# Seagate : Seconds brand new hard drive doing it

## gengreen

Hello,

I unfortunately getting some serious trouble with a seagate hard drive :

Model :

Seagate BarraCuda ST500DM009 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive 

I tried again today to install Gentoo on it, at the stage3 steps, when tar xpvf stage3*... the hard drive fail with those log :

http://dpaste.com/2T9BHNF

I tried some generic distribution (Ubuntu / Fedora), I never could finish the install... I never experienced any problem with another brand like kingston/samsung. 

This is the second brand new hard drive, exact model doing this. Did I miss something ? Someone known wth those log mean ?

Thanks

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## sdauth

Have you tried to replace the SATA cable ? And / Or connecting the drive to an other SATA port to see if it shows the same issue ?

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## gengreen

yes :(

My sata cable aren't old and work fine with my ssd kingston and my HM250HI samsung (2010 model still alive  :Very Happy: )

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## Hu

What does the drive's long self test report?

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## sdauth

Not easy to "debug" then.. One time I solved a similar issue by switching the SATA cable (Never knew these could fail..)

Have you tried to run a badblocks test on it ? Or before that a SMART test ? A short smart test should be enough to spot hard failures (Uncorrectable sectors etc..)

----------

## gengreen

I never did a test / report for a hard drive... smartmontools is the tools to go I suppose, will read the doc.

Something else, I was looking into the boot log :

http://dpaste.com/2WCPMQS

I found some topics on Google with the similar error, as  the hard drive is brand new, I could definitively have missed something...

Thanks

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## Ant P.

Maybe not the SATA, but the power cable/supply at fault? Seems a bit strange for two new drives to not work, but it could also be a bad manufacturing batch of them.

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## gengreen

smartctl report :

http://dpaste.com/3AH9N60

Ant.P I tried with differents power supply / sata cable (including brand new cables), still the same...

I don't known much about Seagate and the quality of their product but I also own a external usb hard drive Seagate SRD00F, it work badly (slow, sometime fail to read / write...), so I'm wondering too if the problem is not a manufacturing defect...

Edit : I just saw that the hard drive is still under warranty, will try to get a replacement.

----------

## C5ace

In my experience HITACHI (now HGST) are the most reliable. I run 4 of them as RAID 5 array 24/7 since 2008. Then Western Digital Black. More than 90,000 hours without problems.

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## NeddySeagoon

gengreen,

```
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE

197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       8
```

That drive has 8 blocks that is know it cannot read. The data there is lost.

Its scrap. There is no use far a drive that cannot read its own writing.

```
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE

  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   080   080   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       25792
```

The drive is supposed to detect failing sectors and relocate the data before they become unreadable.

Its done that with 25,792 sectors.

As its a new drive

```
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE

  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       52

  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       197
```

its probably suffered transit damage.

Return it.

----------

## gengreen

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> gengreen,
> 
> ```
> ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
> 
> ...

 

Nice thanks for those details! As the hard drive is under warranty until 2020 and your confirmation  that the drive is indeed defective, I will just push the replacement process.

In a general way, what hard disk  brand do you recommand (the one that you would buy) ?

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## sdauth

 *gengreen wrote:*   

> In a general way, what hard disk  brand do you recommand (the one that you would buy) ?

 

Of all drives I owned from various brands, only Segate ones failed badly. In my case it was 3.5" 1.5TB.

Anyway, YMMV as always..

I recommend Western Digital or even HGST though.

Most of the time and as NeddySeagoon said it, errors like bad sectors happen because of transit damage (poorly packaged..) so one thing you should always do when you buy a new hard drive online is to run a badblocks and a smart test when you receive it. Do no put any data on it before being sure it is 100% clean.

```
badblocks -wsv /dev/sda #Warning, this is a destructive test, do not issue this on a drive with data you care about on it.

smartctl --test=long /dev/sda
```

After that, if there is no errors, you can consider it is safe for operation.

----------

## gengreen

 *sdauth wrote:*   

>  *gengreen wrote:*   In a general way, what hard disk  brand do you recommand (the one that you would buy) ? 
> 
> Of all drives I owned from various brands, only Segate ones failed badly. In my case it was 3.5" 1.5TB.
> 
> Anyway, YMMV as always..
> ...

 

Speaking about the wolf : 

Disk /dev/sdb: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors

Disk model: HGST HTS721010A9

I have on too, can't remember when I got it, but it's been a long while... Good to known the good brand since benchmark website are providing false information

https://hdd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/4115/HGST-HTS721010A9

"Top Hdd" : https://hdd.userbenchmark.com/ (top 15 HDD seagate..._)

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> Most of the time and as NeddySeagoon said it, errors like bad sectors happen because of transit damage (poorly packaged..) so one thing you should always do when you buy a new hard drive online is to run a badblocks and a smart test when you receive it. Do no put any data on it before being sure it is 100% clean.
> 
> ```
> ...

 

I added those 2 command into my personal bible, thanks

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## AJM

 *gengreen wrote:*   

> Nice thanks for those details! As the hard drive is under warranty until 2020 and your confirmation  that the drive is indeed defective, I will just push the replacement process.
> 
> In a general way, what hard disk  brand do you recommand (the one that you would buy) ?

 

Be careful with warranty replacement drives - they are often not brand new good drives, but "recertified" drives which are even less trustworthy than their brand new ones.

I have spent the past decade and a half replacing failed hard drives and Seagate are by far the worst in my experience - and that includes their "Enterprise" drives too.  That said, all hard drives are a lottery and I'm very happy to see them die off; solid state drives also fail but not nearly so frequently in my experience.

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## NeddySeagoon

gengreen,

I like HGST.

Western Digital upset me. I had two drives is a raid5 set fail with no warnings. They failed 15 min apart, so the raid set went down.

I have also lost one HGST drive from a raid5 set. It gave advance warning and I was able to replace it before it failed totally.

The other drives in that raid set are over 10 years old now.

As AJM says, warranty replacements are usually not new drives. They are refurbished warranty returns.

When you return your drive it will join the pool in process.

-- edit --

badblocks has not been useful on HDD since they reached 4GB in size.

All it usually does is trigger the bad block relocation mechanism.

Still, if you check the smart data before and after the test and you have lots of reallocated sectors, you have a problem.  That does net need badblocks. A whole surface write will do that.

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## alexander-n8hgeg5e

Hard drives fail usually more frequently early in their life and when they get old.

I'm not a drive expert but, because of the reloacated sectors

i would think i'ts broken and not cable related.

I had one that failed not after 2hours but a few days.

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## Tony0945

I never buy anything but WD Black. Only had one drive start to fail and that was at 4.5 years. They replaced it with a refurbished drive that they warranted for six months (the remainder of the original drive's warranty).

There is a "transit" check that smartmoncontrol can do too.

Some swear at WD, and praise Seagate. I can only relate my experience. 

The WD Black on this drive is nearly ten years old, running almost continuously. Smartmon shows zero errors.

I'm considering switching to an SSD, solely for speed.

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## Hu

 *gengreen wrote:*   

> I have on too, can't remember when I got it, but it's been a long while...

 Many drives can report their total power-on hours via smartctl.  This isn't exactly when you got it, but for drives in continuous service, it's probably pretty close.  Even if it is wildly off (for example, if you only run the drive 4-6 hours a day), power-on hours may be more interesting than knowing how long you have owned the drive.

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## alexander-n8hgeg5e

My disks are old, and they do not care about this, at least until now.

Just put more of them in the device.

Mix the models good up.

And make raid1's to combine them down.

Then put btrfs raid1 over that.

Btrfs can fix bitflips, if the drives fail to find them.

I have my disks somewhat frankenstein... One disk died young.

One is to small so i have lvm-combined the wd-blue and the wd-black.

So actually 3 x redundancy.

The other 2 are hitachi ultrastar and one is wd-green

I have discovered something,

smartctl -s aam,128 i think makes them quiet.

This should probably help for longer life.

Device Model                             : WD5000AAKS-00A7B2   

Power_On_Hours                           : 30998               

Device Model                             : WD7502AAEX-00Y9A0   

Power_On_Hours                           : 12318               

Device Model                             : HUA721010KLA330     

Power_On_Hours                           : 41329               

Device Model                             : WD10EADS-00M2B0     

Power_On_Hours                           : 15960               

I know, they draw power, they are slow, and make noise.

But my data is on a real disk, and they do not die if i write

to the same sector a few times.

----------

## Goverp

FWIW, my desktop box has 4 WD Blue 320 GB drives in a RAID 5 array; 1 of them is 13 years old (the original non-RAID boot drive), the others about 7 years old.  Only one recorded error in SMART, no reallocated sectors, no problems.  The box is used every day, usually powered off overnight.  It survived power cuts and the like.

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## steve_v

 *Goverp wrote:*   

> FWIW, my desktop box has 4 WD Blue 320 GB drives in a RAID 5 array

 FWIW, I learned the hard way why RAID 5 sucks, when I failed to check out backblaze before buying a batch of 8 ST2000DL003 drives (hint, same platform as the ST1500DL003 in the table). Recovering ~9TB of data sucks quite hard.

Personally, with a 4-drive setup I'd go RAID 10 all the way, rebuild times for RAID5 are a disturbingly long period to be without redundancy. At 320GB it's probably not too scary, but it will only get worse with bigger drives. 

My 8-drive array is RAIDZ 6 right now, all seagate skyhawks (they were cheap), no problems at 3 years in. Upgraded from 3TB WD (fecked if I can recall the model) drives that were bad to the point I trashed them all rather than giving the live ones away as I usually do.

Some drives are good, some are not. I have found that manufacturer makes far less difference than model.

Even HGST with their glowing reliability record used to be something else - something that was big, blue, and apparently no moon. Now they're owned by WD anyway.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

alexander-n8hgeg5e,

 *Quote:*   

> smartctl -s aam,128 i think makes them quiet. 

 

It makes them quiet by slowing the head movements. That ruins the seek times.

If seek times don't matter, go for it.

----------

## krinn

it doesn't matter the manufacturer or the drive model this much, normally a higher quality product have higher quality components and should gave higher reliability

still even having a ferrari doesn't prevent you from having a fail car.

your best clue for reliability is given by the manufacturer

if you look at what WD say, all black, red or blue have high reliability ; but if you look at WD number of years they warrant their drives, difference appears

----------

## alexander-n8hgeg5e

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> If seek times don't matter

 

Some of these species, are crazy and it sounds like they

are trying to vibrate their heads of... Especially the wd-black one,

sounds like some angry beast. It just sounded so unhealty

so i let them chill.

I compensate it by adjusting the io scheduler.

I believe in the kernel, if everything goes right,

anyway all data is in the cache, and in the case it  comes to

writing, there will be a smooth movement and the head

draws calmly 100Mb/s down for half a second

at least that's what i dream of...

It would be cool to build some ssd killer hdd

array...

Some time ago i bought 4 cheap,used 2.5" harddisks  from

ebay. I connected them with the cheapest sata2usb2.0 housings

to a laptop. It was 4x redundancy. On top I had btrfs.

What happened was, I lost a complete virtual machine image.

Actually only one file. I think the usb power was way to unstable

for the 4 drives. Definitively not what i would do if it was serious.

So but i was somewhat confused, i thougt the data handling would be more robust.

----------

## steve_v

 *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   

> Some of these species, are crazy and it sounds like they
> 
> are trying to vibrate their heads of... Especially the wd-black one,
> 
> sounds like some angry beast.

 You've never owned a Quantum Fireball (or Atlas for that matter), have you.  :Razz: 

Speaking of old, reliable and stupidly noisy drives... my 80MB Quantum ProDrive ELS (the first "real" HDD I ever owned) is still going strong. As is a 120MB Seagate of about the same age.

----------

## NeddySeagoon

alexander-n8hgeg5e,

You have never hear a real HDD with a real stepper motor.

Voice coil activated head servos (any HDD over 1G or so) are so much smoother and quieter than the buzz of a stepper motor.

Lots of long seeks can make a voice coil head servo noisy too.

----------

## alexander-n8hgeg5e

 *steve_v wrote:*   

> all (or Atlas for that matter), have you. 

 

The oldest thing I had was such a 5.25 " drive with 4Gbyte i think...

But i can't remember if it was loud.

At that time it was already old, don't know why i mounted it 

in the computer, i think i was attacted by the size of the case.

It was 40Gbyte best price/value time. , approx. 

 *steve_v wrote:*   

> my 80MB Quantum ProDrive ELS (the first "real" HDD I ever owned) is still going strong. As is a 120MB Seagate of about the same age.

 

That are real harddisks  :Smile:  , you can probably read your mails with a

lens and some iron dust...

The new ones are guessing your data, are trying to read from the atoms...

Do you run them in some system that you use ?

----------

## NeddySeagoon

alexander-n8hgeg5e,

 *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   

> The new ones [HDD] are guessing your data ...

 

True but it has a respectable name.

----------

## alexander-n8hgeg5e

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> alexander-n8hgeg5e,
> 
>  *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   The new ones [HDD] are guessing your data ... 
> 
> True but it has a respectable name.

 

 :Laughing:   did't knew that some name like this actually exist.

This is why i want btrfs, i want to catch my disk flipping a bit.

----------

## steve_v

 *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   

> 5.25 " drive with 4Gbyte

 Sounds like a late-model Quantum Bigfoot to me. Pretty common, and the last of the half-height 5.25" drives IIRC.

 *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   

> Do you run them in some system that you use ?

 The 80MB drive was a (mostly r/o) boot drive in my router for many years after the 386 SX16 it belonged to bit the dust (a drive outliving a motherboard, imagine that!). Now it's in my IBM 330-100DX4 retro gaming machine, again as a boot drive, with a Conner 540MB (also loud as f*) for storage.

The 120MB is sitting on a shelf along with a couple of 640MB drives, they're all goers, I just have nothing to put them in right now.

 *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   

> This is why i want btrfs, i want to catch my disk flipping a bit.

 I run ZFS on my storage server, it's wicked cool. Snapshots, checksums, transparent compression, deduplication, network replication, adaptive caching, all the other good stuff.

BTRFS looks promising, but it's still kinda feature-poor next to ZFS.

----------

## gengreen

 *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   

> My disks are old, and they do not care about this, at least until now.
> 
> Just put more of them in the device.
> 
> Mix the models good up.
> ...

 

You right, that's make sense.

HGST Travelstar

http://dpaste.com/1138TZM

SAMSUNG HM250HI

http://dpaste.com/12CJR7B

Those are old one, the HGST show some failure but still handle)

About seagate, I got a usb drive Seagate RSS LLC Backup Plus Portable Drive for less than a year, never worked too :

http://dpaste.com/3ZB859T

Can't get a smart result on this one

----------

## krinn

(for the story, i had two of them, in a hw raid, but its little brother died 2 months ago)

it makes a bunch of prefail and old age  :Smile: 

```
smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [x86_64-linux-4.14.67] (local build)

Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===

Model Family:     Western Digital Raptor

Device Model:     WDC WD360ADFD-00NLR1

Serial Number:    WD-WMANT1064640

Firmware Version: 20.07P20

User Capacity:    37 019 566 080 bytes [37,0 GB]

Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical

Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]

ATA Version is:   ATA/ATAPI-7 published, ANSI INCITS 397-2005

Local Time is:    Tue Dec 24 14:52:52 2019 CET

SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.

SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:

Offline data collection status:  (0x84)   Offline data collection activity

               was suspended by an interrupting command from host.

               Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.

Self-test execution status:      (   0)   The previous self-test routine completed

               without error or no self-test has ever 

               been run.

Total time to complete Offline 

data collection:       ( 1195) seconds.

Offline data collection

capabilities:           (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.

               Auto Offline data collection on/off support.

               Suspend Offline collection upon new

               command.

               Offline surface scan supported.

               Self-test supported.

               Conveyance Self-test supported.

               Selective Self-test supported.

SMART capabilities:            (0x0003)   Saves SMART data before entering

               power-saving mode.

               Supports SMART auto save timer.

Error logging capability:        (0x01)   Error logging supported.

               General Purpose Logging supported.

Short self-test routine 

recommended polling time:     (   2) minutes.

Extended self-test routine

recommended polling time:     (  22) minutes.

Conveyance self-test routine

recommended polling time:     (   5) minutes.

SCT capabilities:           (0x103f)   SCT Status supported.

               SCT Error Recovery Control supported.

               SCT Feature Control supported.

               SCT Data Table supported.

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     0x000b   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0

  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0007   165   165   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       2750

  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   097   097   040    Old_age   Always       -       3156

  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0

  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000a   200   200   051    Old_age   Always       -       0

  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   012   012   000    Old_age   Always       -       64654

 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0012   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0

 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0

 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       3137

194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   119   077   000    Old_age   Always       -       24

196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0012   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x000a   200   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       4

200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   051    Old_age   Offline      -       0

SMART Error Log Version: 1

No Errors Logged

```

----------

## alexander-n8hgeg5e

 *steve_v wrote:*   

>  *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   5.25 " drive with 4Gbyte Sounds like a late-model Quantum Bigfoot

 

Yes I think it was a quantum bigfoot.

 *steve_v wrote:*   

>  after the 386 SX16 it belonged to bit the dust (a drive outliving a motherboard, imagine that!...

 

I cannot believe the board died,... These old computers look that reliable,...

Probably the capacitors,...  maybe fixable.

 *steve_v wrote:*   

> I run ZFS on my storage server, it's wicked cool 

 

I know, i had considered useing it.

But then i recognized , it is not in my loved kernel, and something with the license...

----------

## dmpogo

 *steve_v wrote:*   

>  *alexander-n8hgeg5e wrote:*   Some of these species, are crazy and it sounds like they
> 
> are trying to vibrate their heads of... Especially the wd-black one,
> 
> sounds like some angry beast. You've never owned a Quantum Fireball (or Atlas for that matter), have you. 
> ...

 

I did, that was my first drive  :Smile: 

----------

