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

[Hugster]

I have a clicking sound every few seconds on one of my 2TB drives, I read on new egg this is first signs of failure.

The drive is 143 hours old .....

 Should I just RMA now?

Message Edited by Hugster on 09-23-2009 12:30 PM

[igor]

I have the same issue with 1-week old 1.5TB LP drive ST31500541AS. Should I hurry and return it to Fry's while I can?

There're no re-allocated sectors, but the seek error rate is ~433K and RawReadErrorRate=HardwareECCRecovered=181M. It reports temperature as 33C. File reading stops while it's clicking. Raw Read Error rate increases 300K per second while files are being read.

I'm copying the files to an identical drive (bought two, silly me),  and that drive's seek error rate went from 6K to 37K after writing 200GB.

Message Edited by igor on 09-24-2009 01:15 AM

[Hugster]

mine is not as high just yet

but the error rate on a histogram is trending upwards !!!

i bought mine in Frys too

Message Edited by Hugster on 09-24-2009 08:03 AM

[Grim0x]

Hello Hughster.

I will give my own personal would-be action to such a situation.

Assuming that you know the typical (normal) sounds that a HDD makes (having had 4 of them before).

IF I heard ANYTHING unsimmilar - I would RMA it. Stat.

Thats just me - I'd rather NOT find out it has a problem, than wait till later - and find out!

I have a drive thats making some noises now too.

I fret everyday. Its a 500 GB -and I have no where to put that data!

My reccomendation is - if you know the drive is making unusual sounds (and its not a case where, its waking up from sleeping), then RMA it.

Sad thing is - SEAGATE gives refurbrished drives in placed of RMA'd drives!  (not new one AFAIK ) 

[Hugster]

wow wow wow, 16 days later and the drive is dead

lol

first seagate drive to fail out of at least 10, and not a single mod responded to my thread

how sad, now i will go and post all kinds of bad things all over review forums on major electronic sites

great job

[fzabkar]

I wish Seagate would issue a technical bulletin to clarify the raw Seek Error Rate and Raw Read Error Rate attributes.

The truth is that high Seek Error Rate numbers are usually better in 99% of cases.

See these Wikipedia discussion topics on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk.M.A.R.T.#Seagate_raw_Seek_Error_Rate_attribute

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk.M.A.R.T.#Raw_Read_Error_Rate

A seek error rate figure of 433K means that your drive has had zero seek errors in 433K seeks, ie a perfect rating.

The raw read error rate value is a sector count, not an error count. An increase of 300K per second is telling you that the drive is reading data at the rate of 300K sectors per second, ie 150MB/s. Look at the normalised (cooked) value to see how your drive is performing. It will probably be in excess of 100, which is good.

[Hugster]

unfortunately my drive is now a paperweight and the funny thing is that HDD Inspector was reading ok readings even during the clicking failure

i got the drive clicking away right now while i'm madly trying to backup all the 1.5 TB that's on it

thank god the 2nd drive isnt dead yet

[Hugster]

well, the 2nd drive that came started clicking today again

so that means my success rate with new drives is 33% working 66% faulty :/

lol?

[g33k]

I bought 2 of these drives a couple of months ago and the clicking is present on both of them. I'm in IT and I know what normal HD noise sounds like. Like you, the tests show passing results. I don't believe them. It takes over 8 minutes to run a short generic test. I have a seagate 1Tb drive as well and it takes just over 1 minute for the same test. I can't even play a 30 MB music file off these drives without major stuttering. I'm going to run the long tests right now and I'm anticipating seeing bad sectors, but i'm most likely going to RMA the drive regardless. 

It's super-distressing how many complaints reporting exactly this problem that I've read. I wish Seagate would address the problem directly.  I'll be really annoyed if I get a drive back that has the same problem, which i've read has happened to others. Hopefully all the problem drives come from a small number of bad batches and that they've fixed whatever the problem was now.

[Hugster]

don't bother looking for bad sectors. it's the head, not the disks. you will see your read/write time decrease drastically over the next few days to almost nothing untill the drive finally ceases completely. 

i bought 2 drives, RMAed 1 drive 2 times and it looks like finally i have both drives functioning properly. 

the one thing seagate has is a great RMA department with easy and fast service, so at least that made me happy.

in the future, i will move back to WD as users are reporting fewer problems with their 2TB drives at 7200 and 5400.