Any experience with Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB?


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I have used it. it works quite fast...

 

However. I do not like that it is rated to only be turned on 8 hours a day 5 days a week and only a 1 year warranty.

I think seagate is aware that it is a crap drive and will fail.

 

If i could, I would boycott seagate and WD right now for getting rid of reliable drives and selling crap at an inflated price.

 

I have mine in a backup server that is not on that often. I only bought them because I was out of space and the sale was good.

so far they are to new to get an idea of how they will hold up in a year or 2 or 3....

 

 

 

 

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I have used it. it works quite fast...

 

However. I do not like that it is rated to only be turned on 8 hours a day 5 days a week ... .

This is the 2nd time I've seen the above stated in this forum (the other one said "2400 hours"). I don't believe it.

 

Do you have a reference for your claim? A reliable one, like somewhere in seagate.com (not some hobbyist rumor-mongering site) please.

and only a 1 year warranty

 

I think seagate is aware that it is a crap drive and will fail.

Then buy the retail box product (same drive) and get 5 years warranty. Sometimes, warranty length is an indication of product reliability/longevity, but other times it is just one of several business/pricing decisions. In this situation, the customer is being offered the option to get a lower price in exchange for self-insuring after the first year.

 

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I have used it. it works quite fast...

 

However. I do not like that it is rated to only be turned on 8 hours a day 5 days a week ... .

This is the 2nd time I've seen the above stated in this forum (the other one said "2400 hours"). I don't believe it.

 

Do you have a reference for your claim? A reliable one, like somewhere in seagate.com (not some hobbyist rumor-mongering site) please

 

 

 

and only a 1 year warranty

 

I think seagate is aware that it is a crap drive and will fail.

http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/barracuda-ds1737-1-1111us.pdf right from Seagate .com..

it was also posted on the spec page http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/barracuda/# and was removed

 

we can also go with toms review also http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/4tb-3tb-hdd,3183-4.html or any other review on the net.

the specs are on the net. they are not trying to hide them.

 

Then buy the retail box product (same drive) and get 5 years warranty. Sometimes, warranty length is an indication of product

reliability/longevity, but other times it is just one of several business/pricing decisions. In this situation, the customer is being offered the option to get a lower price in exchange for self-insuring after the first year.

There is no longer a 5 year warranty on any seagate consumer drive other then the Constellation class (about 3 times the cost?).. the retail box of this drive (STBD3000100) is still 1 year.

 

if you can find one with a 5 year warranty, then get it. the drives sold to the vendors (not made) before Jan 1 2012 (i believe that was the hard date?) are 1 year. a lot of websites have not updated to reflect this. one good example was best buy was advertising them as a "5 year warranty". but it said 1 year on the drive if you ran through the segate website.

 

keep in mind these drives are a new technology. in order to get the 1TB platter density, they have a laser on the head to heat up the platter during write operations to get the platter hot enough for a write at such a high density. these have not been around long enough to test them for several years... who knows? they might be king.

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There is no longer a 5 year warranty on any seagate consumer drive other then the Constellation class (about 3 times the cost?).. the retail box of this drive (STBD3000100) is still 1 year.

 

if you can find

I have used it. it works quite fast...

 

However. I do not like that it is rated to only be turned on 8 hours a day 5 days a week and only a 1 year warranty.

I think seagate is aware that it is a crap drive and will fail.

 

If i could, I would boycott seagate and WD right now for getting rid of reliable drives and selling crap at an inflated price.

 

I have mine in a backup server that is not on that often. I only bought them because I was out of space and the sale was good.

so far they are to new to get an idea of how they will hold up in a year or 2 or 3....

 

 

 

 

one with a 5 year warranty, then get it. the drives sold to the vendors (not made) before Jan 1 2012 (i believe that was the hard date?) are 1 year. a lot of websites have not updated to reflect this. one good example was best buy was advertising them as a "5 year warranty". but it said 1 year on the drive if you ran through the segate website.

 

 

 

I just bought another one of these 3TB drives (now have 3): (From a brick-and-mortar Best Buy) in a retail box, because the box specifically said 5 years warranty.

 

ST3000DM001-9YN166    --- Best Buy SKU = 3371132

 

And did a Seagate warranty check just to make sure...

 

End User    <serial number redacted>    In Warranty      Expiration 22-May-2017 

 

{Now, note, I'll need to register the drive or keep the receipt, as I bought it in June... and should get 5 years from date of purchase}

 

I'm willing to pay the extra $30 or so over a bare drive, for as long as I can get a 5 year warranty on a 3tb drive.

 

{And if you watch Best Buy's sales -- they will refund you down to their sale price for 30 days after purchase {45 if you are a silver points member} )

 

{And the WD "retail box" 3tb is three years - SKU# 2927251 -- also verified online}

 

So far, no issues -- 4 passes each of preclears with no errors or pending or relocated sectors.    {BTW - this takes *DAYS*!}

 

I only bought them because I was out of space and the sale was good.

so far they are to new to get an idea of how they will hold up in a year or 2 or 3....

 

I agree tho,  I made the choice only to buy 3tb (and 4tb once they are reasonably affordable) from now on.  Been retiring old 1tb and 2tbs as they begin to show age/relocated sectors...

 

This drive is "too new" to know how it'll hold up long-term... but I'll keep an eye on it.  (and my others too)

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thats good news,

 

we got one at best buy a few weeks ago and it came up with a 1 year warranty on the online checker.

the box did not state the warranty period on it.

Best Buy let us return it.

 

It was the only one they had in stock at that store. I can check another store over the weekend. I would pay the extra $30 for the 5 warranty.

 

Talking to our CDW rep at work. He mentioned that it is possible the same drive model right now might have a 5 year, 3 year, 2 year or 1 year depending on when it left seagate and who the client was. I would love to find out how true this really is.

 

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Talking to our CDW rep at work. He mentioned that it is possible the same drive model right now might have a 5 year, 3 year, 2 year or 1 year depending on when it left seagate and who the client was. I would love to find out how true this really is.

 

It is true. Don't expect them to be the same price, but they are the same model.

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@ Johnm - I asked the same question in my thread here but did not get an answer from you, saw the OP had the same question so here it is again:

 

Question on the definition of power on hours there - doesn't UNRAID spin down drives when they are not being used (read/write)? Would it still be counted as powered on then?

 

My use for this tower is mainly to store and serve media  to my HTPC and other players. So even though the unraid server system would be on 24/7 the disks would only be spinning as and when I access it right?

 

If so, then 2400 hours roughly translates to around 6.5 hours per day, but I would never be able to watch movies for 6.5 hours a day (unfortunately).

 

If I would estimate the hours of use it would be probably 8 hours a week, which is around 500 hours a year (with a buffer).  So I should probably run without issues for a few around 5 years, hopefully.

 

Am I understanding this 'power on state' definition correctly?

 

@ OP - My tower has 5 of these disks running and 2 out of the 5 I've had for over 8 months now and have worked fine so far without issues, the other I have had for close to 3 months and they are working great as well. I got these drives by opening up the Seagate Expansion 3TB external drives, which is sold at a hefty discount than the bare drive on Newegg and Amazon - when I bought them they were at least $60 cheaper.

 

Of course you would loose the warranty if you pry open the enclosure so not advising you to do this, but for me the premium of $60 for a year of limited warranty for a $120 drive was too much and so I decided to go without it. 

 

But to answer your question the drives are awesome fast and works very well for most of my uses.

 

 

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@ Johnm - I asked the same question in my thread here but did not get an answer from you, saw the OP had the same question so here it is again:

 

Question on the definition of power on hours there - doesn't UNRAID spin down drives when they are not being used (read/write)? Would it still be counted as powered on then?

 

My use for this tower is mainly to store and serve media  to my HTPC and other players. So even though the unraid server system would be on 24/7 the disks would only be spinning as and when I access it right?

 

If so, then 2400 hours roughly translates to around 6.5 hours per day, but I would never be able to watch movies for 6.5 hours a day (unfortunately).

 

If I would estimate the hours of use it would be probably 8 hours a week, which is around 500 hours a year (with a buffer).  So I should probably run without issues for a few around 5 years, hopefully.

 

Am I understanding this 'power on state' definition correctly?

 

@ OP - My tower has 5 of these disks running and 2 out of the 5 I've had for over 8 months now and have worked fine so far without issues, the other I have had for close to 3 months and they are working great as well. I got these drives by opening up the Seagate Expansion 3TB external drives, which is sold at a hefty discount than the bare drive on Newegg and Amazon - when I bought them they were at least $60 cheaper.

 

Of course you would loose the warranty if you pry open the enclosure so not advising you to do this, but for me the premium of $60 for a year of limited warranty for a $120 drive was too much and so I decided to go without it. 

 

But to answer your question the drives are awesome fast and works very well for most of my uses.

 

Power on hours are just that, the number of hours the drive is powered on. You should note that this is a rating, not time period. You should not think things like 6.5 hours a day. More correctly is 50% of the drives will last at least 2400 power on hours. This also includes the horrible treatment expected of  USB external drives. They often lack airflow and are subjected to more movement. If SeaTools generates an error report and the drive is in warranty period, they'll RMA it. High G impact will void a warranty, not power on hours.

 

3TB drives for $120, man I missed out on that one. Best I've seen this year was $130. I think I might have fallen for the $120 and you're right 50% increase for more warranty time is not worth it.

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Thank you!  Sad, ... very very sad.

 

And, thank you chuck23322 for relating proof of the 5-year warranty on a retail box (if you get lucky). I had seen prior reports with the same finding, which raised my doubts about the 2400 hour spec. (But the manufacturer's data sheet is as gospel as it gets.)

 

For a laugh, on that datasheet, 3 lines above the 2400 (power-on hours) is 300,000 load/unload cycles. Works out to over 2 such cycles per minute of "life expectancy". At 15 seconds to go from standby to ready (no spec for ready to standby--it's shorter but at least a second or two) ...

 

On the topic of power-on hours (as maintained by SMART [and probably to be used to judge warranty eligibility]), you used to (and maybe still can!) spoof that counter. Something I discovered about a year ago. I ran a SMART on a drive (a Seagate 200GB IDE) and saw 32 power-on hours. But that drive had been in service for 6 years steady!!! An afternoon of sleuthing later, I figured out that if the drive stayed constantly active AND was shut down abruptly, the SMART counter was never updated. That drive had been (and still is) in use in a Series2 DirecTiVo, which I've always powered down once per month  (by a cord pull--TiVo:"Switches, we don't need no stinking switches.") to remove the drive for a video-ectomy (.ty extraction). I reproduced that same spoof on a recent (~2yr old) SATA drive. You heard it here first!

 

Oh, by the way, do the retail box drives still put the serial# on the box label? Check the warranty before you buy.

 

 

 

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For a laugh, on that datasheet, 3 lines above the 2400 (power-on hours) is 300,000 load/unload cycles. Works out to over 2 such cycles per minute of "life expectancy". At 15 seconds to go from standby to ready (no spec for ready to standby--it's shorter but at least a second or two) ...

 

On the topic of power-on hours (as maintained by SMART [and probably to be used to judge warranty eligibility]), you used to (and maybe still can!) spoof that counter. Something I discovered about a year ago. I ran a SMART on a drive (a Seagate 200GB IDE) and saw 32 power-on hours. But that drive had been in service for 6 years steady!!! An afternoon of sleuthing later, I figured out that if the drive stayed constantly active AND was shut down abruptly, the SMART counter was never updated. That drive had been (and still is) in use in a Series2 DirecTiVo, which I've always powered down once per month  (by a cord pull--TiVo:"Switches, we don't need no stinking switches.") to remove the drive for a video-ectomy (.ty extraction). I reproduced that same spoof on a recent (~2yr old) SATA drive. You heard it here first!

 

Oh, by the way, do the retail box drives still put the serial# on the box label? Check the warranty before you buy.

 

If you read the data sheet, "life expectancy" is indicated by Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). That <1% means you may have a drive lasting 100 years! The figures cover the expected failure modes of the device. Each indicates the mid point of population failure and there is no correlation between the failure modes. Hence they are independently listed. A drive is bad when any one of them fails. They are not warranty figures. The reliability figures are used to justify the AFR.

 

To wit (from the Seagate documentation for 7200.12);

"2.12 Reliability

The product shall achieve an Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) of

0.34% (MTBF of 0.75 million hours) when operated in an

environment of ambient air temperatures of 25°C. Operation at

temperatures outside the specifications in Section 2.9 may

increase the product AFR (decrease MTBF). AFR and MTBF are

population statistics that are not relevant to individual units.

 

AFR and MTBF specifications are based on the following

assumptions for desktop personal computer environments:

o 2400 power-on-hours per year.

o 10,000 average motor start/stop cycles per year.

o Operations at nominal voltages.

o Temperatures outside the specifications in Section 2.9 may

reduce the product reliability.

o Normal I/O duty cycle for desktop personal computers.

Operation at excessive I/O duty cycle may degrade product

reliability. "

 

And if you ask Seagate what voids a warranty;

http://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-returns/void-warranty-checklist/

Power on hours is not there.

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For a laugh, on that datasheet, 3 lines above the 2400 (power-on hours) is 300,000 load/unload cycles. Works out to over 2 such cycles per minute of "life expectancy". ...

If you read the data sheet, "life expectancy" is indicated by Annualized Failure Rate (AFR).

I guess I should have included my style sheet :). Those are figurative quote symbols. (I don't believe Seagate ever uses that exact term.)

 

The Reliability section is glaringly absent from the ST3000DM001 (Rev D) product Manual. The Reliability section for the 7200.10 SATA manual is very similar to the 7200.12 you cited, including the 2400 POH/year. Interesting to see that section in the 7200.7 SATA manual (ca 2005):

2.12 Reliability

Nonrecoverable read errors:  1 per 10^14 bits read, max

Mean time between failures (MTBF):  600,000 power-on hours (nominal power, 25°C ambient temperature)

Contact start-stop cycles: 50,000 cycles (at nominal voltage and temperature, with 60 cycles per hour and a 50% duty cycle)

Service Life: 5 Years

Preventive maintenance: None required

 

We are justifiably upset at the reduction of warranty to one year, but it looks like this 2400 power-on hours (per year) has been in the picture for quite some time, and as c3 states, is just one of several factors in the conditions assumed for the statistical "assertions" (note: figurative"s :)). We shouldn't read so much into that number.

 

 

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I just bought one of these to use as my parity drive so that as I need to add or replace drives going forward I can go with 3 TB.  My current parity will be kept as a warm spare for the time being. 

 

When I buy drives I look at as many user ratings as I can, here, at other hardware sites, at new egg, amazon, or anywhere else I can.  I do value the thoughts I get here or on other sites.  If lots of people complain about actual failures I stay away, but if the concerns are "it might fail" for one reason or another I try not to get too lead around by that (obviously depending on the rational).  At one time or another I've heard to stay away from Seagate, WD, Hitachi, or any other brand.  They have all had problem drives at one time or another and have all had some drives that have had excellent ratings and reliability. 

The fact is as fast and cheaply as all of these things are put together, you are just as likely to get a bad batch from a good set of drives, or have one fail unexpectedly for one reason or another as you would trying a newer drive that initially had good ratings with as little actual bad feedback as I've seen on these drives.  The potential for hardware failures is why we're all running parity protection in the first place and why we run pre-clears.  Keep a spare on hand.  Believe me I don't mean to make light of it and loosing a drive can be scary if you lose the data.  However, aside from looking for the drives that obviously too many people complain about DOA or early failures, you would have to start spending huge money on enterprise drives to really materially change reliability.

 

I wanted a 7200 RPM 3TB drive for parity and the other options for 7200 RPM drives are substantially more expensive.  Once this drive is in place for parity, I doubt it hits 2400 hrs / yr.  It will run during write operations and once a month for parity checks.  When I start buying actual data drives I may (or may not) go to another brand depending on what I read at that time. 

 

Also note the article in Tom's Hardware also mentions the similarly priced WD30EZRX is also not geared for 24/7 operation. 

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1 cycle (because it take roughly 32hrs) and no error, I have 15 drives in my beta12 mix of WD,Hitachi,Samsung running for 6 month without problem and I only do 1 cycle of preclear on them.

 

Anecdotally, sometimes people have not seen infant-mortality failures {of any drive manufacturer, of any size} -- until 3-4 passes.  So since I've read those reports, I follow the advise to thoroughly do a pre-clear -- it's why it has the multiple-pass option.  I understand it takes awhile,  but for me, I do it anyway and plan accordingly -- for exactly this reason.  So since I'm adding 3tb at a time -- I want to really hammer the drive(s) good before I add them to my array.

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People do like to read the numbers wrong. Similar to the big scares saying you could never successfully rebuild a RAID array using 1T or larger drives.

 

The numbers mean the AFR is <1% if the drive is powered on for 2400hrs a year. If you take POH/AFR you get 240,000 hours for the MTBF. In other words, 1/2 the drives of a very large population would fail in 3.9 years.

 

Hey, WD doesn't publish any similar info at all for these specs on their datasheet.

 

Personally, I've been looking and waiting for deals. I don't like the 1-year Seagate warranty but I do read many times about issues people are having with the WD 3T drives failing.

 

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This doesn't speak to the overall reliability, but since I made this my parity drive, my parity checks have been mostly been between 100 MB/s and 110 MB/s.  spurts either side of that.  Previously on 5rc5 I was staying a lot closer to the 90 MB/s average, sometimes in the 80s.  That was using a Hitachi 7200 RPM drive.

 

Pleased with that outcome.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 year later...

Bump.

 

I've had FOUR of these suckers, and every single one of them has just made it through the first year's warranty and then died completely... none of them are recognised by the BIOS any more, so of course "SeaTOOLS" doesn't see them either. On three of them, you can hear the heads seeking helplessly, like a lobotomised animal... the most expensive paperweights I ever owned.

 

The ST3000DM001 is utter crap.  Meanwhile, all of my WD drives are happily spinning away with no problems whatsoever.  The fact that Seagate are still taking money for these drives, knowing that they are rubbish and fail relatively early, is outrageous.  >:(

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I don't trust Seagate anything these days. I used to back in 2006.

 

But now all the failed drives I see in the shop are either Seagate, Toshiba, or Hitachi. In order of failures.

 

Of course I still see some Western Digital drives. But those are way less often than the others. So I pick the lesser of 4 evils. I've had great success with hundreds of WD drives I've purchased. I know I would not be a happy person if I was trying to save $10 a drive and purchased SGs.

 

And I'm talking about smaller drives here. Like 500GB to 1.5TB. The Seagate 1TB and 1.5TB drives are the WORST! They seem to last about 1 to 1.5 years until bad sectors start. Hmm, 1TB per year!?!?

 

I could never purchase a Seagate hard drive now in good conscious. Even if you gave me one I don't think I'd use it for anything of value.

 

There's been a shift to solid states lately. Mostly on the smaller side. Samsung is "once again" the leader in drives with their Evo series. Just like they used to be with their 2TB HDDs before Seagate bought them out and ruined the product line.

 

I'm not sure if the Samsung company is still in control of their solid state hard drive plant, but here's a quote from a press release;

"This transaction was announced in April 2011 along with a series of other agreements between Seagate and Samsung. Seagate is supplying disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer electronics devices. Samsung is supplying its market-leading semiconductor products for use in Seagate's enterprise solid state drives (SSDs), solid-state hybrid drives and other products."

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