Seagate Drive failures - class action

[Akira]

The "crap" designation has over time been applied to drives from all makers I'm afraid. IBM/Hitachi for example had a series named 'Deskstar' that pretty soon was nicknamed 'Deathstar'. I can attest to the nickname being highly apt. Western Digital and Samsung to mention two other big makers have had poor products as well.

One simply has to acknowledge the fact that any disk drive, be it HDD or SSD, from any maker, has limited longevity.

Another friend of mine who is Finish living in Japan just told me that he fell victim of the Deathstar...

Personally I try not to use an HDD as C drive longer than about three years.  I'm moving to a new Windows 10 machine now.  It has an SDD as C drive, but I will still use HDDs for storage.  I'll keep your advice in mind.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Pay heed to the fact that also SSD-drives don't last for ever .... They might have even shorter longevity than some HDDs.

[Frank Fremerey]

After IBM shut down their HDD business I only used Samsung and
Western Digital for serious storage. For a game system of my son
where no data of interest are saved I might use a Hitachi or
Toshiba.

My professional Backups  are all on WD green series. Never failed
in me once...

[Akira]

Pay heed to the fact that also SSD-drives don't last for ever .... They might have even shorter longevity than some HDDs.

Yes, I will.  Also, I will use the SSD "C" drive only for the system, application and the data I'm working on (I always a USB memory as temporary storage).

After IBM shut down their HDD business I only used Samsung and
Western Digital for serious storage. For a game system of my son
where no data of interest are saved I might use a Hitachi or
Toshiba.

My professional Backups  are all on WD green series. Never failed
in me once...

My friend system engineer says he only trusts Hitachi.  Maybe the (bad) experiences vary.

WD green series seems to have been merged to the blue series.

[pluton]

All the makers take turns having their bad spells.
Right now, Hitachi is one of the "good ones".   
Recently, Western Digital purchased Hitachi's HDD business, but curiously kept the HGST brand separate. 

[Jørgen Ramskov]

All companies have experienced problems with a series of harddrives. All you can hope is that the ones you buy aren't part of such a series and prepare for when the harddrive eventually fails. I use 5x 2TB Samsung drives in my NAS and they have so far been running reliably for around 5 years. I did have to firmware upgrade the harddrives shortly after getting them because Samsung found a critical bug. The NAS is just as old, so it might as well be my NAS that suddenly decides to stop working.

Flash can only be written to a limited amount of times before they stop working, but it does look like they have gotten that resonably under control:
https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

That doesn't mean that SSD's don't fail, they certainly do. Just like all other computer equipment

[Bjørn Rørslett]

SSD 'wear levelling' algorithms get better over time, but much of the uses such drives are subjected to will sooner or later kill them no matter how cleverly the wear is distributed over the microchips inside. To wit, the OS reads and writes all those small temporary files all the time, and even if the OS is smart enough to understand disk defragmentation is a bad idea with SSD, the user might not have understood the same and do the defragmentation anyway. Or equally bad, updates some huge disk files over and over again (did I hear monolithic image library bases like LR??) which will kill the drive equally effective over time. The SSD needn't even be filled to capacity when it eventually gives up the ghost.

I' m currently looking for a replacement of a SSD drive of a highly regarded brand. The drive is not 4 years old and filled only to 30%. It is beginning to show the usual signs of a premature death with hiccups and getting awfully slow.

Jørgen: with old NAS units, the fan tends to die followed by the power supply. Not necessarily in that order. Both items can easily be replaced and in particular the fan should be switched to a truly silent-running type. Noctua fans are whisper quiet and my choice when I put the old fan out of its misery.

[Jørgen Ramskov]

SSD 'wear levelling' algorithms get better over time, but much of the uses such drives are subjected to will sooner or later kill them no matter how cleverly the wear is distributed over the microchips inside. To wit, the OS reads and writes all those small temporary files all the time, and even if the OS is smart enough to understand disk defragmentation is a bad idea with SSD, the user might not have understood the same and do the defragmentation anyway. Or equally bad, updates some huge disk files over and over again (did I hear monolithic image library bases like LR??) which will kill the drive equally effective over time. The SSD needn't even be filled to capacity when it eventually gives up the ghost.

I' m currently looking for a replacement of a SSD drive of a highly regarded brand. The drive is not 4 years old and filled only to 30%. It is beginning to show the usual signs of a premature death with hiccups and getting awfully slow.

A lot has happened in 4 years. The development of SSD's have gone fast and continues to develop. Samsung recently showed a 16TB SSD.

Jørgen: with old NAS units, the fan tends to die followed by the power supply. Not necessarily in that order. Both items can easily be replaced and in particular the fan should be switched to a truly silent-running type. Noctua fans are whisper quiet and my choice when I put the old fan out of its misery.

Yes, it's not unlikely that either the PSU or the fan dies. When I had a desktop machine (self built), I used Noctua fans. The noise is not that big a deal though. The NAS is not in any of the rooms we spend much time in. We usually have pretty stable power, but I do have my NAS connected to an UPS, which might help in keeping the PSU in the NAS working well. The UPS actually failed a few years ago due to a swollen battery. I replaced the battery and it's been running since.
Whether the NAS eventually fails or not, I will likely replace it within the next few years.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

I'm fully aware that SSD technology is rapidly evolving. But most of us cannot afford to be constantly on the pricey and  cutting edge of technology with heavens know what undetected bugs lurking under the shiny surface. So we have to do with more mundane gear and rely on these for some years before they are replaced. I have spoken to so many people believing that now they have switched to SSD, they no longer risk a disk failure. Nothing could be more wrong.

[Jørgen Ramskov]

I wasn't suggesting that you or everyone should be replacing gear more often or always live on the cutting edge of technology. It was merely a statement that the SSD technology has evolved a lot since whatever drive you're now experiencing problems with.

Thinking SSD's never fails is clearly a misunderstanding, but I do believe they are generally more reliable.

[Akira]

I'm fully aware that SSD technology is rapidly evolving. But most of us cannot afford to be constantly on the pricey and  cutting edge of technology with heavens know what undetected bugs lurking under the shiny surface. So we have to do with more mundane gear and rely on these for some years before they are replaced. I have spoken to so many people believing that now they have switched to SSD, they no longer risk a disk failure. Nothing could be more wrong.

I hadn't used any SSD until I built my new PC this week simply because I don't want to jump on the latest technology in genearl, so far as my main PC is concerned.  I always want to incorporate the tried and tested hardware or technology method.  I don't blindly believe that SSD is more die-hard than HDD, but I decided that it has been tested & tried long enough to be common.  I've used Mac Book Air (my mobile machine, not the main one) for a year to get the hang of SDD.

I wouldn't have bought any SDD as early as four years ago, no matter how much budged I could have had.

[Andy]

Jorgen,
based on personal experience I'd be careful to claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDs. While a total failure is indeed quite rare, performance variation with many brands is much higher than with HDs.

Bjorns comment on SSD performance degradation with relatively low usage and being very slow is an indication that the mentioned SSD is using a threshold based GC (Garbage collection) approach vs. realtime GC/WL. If the SSD controller is fast enough to do realtime GC faster than the max write rate of the SSD, write performance variation diminishes almost completely over the lifetime of the SSD.

The combination of realtime GC and faster GC than the max write rate for a particular SSD type is a necessary precondition if SSDs should be combined in larger raid configurations with predictable (write) performance. Most consumer SSDs failed in this regard when I did my analysis a while ago.

I built quite a few of those open systems for very high sustainable combined I/O and compute performance (my second hobby besides photography).
Due to cost reasons I had to use consumer SSDs. Given the high number of SSDs needed (approx 100), I spent more than 2 months to evaluate 15 different consumer brands, before choosing the right model for my use case.

Here is a picture of one of these machines. 4 sockets, 32 physical cores, 512 GB RAM, 96 SSDs

This particular configuration had applications running with very high computational intensity (measured via energy consumption) and high sustainable I/O (average write rate > 10 GB/s for a full week per run). Over the course of the year, each of the SSDs experienced a significantly higher write volume than guaranteed by the manufacturer. The drives didn't fail completely, but at the end write performance in about 10% of the total number of drives went down. (Was ok for me, as they served much longer than anticipated. Some drives had 20x the max. write volume the manufacturer listed). The other consumer drives I evaluated had much more erratic write behaviour under sustainable load.

BTW, loading a 100 GB data file from the SSDs into main memory took less than 5 seconds - a very convenient speed to work with....



Getting back on the HD failures rates and causes.
For those interested: Google published such a statistical report (they have quite a few drives)

rgds,
Andy

[Jørgen Ramskov]

Andy: Impressive setup!

Jorgen,
based on personal experience I'd be careful to claim that SSDs are more reliable than HDs. While a total failure is indeed quite rare, performance variation with many brands is much higher than with HDs.

I was probably not specific enough. I believe they are more reliable due to not having any moving parts, that's particularly important with devices that gets moved (laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.).

[Andy]

I was probably not specific enough. I believe they are more reliable due to not having any moving parts, that's particularly important with devices that gets moved (laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.).

Hi Jorgen. I agree with this perspective.

regards,
Andy

[bobfriedman]

i have like 12 of these drives 3TB drive from Seagate (ST3000DM001)  yikes..

but i use them in two RAID5 banks..  the others are secondary backup and get virtually no use other than to pop them into a thunderbolt SATA dock.