only 50%
I prefer to have a fan blowing across the drive ie blowing from the end.. thi in a suitable enclosure is abot 80-90%
the only improvement I have experimented with, and currently not financialy practical.. is a mixture end mounted fan and Aluminium and copper heatsink fins mounted on and around the HDD.. this is my current 100% reference..

And as mentioned.. all that my advice will do is improve the reliability, reduce the risk .. not prevent a failure from ever happening..

Right I know that, I was just wondering because I have no place to put fans in fron of my case... and according to everest my HDD runs at about 41 C...

Hi The Duck this is the kind of thing you should be looking for. It mounts in a 5.25" drive bay and replaces the plastic blank that is usually there. It sucks air in at the front through a filter and blows it across the drive.

http://www.jdr.com/interact/item.asp?itemno=FAN-DRV

Check them out, you can get them with multiple fans as well.

I also put an "exhaust fan" at the back. This takes up what would be an expansion slot (PCI) but there is usually space at the bottom of the MoBo. It does not mount in a PCI slot, it just needs the screw hole in the case.

:)

That's nice, I'll have to look into that. I already have a back outtake fan, My case has a spot where you can mount it on...

Thanks again :D.

I've really never had a true problem with the actual HDD failing........ I'm 50-50 on the bad-luck -- corporate change. I mean harddrives are supposedly very reliable in our current time period for such a sensitive complex device. If I lost that many gigs of music I'd be livid. I'd probably wage an Internet smear campaign on that company with anecdotal evidence.

Were these refurbs or did you open them brand new?


As for the HDD coolers, if you don't mind the extra noise ( of course they make low DBM) add a fan, but seriously unless you have a stack of more than 3 15,000 rpm drives I wouldn't even bother. And this is coming from someone who watercools his s-478..... and soon will be using a phasechange system on a s-775.

I don't have any recent Seagate drives, but they were the first to offer 5 year warrenties across their entire line. So Seagate themselves do believe their drives are up to stuff. And people generally do not have problems with them.

By the time you kill 5 drives, I imagine there has to be another issue that is causing these problems. Really, you should not be able to kill 5 drives in that time period. The last drive that sort of thing happened with was in the IBM DeathStars (*cough* Desk Star *cough*) when the drive sizes were a bit smaller.



By dead do you mean that reformatting does not correct the problems? (I assume this is true because you do happen to know a fair bit about computers)


Can you give me specs on your powersupply?

The market of powersupplies is in making the consumer buy a PSU based on watts. They don't even have to be real watts. The company just needs to be able to print them in a book with some arcane formula for finding it.

Unfortunately 99% of the consumers do not understand PowerSupplies well enough. But I'd guess 85% of them are lucky enough to buy a name-brand and leave it as-is and usually expirence no problems.

But since the power supply is one of the most important parts of the computer, it needs to be well understood. It could be that this thing is ready to fail, and it is warning you by killing all of your HDDs.

I need: +12v AMPs, +5v AMPs, +3.3v AMPs, and maybe a combined WATTs rating could help. Also name the brand, and anything else you can find. I'll look it up and see if it is up to stuff. It would be benefitial to know other hardware specs, but generally just knowing the PSU can be an alert to major problems.

Cheers.

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I mean harddrives are supposedly very reliable in our current time period for such a sensitive complex device.

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Yeah... I've not had any issues with drives at work or drives acquired before the last year or so, nor the two refurbed drives I bought this year or three drives that Seagate actually replaced (with refurbed ones as well). Maybe their refurb department has better QA than their new production lines?

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Were these refurbs or did you open them brand new?

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All brand new.

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As for the HDD coolers, if you don't mind the extra noise ( of course they make low DBM) add a fan,

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No room for a fan in this system... but the other drive in it, is a Seagate from about three years ago, and it is closer to the heat source, ran fine.
I took the bad drive out, placed it in an open system of mine so the drive wasn't near anything and after about five minutes of operation it was prolly about 180F maybe hotter. This was with plenty of airflow and nothing else heating it in a different system than the one it failed in.
To be honest, I have no idea how hot it would have gotten (the system had been up for about two weeks) and I guess I am just lucky it failed before it melted any wires or such.

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I don't have any recent Seagate drives, but they were the first to offer 5 year warrenties across their entire line. So Seagate themselves do believe their drives are up to stuff. And people generally do not have problems with them.

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Yeah, they have always been flawless until this last year. I am sure you could find a few posts by me on here swearing by Seagate drives to people who were asking about building their own systems.

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By the time you kill 5 drives, I imagine there has to be another issue that is causing these problems. Really, you should not be able to kill 5 drives in that time period.

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Unfortunately there has been no common thread between the drives... I mean a drive dies, I send it to Seagate, they send me a refurb, I stick it where the drive that died was... everything works fine. This is five drives over three systems. I'd have just assumed I was being dumb otherwise, but this clearly seems a Seagate production line QA issue at this point.

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By dead do you mean that reformatting does not correct the problems?

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Most won't reformat, get very, very hot, or show up on the bios with names like:

Drive: %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%8476$&%$%^#$^%$%^$%$*&%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Size: 7834383535836326347667264567763832863286363 bytes

Oddly drives like the latter (happened twice) still kinda work, they can't boot but they can still hold data... only they will randomly lose a third to half the data once every other week or so. That was a lot of fun.

I don't have power supply specs on hand right now (writing this during commercials of [adult swim]) but the latest system was a Shuttle X Zen with no extra anything beside the HDD and the DVD-R so it seems unlikely that the PSU would be the guilty party. Expecially due to the heat issue, and the fact that the current drive is having no issues. The last one did take almost a month to fail though... if this drives goes I'll check it out.

Really I think Seagate has cut some corners on new prodcut QA or I have become amazingly unlucky. :(

cheers,

catch

Hi !mitationRust

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And this is coming from someone who watercools his s-478

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Which implies that you are overclocking, so you will have ensured a good airflow in the first place?

The problem seems to arise more in small cases where all the 5.25" drive bays are occupied. Hot, stale air can collect around the HDD and cause overheating issues. In this situation the HDD cooling unit is advisable.

The last few cases I have bought have been fitted with twin fans front and back which would have the same sort of effect. At the end of the day it is all about airflow?

Tim~ I totally agree that the PSU is the most overlooked component, particularly when people are doing upgrades :eek:

However, Catch did specifically mention that these events had happened at different locations, and in different kit. This would seem to rule out local microclimate, environment and power supply, and led him to question the manufacturer.

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The last drive that sort of thing happened with was in the IBM DeathStars

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I seem to recall that Fujitsu (I think?) had a lot of drive failures that even resulted in a class action against them, and them having to pay compensation on drives that failed after the 12 months warranty?...............so it does happen.

I would be very interested to know what it was that failed with these drives. I know that HDD manufacturers buy in common components, so it might be like the MoBo capacitor scandal that we had?

My latest thought has been on the statistics of the whole issue. Perhaps we are seeing more failures because there is a much larger population of newer drives that have a shorter warranty and a much reduced QA process?. Perhaps the overall failure rate is more a reflection of the total population size, than a quality problem? In this case, Catch would seem to have been terribly unlucky?

:)

On the IBM Deathstar, I can only find this picture...

http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?im...RfMV8xX2wuanBn



But more seriously, I tend to recall seeing a video that showed what was wrong (they opened the disk up): the read/write heads were unable to get onto the HDD's platters from the "parked" position. Hence a "click of death" while the read/write heads destroyed themselves while running into the platters.


I can't seem the find the video anymore (Google tosses up a 403 error when I'm trying to find it, probably due to my use of inurl: -- see attachment), but that is what I remembered of it.



And I agree more and more that in catch's case, this does look like a problem on the manufacturer's end. Kind of sad, but that is the way it is looking... :(

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Originally posted here by nihil
Hi !mitationRust
Which implies that you are overclocking, so you will have ensured a good airflow in the first place?

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Not really, I'm not the average. My rad is outside of the box so the ambient temp has little effect. Not to mention the Europe designs that don't use the 1/2" tubes.

Most people are sitting on a potential extra 300 - 500 MHz but are too scared to touch it because of a false heat scare. Heat only goes up when you touch your v-core while OCing. I suggest that everyone do this. This would be a great incentive for comp repair stores and it only takes a few minutes. You owe me one buddy. :)

I skipped over the meat of the post.....Damn bra, I'm with you and Tim ( it's an assurance issue), Seagate did you wrong, period. Look at the bright side, you've alerted me to stay the hell away from the rogues at Seagate.
I've basically stuck with what I know, Maxtor and West-dig.....though I'll admit I'm a cheap arse sometimes when it comes to components. I've never owned anything over a 20gig, everything else is on media. I like cheap spring-loaded keyboards from China as well. But at the same time I'll spend a crap load on wireless mouse’s etc......

Excuse me as I go outside of the box for a minute here. But you know how two people can buy the exact same RAM (model) from the same vendor but the sticks will both have different chips? The only way you can tell this is to read the fine print on the top of the chips. OCZ RAM is widely used by overclockers but some chips are notoriously sought after for their stability / ability. The reason for the difference in chips is because as the market fluctuates so does the amount of chips made and some companies just use what chips are available.

Maybe Seagate used some bad chips.

I've had my expectations and such invested in a particular company. One day out of the blue blindsided from the coc*s*kers ....this was made in India. MTX car stereo amps. BTW check out their new 22" sub 300+ lbs http://www.mtxaudio.com/caraudio/pro...Hammer_img.cfm .........see and then you come back to them like a battered housewife.

MTX is still good.

[Adult Swim]........... You have to get a TiVo and do a homemade HDD mod (Seagate refurb ;) ).....I'm a day behind you I'd suppose. I like to watch my stuff in the late mornings. I'm on the phone/ em@il / VoIP with too many vital investors from Alaska and Russia during [Adult Swim] to follow my Lil' Slugger (Paranoia agent) and my hunger force etc...