AlienTech

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  1. I had the same 1.5tb drive they used and it used to run very hot, over 60C.. That could be the problem.. The motor was having trouble dealing with the 5 platters and after a few years it turned grey around the motor housing.. The drive was very fast though. I also had the 1TB model with 3 platters and that was a very good drive and ran cool and the very same fast transfer speeds.. So I wonder if they just could not get a motor rated for the load.. DC motors can work but you just pump more current through it and the result is higher heat. Both 1TB and the 1.5TB were identical drives except the number of platters.. Same circuit board and housing as well.. The 3TB drives had problems with dust and water damage and I seen pictures of platters which showed dried water on them and a lot of other things so this is most likely a production problem.. Firmware and such were only added burdens. Anyone dealt with the 2TB drives where those without the deeper notch were 20% faster? Those used 3 platters and it depended on which country they were produced in. The drives with 2 platters were the fastest drives at the time and they ran very cool as well. The 3TB were supposedly based on it as well by adding an extra platter to get 3TB. But we know both 2 and 3tb's also had variants which performed very poorly. And those who got the proper 2 and 3TB of those drives are still very happy since they were very fast drives and ran cool as well. It is only people who run raid setups where 1 drive fails and they have to replace it that have problems if they cant find an identical drive. Using the model and part numbers dont matter as identical model/part numbers can perform differently.. I dont think enterprise drives have this problem. So even if backblaze had problems with a particular drive, I loved that same drive since at the time it was a very fast drive and 50% extra storage was worth the extra heat and I did not have to get a very expensive small capacity SSD. Considering more than a decade ago, the faster the drive the more heat it generated. When we used maxtor 512MB drives you could not touch them. And they failed under 2 years but after the 1 year warranty. We pretty much guessed that due to the short warranty period compared to the 3 and 5 years for the other drives and yet we bought a ton of those drives because of the speeds.. I suppose the difference is people buying premium SSD's now compared to standard SSD's.. If the drive is fast enough then even if reliability is lower it is still worth it for a lot of occasions.
  2. Quote from: garycase on August 10, 2015, 01:46:09 PM Who knows, by Nov WD may release an 8TB PMR Red Reading this thread, it would have been useful if people had mentioned the model of the drive they were discussing because some people were talking about a conventional drive while some were discussing an SMR drive. There are several 5 TB Seagate drives available at the moment, each designed for a particular application. The only one that uses SMR technology has "AS" in its model number, such as ST5000AS001. They work very well in external USB cases and it isn't Seagate's fault if people break open the cases and use the drives as they were never intended to be used. The ST5000DM000, in contrast, is a conventional non-shingled drive. THAT is what I been trying to say.. The model number does not mean anything. Identical model and part numbers behave differently and this has happened with the 2TB, 3TB and the 5TB.. at least in the 2tb and 3tb's we narrowed it down to the firmware differences and that information is not easily available and in both cases the people involved were very experienced with drives having dealt with hundreds of them. The HDtune graph for the drives are different as well from a regular drive. Just because of the hostility of some thinking they know a lot I wont even bother spending the time just to have it be deleted. And in 2010/12 when facebook was testing the drives no 5TB or even 4tb drives were available but SMR drives were being tested because anand tech did have an article on it. Anyway I only signed up because I wanted to get this 5TB and now I wont, the 5TB toshiba I got works just fine normally without having to deal with all this and it has a latency of 11ms compared to the 16ms this one does. You got to buy what ever makes you happy and you are stuck with it. good luck..
  3. Reading this thread, it would have been useful if people had mentioned the model of the drive they were discussing because some people were talking about a conventional drive while some were discussing an SMR drive. There are several 5 TB Seagate drives available at the moment, each designed for a particular application. The only one that uses SMR technology has "AS" in its model number, such as ST5000AS001. They work very well in external USB cases and it isn't Seagate's fault if people break open the cases and use the drives as they were never intended to be used. The ST5000DM000, in contrast, is a conventional non-shingled drive. If the ST5000DM000 is not SMR, I wonder why people are having odd performance issues with them which seem to be related to the SMR tech? Unless the performance issues are nothing to do with SMR in the first place, because these drives are PMR? To confuse things further, here is "legit" reviews with their review of the ST5000DM0000, stating it's SMR. Ahhh, gotta love the total confusion. I have no idea either way what type of drive it is. http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241 I know years ago facebook tried out SMR drives and only 2TB drives were released at the time, Seagate only came out 2 years later and said they had shipped many millions of SMR drives.. Yet SMR drives were not available until they released the archive 8TB drives.. So I am sure they tested SMR with all capacities since 2TB onwards but did not generally sell them to the public. I think you can find the seagate PR release from years ago saying they had shipped millions of SMR drives.. I am sure they have not sold millions of 8TB drives even now.. So these millions are from all the data centers testing these drives out. Some even put put some reports on write once and read many data for large number of pictures and stuff.. The model number ST5000DM000 is given for these.. But I bet the firmware would be like SC49.. But in the picture it says CC46 which is a normal PMR firmware.. So either they are now even using similar firmware on both or the picture is from a different drive.. so there is no way to actually tell the different drives.. as the model/serial were similar and only firmware was different before.. But the crystal diskinfo also shows NCQ enabled and matches the firmware.. so I really am confused.. This to my knowledge is not an SMR drive. This makes everything even more confusing.. I had forgotten to mention some of these drives used ADVANCED format sectors which means they emulate 512byte sectors but use 4096byte sectors internally.. Some of the problems could also be because of this.. I specifically partitioned the drives on 16MB boundaries even though microsoft says they automatically use 4K boundary settings.. It did fix some of the read speed problems I had experienced.. Using 1mb boundary did not fix it and I gt tired of just playing with it. http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241# ...This public service announcement by Legit Reviews could be over right now, but we went a step further and got our hands on a Seagate ST5000DM000 5TB drive and took a look at the performance of it. The Seagate SR5000DM000 features Seagate Shingled Magnetic Recording, or SMR, to maximize the number of tracks per inch on a single disk. This particular model has four platters (disks) and eight heads. Each platter is able to hold 1.25TB of data.....
  4. Some people come on and say the drives work just fine for them and over the years this really caused me to lose some hair.. Until by chance I found someone complaing about a drive they had to install into their raid system. It was an expensive server room system and the guy worked for a wel known networking company and they could not get the exact same drive from where they got the original and sso he got one from another place with the same model numbers, Now I already had 2 of these very same drives as well and I only had high opinions on their performance and lack of heat.. but he said the performance on his system dropped to 20% of normal once he installed the single replacement drive. Removing the drive got the performance back up even though the system was missing part of the raid system. The model numbers were identical.. BUT the firmware were an unknown.. There was a complaint on the seagate forum about the drives with this particular firmware having speed issues.. Just 1 message.. Google did not have much to offer.. These were 2TB drives.. They got over 200mb/read/writes and run under 40C without any fans. Since I had the 3TB drive showing all the problems mentioned above I checked the firmware and it looked similar to the 2TB drive the tech from SMC mentioned.... Not the regular firmware that people mention all over the net.. Seagate forums changed a few years ago because too many of us were talking about this minkey business on there. Now you can barely find any real world info on there. And its shame because there were many wh knew data/disaster recovery using specialised tools and programs and offering their help. Maybe seagate wated to stop this user fixing the problems as data recovery seems to be big busienss for them. In the vast majority of cases fixing the drive means snipping a lead for the thermister that shorts the power lines.. Fixes 50% of the dead drive problems in a few seconds.. ST2000DM001-1CH164 xxx2MELK Firmware : CC24 ST3000DM001-1E6166-xxx49VAH Firmware : SC48 That would be the only difference you notice.. One drive performs fantastic.. The other one drops writes to 30MB/sec.. has NO NCQ.. and speeds vary depending... Reads are 100-150MB's.. I thought it was SMR since a power failure will cause adjacent files to get corrupted.. But since SMR drives have an AQ I suppose it is not an SMR.. But who knows.. I also have 10 other 2TB drives I got which have all kinds of different model numbers and firmware and some perform better than others.. But I dont rely on what other people experience since my experience is vastly difefrent and as I said, particular model numbers I have perform very well.. and particular ones perform very poorely.. enough to make me not want to take a chance and pay a little extra and get a drive that I know will not be different than the informaton I learn from others..
  5. So if I have power supply problems I need to apply special technologies just so I can use seagate drives? And Then keep it in a special freezer so I can use it for longer than 10 minutes? Where do you get off saying this stuff. You sound like seagate. If they want people to use their stuff they need to make it so it is usable. Like having ventilation instead of sticking it inside a plastic box and among other things have some kind of power failure mechanism because other drives dont have the problem. Like no one has kids or cats or dogs. So the drive will always stay stable on the desk. but all that does not matter either since seagate has an exponential failure rate compared to anyone else no matter who uses it or where it is used. The low prices are just a con and now you cant even find decent info on their drives. They try to hide almost everything about it. I could find no info on my 3TB drives, it is not even listed on their web site. And never fret, I have found 4 versions of seagate 2TB green drives and seems they have at least 3 versions of 3TB drives that I know off. All with the same model number but entirely different features. Since they dont publish any info, basically you get what you deserve. I saw someone ask what the difference was between 2 external models and was told thats propriety information. Say what?
  6. By accident I would say. I was copying files to the drive and had problems like the computer freezing up or power cycling due to them switching the electric lines. I have a UPS but was using one of them super dooper efficient power supplies with all these wizbangs on it and it would reset the computer. So I splurged on a power supply that cost 1/4 of the wizbang one and it dont reset at every hickup. Guess the more wizbang they make things the less tolerance they have. But I figured I would rather have some data protection rather than power protection. The cheap Chinese power supply seems to have no problems with the spikes. One of the main problems was the High temperatures of the drive. I had a fan flowing onto the case but it was still getting over 55C and I shut it down when it hit 60C. It copied I think like 200GB by that time. When I went to play one of the video files it showed corruption but the file on the internal drive worked fine, checking the file contents it was all 0's.. I checked a few other files and they were fine but then I found a couple of others with problems. Reading up on shingled recording I see they erase many tracks and rewrite the data and I think there might be other files you never touched which end up here, so in the end you have no idea which files got corrupted. Which is my main beef! I can understand the file you are writing getting toasted but not files you never touched which you expect to be in good condition. I did not do extensive testing like if anything happens if the computer locks up and the drive still seems to work etc.. By that time I was just sick of the drive which showed wild speed variations. For a 7200 drive to copy files at 20MB was just too much. Testing showed the drive at 140MB read/write but try copying 100GB and it takes hours. With no NCQ, the drive slows down drastically for a lot of small files. I think Seagate got their panties into a bunch because people were using their drives for their own benefit. How else can you explain their behavior where they spend extra effort to make sure their drives are junk now, with warranty that fluctuates wildly with performances thats designed for grandpa's and explanations thats enough to con marketing people. I known seagate for close to 30 years now and the only drive I was impressed with was a certain model that they created once they bought out quantum. They used CDC and Quantum technology to make a decent and performance drive that was rather good and I still have this drive after over 15 years working fine and no errors or bad sectors. All their drives before that was junk and performed like a pinto. After they brought out maxtor they went for the performance but without the quality. I dont have any maxtor drives working after 10 years, they all died 5 or so years into it but their performance was high compared to others. This latest gimmick from seagate has made me rethink about buying their drives no matter what. it is a HUGE hassle when they go back. Recovering a TB of data takes weeks. Then it is a fight about the RMA and they may or may not. The RMA'ed drive might be worse. The last one they did not return but the one before that got like 3 sectors bad with 10 hours on it but I saw blackblaze say those drives were the second worst drives they have used with almost 20% failures, I would think due to high operating temperatures of over 60C. Since I got the SSD the hard drives are only for storage of media files. But it is getting to the point where the benefits are beginning to weigh in. IE you have to spend weeks recovering data before you realize the penalty. I just cant handle losing 2 drives every year like this. It just makes an entire month go by being extremely depressed and stressed. I saw the WD 4TB and Seagate 5TB for the same price and glad I saw this. The 4TB uses older technology so they are better drives but slower. Not that slower drives are reliable since I also lost data on them. But at least they lasted a few months. You cant spend money and be excited and then 2 days later get depressed and want to throw the thing out. Which is how I felt after I lost a drive and they refused to send the drive back as being out of warranty and then buying a new one and getting all these problems. If they want to be like this then so be it. They wont see my money any longer.
  7. I signed up just to answer this question because there was been much confusion. Seagate started using shingled recording to put more data per platter. They do it even on their 3 TB drives where they use the 800GB platters but fit 1TB of data on it. These drives are extremely dangerous for personal use. A power failure will wipe out files you never touched. It would be impossible to find out which files got corrupted unless you had MD5 checking on for every file and did a file verification often. As a backup device this is junk. The various speed problems are because of where the data is stored. For a new drive it is fast but as it fills up and writes over old data the speed drops drastically. Although it is still slower than the regular drive, this slowdown goes to slower than a USB2 pen drive. I suppose seagate was able to con a lot of people who knew nothing to buy these garbage. They better be careful in how they use the drive because data loss is guaranteed on these drives. When seagate puts out number of drives sold, it is sold to places like google or facebook which have millions of these drives used as wrote once and read many devices. They also have power failures and fault tolerances. it just is not usable for a user even for backup purposes due to the weakness it displays. File corruption dos not stay with one file but spreads across many other files with no indication of which files are corrupted. So these drives can never be used in a desktop like environment with frequent updates of files, email databases or even drive fat tables. not only that but I bet the failure rates on these drives would be huge. backblaze gives a number above 40% of drives failed in under 2 years and I would think the 5TB using similar technology would also fail like this. Seagate has also limited usability of these drives taking away things like NCQ and other features so people wont use them in NAS or desktop environments. I would say pay the 20% extra and get drives like hitachi or toshiba etc which have 1% failure rates.. Since data is important and it is a huge pain to recover it. Data centeres with redundancy can use them since cost is important to them and they can recover from bad drives. I was thinking of ordering one of these 5TB drives so thanks for letting me know it is the same as the 3TB drive. I moved it into my write once storage system. It is not very good for just reading either as windows has this bad habit of updating the drive even if you only read stuff off it. I am hoping it lasts a bit as I dont use it and just keep it for old files on the shelves. Guess I better pay the $30 extra for a better drive.