Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Reschke on March 13, 2011, 09:50:39 PM
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I know this has been covered before but DAMN I hate Seagate!
Seagate ST31000340AS....been through 5 or 6 in the last 12 months. Never have been completely satisfied with the purchase of this drive but I had to have one that day and this was all that was in stock at Best Buy.
I knew I was going to loose this current HDD and it finally failed today right in the middle of a backup! Good thing I bought a brand new WD 1TB with 64MB cache back in December just in case this happened.
The bad news is that when it failed it corrupted my back up drive and that has caused a massive failure on my end where I am now struggling to recover data from a dead drive.
The good news is that within 20 minutes from replacing the drive I have the new WD drive completely setup with Win7 64 Bit Ultimate and its humming along nicely.
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Good thing all I've ever used is WD :D
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My advice is that whatever brand you use, always install an extra fan to blow directly on your harddrives (or if you have many stacked, directly between the cracks). If you keep them cool you keep them alive.
I had several hdd failures in the old days. Then I started investigating why this was happening and noticed that despite having normal case ventilation, harddrives were running hot especially if there were many of them in the same box (I usually do). After taking the habit of making sure the case had a slot for a harddrive cooler (and installing one, duh) I haven't had a single failure in years.
You can try to save data from your seagate by freezing it in a freezer overnight and then starting it and immediately copying as much as you can. They often work one last time before they're completely bricked.
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Hard drives are one of the few things I use water cooling for. Koolance HD-50-L06 blocks allow full use of the stacking areas of most cases that use the tray method but Koolance makes blocks for nearly every mounting available.
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My advice is that whatever brand you use, always install an extra fan to blow directly on your harddrives (or if you have many stacked, directly between the cracks). If you keep them cool you keep them alive.
I had several hdd failures in the old days. Then I started investigating why this was happening and noticed that despite having normal case ventilation, harddrives were running hot especially if there were many of them in the same box (I usually do). After taking the habit of making sure the case had a slot for a harddrive cooler (and installing one, duh) I haven't had a single failure in years.
You can try to save data from your seagate by freezing it in a freezer overnight and then starting it and immediately copying as much as you can. They often work one last time before they're completely bricked.
that's true ripley, my hitachi deathstar, i dropped it twice, one piece is broken in one corner and another piece i use crazy glue to put it back. but my tempest case has 2 fans blowing on the hd. no problems yet. then again, sometimes it's just bad luck i guess.
semp
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Every Seagate drive I ever had died before it should have IMO.
Also I agree that SATA drives tend to run a lot hotter. As noted an extra fan or 2 to keep them cool makes a big difference.
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I think this one is completely gone no matter what I try. As for the fans...I have used cooling fans on HDD's and CD/DVD drives for the last 12 years. It was the best thing to help drives live longer that I have ever done.
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The 'AS' line of drives are a cheap commodity drive. I would never rely on them for anything I actually needed.
The 'NS' of drives are a much better product.
Every drive manufacturer has a 'crap' product or product line. Just like auto manufacturers.
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The 'AS' line of drives are a cheap commodity drive. I would never rely on them for anything I actually needed.
The 'NS' of drives are a much better product.
Every drive manufacturer has a 'crap' product or product line. Just like auto manufacturers.
Reading the title of this thread, the first thing I thought was "there has to be at least one of these threads for every hard drive company in existence."
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Yep that is true Sector95 but having 5 of them in the last 12 months and from different build times according to the serial numbers is just stupid unlucky.
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Hmm, Used Seagate many times. Always seemed good for me.
<S> Oz
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Yep that is true Sector95 but having 5 of them in the last 12 months and from different build times according to the serial numbers is just stupid unlucky.
May want to update that it turns out it was your motherboard.
That was you, right? I'm not confusing threads, am I...?
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Motherboard had toasted SATA ports but it was not the motherboards fault...Here is the skinny on what happened according to what I have been told since my motherboard is back at EVGA now.
The HDD caused a fault initially that caused a restart of my system at some point in the night last Saturday and then my PSU spiked somehow in all the restarts to try and get the system back up and running that fried the SATA ports on the motherboard....don't ask how I just am saying what I was told.
SO I RMA'd the power supply back to Thermaltake (waiting to see if they are going to give me a new power supply); RMA'd the motherboard back to EVGA...got a brand new one X58 SLI LE from them to replace the original of same model. Went ahead and bought a new case and power supply; Cooler Master HAF-x 942 and Corsair HX850W. All installed and running like a champ now. Trying a one time slave setup with the old Seagate drive to grab any data that I can like browser favorites, AH folders, etc...so I just went and got an eSATA external enclosure.
BTW Seagate is sending me a check for the full amount that I have spent in shipping for the previous 5 drives and the original cost of the HDD since Best Buy only wants to give me another Seagate HDD to replace the latest one.
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that's a first reschke...never heard of any drive mfg reimbursing shipping costs on rma's. good customer service.
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That's awesome.. glad to hear...
This just goes to show that the power supply means EVERYTHING.
I've had three builds now using seasonic with no problems. (Well one is a Corsair model that is made by seasonic). My G/F's computer which I built two years ago using a case/power supply combo has been doing goofy things pretty much ever since it was new. Started with random crashes while she played Sims3 (I didn't put much thought into it being that the Sims have always had reliability issues) but about six months ago about one out of every ten boots results in a bluescreen. I don't recall the exact exception code but I remember looking it up and it had something to do with drivers. Reboot and then it is fine. Even a reinstall of XP doesn't cure that. I keep waiting for it to get worse before I waste time trying to track it down.
About a month ago her 'noname' power supply started making noise.. a high pitched 'humming' kind of sound and no it's not coming from the fans. The noise seems to change in pitch and intensity as she puts more load on the video card. I'm about to order her a new power supply.. a Seasonic. How much do you want to bet it'll fix all her issues?
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Had plenty of Seagates over a 20 year period, no failures. Got some old 10Gb and 5Gb in the garage still.
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that's a first reschke...never heard of any drive mfg reimbursing shipping costs on rma's. good customer service.
Yep it was a first for me as well but the only thing I can figure out is that #1 they want to keep me as a customer and #2 they realize that I have been EXTREMELY unlucky with their AS series hard drives. I wouldn't think anything bad about a company with one or two bad hard drives in a couple of years IF I was buying dozens each month for builds. However I bought this one and the subsequent 4 replacements all came from Best Buy due to their extended warranty program. Each had a trouble ticket done by me with Seagate when they started tossing errors so they had a way to track them from the first one which was less than 24 hours after the first purchase.
I am fortunate that it is working in the external enclosure and is letting me grab as much as I can right now.
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i read where Seagate was having issues with a particular run and then boxed with a different model number on the box. I bought the Battacuda 500GB and had the BB tech open the box so we could confirm the series number on the unit itself.
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wether true or not, quite some time ago there was some problems with the as drive with a certain firmware number. I would have to think that would have been corrected quite some time ago though.
I have 2 seagates AS models, 1 3 years old and one 4 years old still going strong. (knock on wood). I switched to WD with the next drive because of the problems or rather the amount of failures people were having which I read in Newegg. Just seemed to be a higher percentage rate as compared to other companies.
I have a coolermaster case with good cooling on the drives also.
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The biggest problem I see is that you are buying cheap crap drives from Best Buy.
#1 rule for power computer users: don't buy from Best Buy.
#2 if you are going to buy a new hard drive, buy an ENTERPRISE CLASS hard drive - a good clue is if a manufacturer has a 5-year warranty on it, they are building it to last. Seagates are fine, WD's are fine - just buy the higher end drive lines and not the cheap crap they put in Best Buy.
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The biggest problem I see is that you are buying cheap crap drives from Best Buy.
#1 rule for power computer users: don't buy from Best Buy.
#2 if you are going to buy a new hard drive, buy an ENTERPRISE CLASS hard drive - a good clue is if a manufacturer has a 5-year warranty on it, they are building it to last. Seagates are fine, WD's are fine - just buy the higher end drive lines and not the cheap crap they put in Best Buy.
Yep I know the rule for #1 As I said in the OP I HAD to have a hard drive RIGHT then and there; it wasn't an impulse buy it was a necessity and it caused tons of grief. Great thing that it is over with now and the WD drive that replaced it worked flawlessly right out of the gate. At any rate as I said Seagate has taken care of me. Their customer service is/was top notch and never created a problem at all.
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Forgive me, cause I can't remember exactly, But the new drives have different connect speeds and if you computer is less you have to reduce the connect speed of the hard drive.
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From what I understand that is essentially correct....but I am not the technical mastermind here. Several others will probably chime in and that what I said is wrong though.
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You don't have to reduce anything yourself, SATA3 is backwards compatible so if you plug the device to a SATA2 port it will happily use that.
It makes no difference by the way to run a regular hdd on sata 3 or 2, they can't provide any more than a fraction of sata2 bandwith anyway. SATA3 matters only on SSD's which can utilize it almost fully.
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Actually, there are many motherboards which will not negotiate SATA3 back to SATA2. That is why most drive manufacturers jumpered to SATA2, by default.
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(knock on wood) In all my years I've never had a hard drive fail save one time on an old old machine that was almost 10 years old that I had set up for the kid to mess around on. Sometimes wouldnt spin on bootup. But whenever that happened, if I did a Fonzie routine on it and gave it a good smack. It would spin right up.
I still have it at home somewhere. It may still work for all I know.