Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Cantbecanit]

With all due respect mate, I'm not the one whose trashed $600 worth of drives am I ?

If you don't know how crucial good stable power is to a PC you don't know much at all, I notice the card is 2007 vintage, a 3TB drive is 2010, that's 3 years and 3 years apart in the world of PC HW is a long time, would you be so good to list the rest of your rig so I can have a dive into that as well, including the Docker

Anyway, I do appologise for my cheap shot at your spelling, but Failer and Docker are not the words I'd expect to read from someone who is obviously as knowledgeable as you are.

Btw, fyi, I was invited to help here because I am helpful and I do know my way around, do you give up free time to help others for nothing? thought not, I just wanted to help you get out of the chain of returning drives, you chose to read me as critical of you, well I'm blind here and you posted limited info even though it asks for specs in my signature, and to sum up, I still think something you are doing is breaking them, the beltsander one was probably because the board in the DOCKER has never heard of a 3TB drive and threw a hissy.

This is from the 6BG/s thread and the guy is spot on, I suggest you have a read, anyway here's Joels comment, I kudos him for it as well, cos I'm generous like that.

Re: Barracuda XT 3TB Won't Link at 6GB/s on Sata III

Options

10-21-2011 09:45 PM

Mine turned out to be a compatibility problem with the SATA3 enclosure I was using.  The drives worked fine with the special Adaptec 3TB firmware and plugged directly into the card.  The Seagate drives didn't play nice with the backplane.  The vendor said that 3Gb Seagates worked fine with it and 6Gb WDs worked fine.  They didn't have any 6Gb Seagates to try but I tried 3TB XTs and 1TB Barracuda 6Gb drives and neither worked.  They would all fail building the array and randomly wouldn't even show up."

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/508/1/

Sata 2

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/storage-peripherals/2011/04/18/seagate-barracuda-xt-3tb-sata-6gbps-40...

Sata 3

[Cantbecanit]

Mine turned out to be a compatibility problem with the SATA3 enclosure I was using.  The drives worked fine with the special Adaptec 3TB firmware and plugged directly into the card.  The Seagate drives didn't play nice with the backplane.  The vendor said that 3Gb Seagates worked fine with it and 6Gb WDs worked fine.  They didn't have any 6Gb Seagates to try but I tried 3TB XTs and 1TB Barracuda 6Gb drives and neither worked.  They would all fail building the array and randomly wouldn't even show up."

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/508/1/

Sata 2

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/storage-peripherals/2011/04/18/seagate-barracuda-xt-3tb-sata-6gbps-40...

Sata 3

[Cantbecanit]

Here's some more info for you

techjunkiewest   01-24-2008 at 09:39:21 PM

- 0 +

This may come as a major shock to all of us who have built their various RAID configurations using standard desktop drives, because standard desktop drives have a tendency to drop out of the RAID array. I talked to engineers and Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung who explained that, when a desktop drives performs internal error correction, the amount of time required exceeds the time that RAID controllers allow before they drop the drive out of the array. When this occurs, the RAID controller writes something (I can't remember what or where) to the drive so that it can't be used again in the array. The Seagate engineer explained that some type of low level reformatting needs to be done before it can be used again.

This is the reason that both Seagate and WD offer RAID drives - they're a $10 to $30 more than their standard drives. Samsung does NOT have a similar drive - I got this from their engineer. These RAID drives limit the amount of time they report to the controller so that they will not be dropped from the array. Two examples of these RAID drives are: Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD5001ABYS, and Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3500320NS

Note the "YS" in the Western Digital suffix and the "NS" in the Seagate suffix. Both Seagate and WD also indicate that these drives are built to a higher spec.

Therefore, the person in this thread that indicated that there was no need for special RAID drives was incorrect, probably because non-RAID drives in an array will work.... for a while.

On a personal note, I learned all this AFTER I purchased a pair of Samsung 500GB Desktop drives for my RAID 1 configuration. They've been in my array for the last three months without any problems. That said, I'm going to replace them with RAID-certified drives in the next 60 days.

I just wish that the vendors, like NewEgg, would warn us and educate us with the facts so that we could make informed decsions.

Found here, have a read

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/244932-14-ich9r-raid-drive-volume

And after that please read this through, it'll save you hassle in future

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/POWER-SUPPLIES-EXPLAINED-PLEASE-READ-B...

[fzabkar]

The ATA standard provides for an SCT Error Recovery Control (ERC) feature set. This allows the host, be it the OS or the RAID controller, to set the error timeout values for reads and writes. WD calls this Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), while Samsung and Hitachi both refer to it as Command Completion Time Limit (CCTL).

Here is Samsung's page on the subject:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/learningresource/whitepapers/LearningResource_CCTL.html

It states that ...

"The [CCTL] time limit can be set from hundreds to thousand of milliseconds. Samsung F1R Enterprise SATA disk drives for Enterprise applications support this SCT option so Samsung F1R drives can be successfully used with SATA and SAS RAID controllers adhering to the T13 SCT command set."

AIUI, most Seagate models support ERC, but only the enterprise models have the timeout values hard coded. If you set the ERC timeouts in a non-enterprise Seagate model, then these settings will not survive a power cycle. However, this volatility doesn't matter if you have some way to set the timeouts automatically after bootup, or if the RAID controller is intelligent enough to do it for you.
You can experiment with ERC settings using HDAT2:
http://www.hdat2.com/

As for the physical differences between regular and enterprise class drives, I have yet to see any HDD manufacturer come clean and explain exactly what these differences are. For example, I'd like to know what is different about an ES.2 model and a 7200.11 drive of the same capacity. The cynic in me suspects that they only differ in the firmware. Ditto for WD's RE2 models.

[jimscreecnhy]

"Never argue with an idiot, he will drag you down to his level then beat you with experience."

@FZabkar- yeah read all about this before purchasing these drives, figure compatibility reports dealt sufficiently with these issues.

[jimscreecnhy]

Well, this one is a first, unboxed the new drive docked it as soon as it started to spin up could hear the disk rubbing on... what I can only imagine is the a read/write head, unbelievable! Almost. 

This one has a cc45 firmware which of course isn't even as new as the last one I recieved so obviously this drive isn't new. I'm kinda starting to wonder if when the drives are returned by others and seagate gets no seatools errors they just ship itout to someone else as a replacment. of course it failed the basic test, not that there was much point running it as you could clearly hear this one was damaged.  On its way back AGAIN! 

I must be a magnet for faulty drives.

[Cantbecanit]

Ok, I won't argue with you and thanks for the advice because I don't not wish to come down to your level thx.

I'll just remind you that I said you will continue to break drives and have to return them shall I, didn't take long for that prophecy to come true did it?

And now you suggest Seagate send out drives with what sounds like the arm gouging the disk?

I notice you failed to list your rig, I wonder why?

I also notice you thanked Fza for basically backing up what I left for you last time, why no thanks for me mate?

Now c'mon, lets see what you are driving them on, at least then it will give a clearer picture of the situation, you never know if I feel you are rigged up correctly I may even say sorry to you, personally for the third time I would refund you and have done with it, have you raised that possibility?

[jimscreecnhy]

Anyhooo... what was it, about two or so weeks since my array failed, changed nothing but it rebuilt overnight - no issues worked like a charm sicnce.  I can only imagine I had a bad sector which needed remapping or some such.  Seagate appologised profusely for sending me two bad drives, assured me my case is definately the exception rather than the norm, and further verified that the drives sent were brand new and not even certified replacments, so it's a mystery how they both arrived damaged.  Spun the drive up while the lady was on the phone so she actually heard it rubbing... was completely dumbfounded it reached me like that, but made no bones about it being faulty.  Said she can't do a refund but offered me a constallation ES instead of a Barracuda because of the issues I've had and further that any additional failed drives from this batch (gosh help me) would be replaced with upgrades.  Can't ask for more than that.

You know I may have had my share of woes with my drives but the techsup and customer services at seagate is nothing short of excellent.  Very very helpful, completely sympathetic and very knowledgable.  On the two occasions I've dealt with them on the phone they gone out of their way to resolve my issues. 

Constellation ES.2 (edit get my facts right)  arrived yesterday spun up without issue in my docker, stuck it in the server rebuilt in the array overnight and so far working like a charm.

I can't say I won't have any more issues though to be fair, I've had none since last glitch and aside from the replaced failures I've had a fairly stable build.  At any rate!  thank you Seagate not just for givving toss about people that buy your products, but  for the excellent after sales sevice and taking this uncanny batch of failures seriously. 

Definately restored my confidence.