Anyone noticed 1 and 1.5tb hdd's seem to be much more unstable?

This drive is being used in a Windows system.

 

It sounds like it spinning up and withing a few seconds (about the time you would hear it starting to read) it just makes a clicking noise about 11 times and then shuts back down.  It doesn't get recognized by the system.

 

Just trying to determine if there is any options to try and recover any info off this - especially since it doesn't get to a point at which it's recognized (would make it impossible to use any software for data recovery, right?).

 

 

As I mentioned, just on the topic of reliability, this has certainly been the case for me - 3 out of 4 have failed.  I certainly don't have any faith for the remaining drive!

 

 

If it is in Windows, there are some free tools to access SMART data.  Try to get a SMART report for it, wherever it is.

 

In Windows, a damaged or clicking drive may perform differently from power up than from a soft reboot.  Does the clicking continue on, or is it about 7 periodic clicks to start with, after power up only?  You can also try the Windows Disk Manager to see if the MBR was read and partitions are visible.

Did you ever check and/or update the firmware on those drives?  The Seagate 1G and 1.5Gig drives all had a bad firmware release...  One way they failed they would not even get seen by the BIOS on the PC.  This could be fixed without you losing data, but you need a special jig to download the firmware to the drive once it had died.

 

See here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3142.0

and here http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2773.0

 

All that said, the repeated "clicking" is not a good sign.  But it still could be a symptom of a bad power supply feeding the drive, or a bad power splitter.

 

Joe L.

[All that said, the repeated "clicking" is not a good sign.  But it still could be a symptom of a bad power supply feeding the drive, or a bad power splitter.

 

Just an additional comment here.  As Joe L says, "clicking" does not necessarily mean a bad drive.  I've definitely had clicking drives that stopped clicking once I fixed data cabling problems.  (Power cabling may be able to induce this as well, I've just never personally had that problem).

 

The only sure sign of a failing drive (that I know of anyway) is a smart report showing reallocated sectors and/or pending sectors.  These types of errors CANNOT be induced by bad cabling.

Yes, my new 1.5TB Drive (Parity) is acting up. Seeing errors. I will have to run a smart on it and then see what the deal is.

If smart fails on unraid, I will also run a smart on the same drive on a different cpu. It explains the clicking I have been hearing.

I also set the drive to not spin down in case that is causing the errors. We will see tonight (24 hours later).

 

I've had 2 failures so far; a 750G Seagate and a 750G Samsung (I have 4 more of these as well). I have 2 Seagate 1T and 2 Seagate 1.5T that are working currently (though one of the 1.5T has Reallocated Sectors Count of 23). My son has 6 of the 1.5T which are working fine (knock on wood). I would say in my experience there is really little difference between the 1T & 1.5T versus smaller drives. People don't usually say "all my drives work just like there supposed to"; they usually only comment when something fails.

I currently only have 4 drives that are above a terabyte "Seagate 1.5TB" drives.  I am experiencing my first failure right now and I guess it's not completely unexpected.  I usually experience on average about 2-3 drive failures a year.  That's including on average around 25 drives spread across my environment.  Drive failures are part of any home server experience and is only amplified with using these cheap SATA drives.  I am employed as a Systems Administrator and I typically experience about 4-5 drive failures a year across approximately 200 hard drives.  This goes to show just how unreliable consumer drives can be.

 

My worst experience has been with Maxtor as I have only one Maxtor drive left that I never had to RMA.  I had a total of 9 Maxtor drives fail all within a years time and they were even different models (250GB-300GB). 

 

The Samsung drives I will never purchase again.  The RMA process is horrible and they only have a year warranty.  I've had 3 of the 7 Samsung drives fail that range from 400GB to 750GB.

 

Seagate and Western Digital reliability has been slightly better than the Samsungs.  They both are about equal in the amount of failures and at this point I would probably lean towards the Western Digital drives since I like the idea of cooler running drives and less power usage.  Unraid is inherently slow so I would guess the performance difference isn't a huge deal. 

 

I have four 1.5TB Seagates arriving today, which I  only picked them because they were cheaper than the WD drives.  The reason why I'm moving up is to have less drives to manage.  I have a chance of fewer failures with half the drives.  I can consolidate some of the root shares to one or two drives so I have less drive spinup and faster access times.  I can monitor SMART/heat/storage more easily with half the drives.  My system will run cooler and now I can remove one of my sata controllers to also simplify my server setup. 

 

 

I have 5 Seagate 1.5TBs and I haven't experienced any difficulties with them.  <knocks on wood>

 

I also get EXCELLENT performance out of them.  I haven't run a full parity check since adding the last two drives, but my parity check ran at 94 MB/s when I just had 3 drives.

My original 4 drives are all Seagate 7200.11 1TB 32MB drives.  My unRAID server has been going for over a year now with no issues out of any of them.  The only drives I've had go bad were older drives added later.

I also get EXCELLENT performance out of them.  I haven't run a full parity check since adding the last two drives.

You really should do a periodic parity check.  It will uncover issues that will remain hidden otherwise.  Do yourself a favor, do one monthly (and do one now)

 

It allows the SMART firmware on the drives to identify bad blocks that are unreadble and then schedule them for reallocation.  Until you do a parity check, you have not "read" the blocks on the parity drive, you've only written them.

 

Joe L.

I also get EXCELLENT performance out of them.  I haven't run a full parity check since adding the last two drives.

You really should do a periodic parity check.  It will uncover issues that will remain hidden otherwise.   Do yourself a favor, do one monthly (and do one now)

 

It allows the SMART firmware on the drives to identify bad blocks that are unreadble and then schedule them for reallocation.   Until you do a parity check, you have not "read" the blocks on the parity drive, you've only written them.

 

Joe L.

 

I do run a monthly parity check.  I only added the new drives this past weekend.