2TB horror stories

[taltamir]

I am looking through the user reviews of 2TB drives are they are absolute horror stories.
The WD are the highest rated...
5 stars - 393 people - it works
4 stars - 135 people - it works
3 stars - 80 people - almost every one of them has about 1/4 fail rate on multiple drives purchased.
2 stars - 58 people - almost every one of them reports about 50% fail rate on multiple drives purchased.
1 stars - 208 people - almost every one of them is reporting 100% fail rate on multiple drives purchased.

This is the best rated one... seagate and samsung have even greater amounts of people claiming DOA's and dead within minutes/hours/days/weeks/months (those seem more common than DOA) AND a whole bunch of firmware issues and crappy support complaints to go along with those.

I find it very interesting that almost every reviewer states that they have purchased MORE then one drive at once. Makes sense, I do that too, but I just find it interesting. And I find it terrifying that they seem to exhibit such ridiculously high failure rates. I am using ZFS RAIDz2 and I am not sure even it would survive such rapid and repeated failures. People are describing drives failing one by one as they replace them under warranty.
I heard that all 2TB drives were ridiculously unreliable but I didn't believe it until I started looking for some for myself, seeing just how many come with horror stories is horrifying.

 

[hclarkjr]

where are you getting those numbers from? newegg?

 

[Veliko]

This is the first I have heard of 2TB drives being unreliable.

 

[Emulex]

All of my RE4 (2002/2003) model ending are still fully operational - under 70% duty cycle for D2D2D backup storage.

You buy junk consumer drives and get what you pay for. buy the real deal.

 

[mikedev10]

those numbers do sound rather painful, keep in mind you're also only collecting data from those who decided to post a review on newegg.

 

[Voo]

Coincidences just fine with these numbers - lower, but obviously the number of people with working drives posting a review at newegg is a good deal less than those with died ones.
- 9,71% : WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS
- 6,87% : Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000
- 4,83% : WD Caviar Green WD20EARS
- 4,35% : Seagate Barracuda LP
- 4,17% : Samsung EcoGreen F3
- 2,90% : WD Caviar Green WD20EADS

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The 7.2krpm 2tb drives really aren't a great idea.

 

[Emulex]

no they are slow as a turd. compared to 15K SAS 3.5" or 2.5" 10K they are so dog slow it's not funny. not sure why. not optimized for high depth queue?

 

[SickBeast]

My Seagate Barracuda Green LP 2tb drive is working great. I've only had it for a week, though. It's faster than my 7200rpm Hitachi 1tb drive.

 

[manko]

I agree with mikedev10 that the main thing you're seeing is that people who have problems with their drives are probably 10-100x+ more likely to post a review (and vent). For most people, if it works, they're not going to go to the trouble to post, "hey, it works fine."

The real question is how many of those drives have been sold vs. failures and complaints. (Minus user error, acts of nature, unprotected power surges and delivery guys playing football with your package.)

I just recently picked up my first 2TB drive. I tend to pick up drives in pairs too, but I already have other 1.5TB, 1TB and smaller drives around. I understand your feelings though, the thought of losing 2TB at once is worrying. On the positive side, it really makes you serious about a multiple backup plan.

 

[Lead Butthead]

Rant about Samsung -

I work for a storage subsystem manufacturer (that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) and we don't even bother to qualify Samsung drives anymore.

In our experience, they don't take bug reports seriously and we have to be prodding them pretty hard to get any kind of response out of them; and it usually goes along the line of "we'll look into it" but that is all; we never receive any follow ups.

WD on the other hand were pretty proactive in trying to resolve issues. A few months ago a problem crop up and they arranged to have periodic conference calls with us to exchange progress and data till the issue was resolved. Seagate and Hitachi... not as much, but they will work with us to track down problems. Samsung just isn't worth our effort to qualify their drives with our subsystems since in our experience, they've never demonstrated any willingness to resolve issues.

 

[taltamir]

those numbers do sound rather painful, keep in mind you're also only collecting data from those who decided to post a review on newegg.

I agree with mikedev10 that the main thing you're seeing is that people who have problems with their drives are probably 10-100x+ more likely to post a review (and vent). For most people, if it works, they're not going to go to the trouble to post, "hey, it works fine."

Those are good points, now that I think about it... its been a few years but when i bought my 5 WD 750GB caviar greens I vaguely remember things were pretty bad too; I accepted that exact same argument, and not a single one of those had an issue. I just kinda forgot. I think that might have also been why I am running double parity on 5 drives... such that 2 of the 5 can fail without dataloss. But I don't think it was quite as bad as it is now, it just seems like things got worse, and from a technical perspective it makes sense for durability to go down as miniaturization goes up.

All of my RE4 (2002/2003) model ending are still fully operational - under 70% duty cycle for D2D2D backup storage.

All my "junk consumer drives" from a few years back are fully operational too.
While the RE4 drive on the egg is:
1. 260$ vs 70$ each. (I simply do not have this kind of money!)
2. Has equally bad rating as the non consumer drives, in fact people right out say "I expected RE drives to be more reliable then the consumer versions; but out of the X I ordered Y have failed within a month".

 

[mikedev10]

i just picked up a 2tb wd from newegg so i sure hope it doesn't poop out. i have a raptor raid 1 74 gb i'm about to spin up so i'll be storing the answers to all the mysteries of the universe on there.

 

[masteryoda34]

I'm currently on my FOURTH Seagate LP 2TB drive. Previously RMA'd 3 in a row.

 

[sxr7171]

I've bought about 12 of those and out of that one failed. I can't say it's terrible. Of course I use them on systems with some sort of data redundancy.

 

[Emulex]

samsung is oem only. their outlets are pretty much microcenter and frys and newegg - they'll never make it in channel without better infrastructure.

 

[Voo]

samsung is oem only. their outlets are pretty much microcenter and frys and newegg - they'll never make it in channel without better infrastructure.

"their outlets are pretty much microcenter and frys and newegg" and "samsung is oem only" is quite conflicting isn't it?

Have a 5.4k 2tb Samsung drive and it works just fine.

 

[ViviTheMage]

I've had 6 2TB samsung drives ... all working so far (8 months and counting)

I've also got 12 RE4 WD drives, only one has failed and needed replacement in 2 years.

 

[Emulex]

nah means they sell bulk package non retail last time i checked. maybe things have changed i don't get out too often but every drive that was as microcenter samsung was bare drive in a plastic anti theft container.

their RMA process left a bit to be desired. in contrast to WD/SEAGATE (i do have a oem login) i just say drive is bad - and they send me another (sometimes free advance exchange). I have never had to prove a drive was defective or even pretend (samsung) that i ran their app and googled the correct answer.

Keep in mind the RE4 is not rated for 100% duty cycle like the SAS drives (600gb). to confuse things even more they have SAS (not WD) interfaced SATA drives - you can get a sas-sata drive now which is rated at 30-40% duty cycle.

people putting RE4 drives in a raid and expecting SCSI(SAS) like performance are going to be in for a good shock.

Oddly the ole 500gb seagate sata drives (12 of them in raid-5) have been rocking out for a long time. I only use SATA for backups. they are just too freakin' slow even with 1GB FBWC to use for much else.

and yeah i woulda shoulda done raid-50 with two 6-drive raidsets but the unit was a windows 2008 storage server and did its own raid thing.

 

[Sunfox]

I recently shopped for 7200RPM 2TB drives as well, and yes it certainly doesn't seem to be a pretty picture out there.

It seems the drives are either prone to failure, or are noisy (which I can't stand). However the reviews on Newegg of early or outright failures should be tempered with the continual reports of horrible hard drive packing jobs by Newegg, combined with UPS's reputation for abusing packages.

In the end, I bought four 2TB Seagate Barracuda XTs (not from the Egg). They're quieter than most, have a 5 year warranty, and seemed slightly more reliable than the rest based on anecdotal evidence (the WD RE4 or Seagate Constellation ES drives seemed to be the most reliable, but noisy). They'll be used in a mix of external RAID 0 and RAID10 for important data (so I can lose 1 or potentially 2 drives).

However I should note that I've also had a pair of Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB drives in a WHS system for over a year now, and they've been fine.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I'm not sure if zip zoom fly is still around but they had the best hard drive packaging from any company. I like how ssds can be shipped in an envelope now lol.

 

[Synomenon]

Have a 2TB WD RE4-GP here and surprisingly, it's not as slow as I expected it to be. Wiping it is another story though. It took over 30 hours to wipe it.

 

[chusteczka]

Hard drives are notoriously susceptible to damage from electrical power disruptions including surges and brownouts. The old copper wiring in most homes and apartments was not designed for the sensitivity requirements of today's computers. Electrical power disruptions are a common occurrence but we do not notice when our 3-phase AC light bulbs dim slightly because we are used to it.

A hard drive failure means that person does not have a voltage regulator or battery backup to regulate power for their highly sensitive computer equipment. Heat can also cause hard drive failures but that is less of an issue than power disruptions.

Gather failure rates from infrastructures with modern power supplies and you will have relevant data.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Each "Green" 2TB drive on the market (sans Hitachi's new offering) has some sort of issue. I know because I have almost all of them in my Unraid server:

2TB WD Green- New EARS version is Advanced Format which doesn't work with XP, yet old EADS version is ok (which is confusing). Also I hear it has problems with regular RAID (works with Unraid though).

2TB 5900 RPM Seagate- Bad early firmware, yet most drives are STILL not shipped with newest CC35 firmware. Because of a issue with the updater, you normally have to FORCE the firmware upgrade (unnerving)

2TB Samsung F4 - Older firmware had data loss problems!!!!!!

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks

Plus THE SAMSUNG FIRMWARE PATCH DOES NOT CHANGE THE FIRMWARE VERSION NUMBER!!!!!!! (Such a bad problem that I refuse to use this drive)

The 2TB 7200 RPM drives are fine. My 2tb Seagate Barracuda XT is my favorite drive ever, my 2TB 7200RPM Hitachi was such a good deal I bought a second for my desktop, and even though I have never had a 2TB WD Black drive I hear they are great...

 

[theevilsharpie]

A hard drive failure means that person does not have a voltage regulator or battery backup to regulate power for their highly sensitive computer equipment. Heat can also cause hard drive failures but that is less of an issue than power disruptions.

Your PSU is your hard drive's voltage regulator.

 

[theevilsharpie]

However the reviews on Newegg of early or outright failures should be tempered with the continual reports of horrible hard drive packing jobs by Newegg, combined with UPS's reputation for abusing packages.

Newegg's hard drive packaging is a joke. A small sheet of bubble wrap and some packing peanuts aren't good enough. If you buy several hard drives, Newegg will even wrap them all up as a single bundle with no cushioning between the drives D:

When I buy HP hard drives for my servers, they come in individual boxes, and they're cushioned on all sides by flexible plastic. You could punt the box like a football and not damage the drive inside. Consumer drives in retail boxes are packaged the same way.

If it weren't for Newegg's massive volume, I'm sure hard drive manufacturers would just flat-out deny RMA's from drives sold by them. I'd NEVER buy a drive from Newegg that wasn't in a retail box.