Seagate Constellation ES.2 ST32000645SS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SAS 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Great specs on paper

Cons: Cannot get a working pair of drives

Other Thoughts: We purchased a pair of these drives to set-up a RAID 1 array in a workstation. We had nothing but problems.

The first pair would run some type of background process for hours every so often even when the drives were idle (no read/writes). It would make noise and heat up the case. Much hotter than some SAS 15K drives running along side these. A reboot seemed to always trigger this background process.

Seagate tech replaced them with another set. Those were DOA.

Seagate tech replaced them with another set. These had exactly the same design flaw as the first. We confirmed the problems in another workstation and documented the issues. (Runs hot and noisy for 6 hours after a reboot.)

As instructed, we set this latest pair back to the Seagate labs for testing. They said that one drive failed their internal tests and the other one passed. They have no comment on the test results that we sent over.

We have asked Seagate to replace these parts with with ones that do not have this design flaw or to refund our money. We are not hopeful.

We have dozens of hard drive that do not exhibit this weird behavior including other Seagate drives. We have worked with both the chassis and motherboard manufacturers to confirm that the problem is isolated to the hard drive. We have confirmed that LSI lists this hard drive as compatible with the controllers.

The problems are compounded in that we are assigned a new contact at Seagate upon every phone call. They tell us that there is no means to stick with one person, so we have to repeat the detail with every call. The other challenge is that they are not setup to have a back and forth via email. We fill out their web form and they respond a few days later with a 'noreply' email address. This situation forces us to call in for support with long hold times during the holiday season.

Hopefully, you will have better luck.

Pros: These are super fast, and super fast ( that's what we want, anyway !)

Cons: I bought 8 and hopefully they werein raid 10 so when one of those failed, it wasn't a problem; but the expirence with Seagate was excellent! For 10 box you have a brand new disk at the office in 1 day and you have the return label for shipping; really not bad !

Other Thoughts: Raid and a good controller...please protect yourself !

Pros: No probs after a month, doing what they're supposed to do.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F mb
Athena Power RM-3UD365R808 3U Case
(2) Intel Xeon E5-2630 6 core
32 Gb Kingston DDR3 SDRAM 1600 ECC Registered
(2) Seagate Constellation SAS 500 GB 6 Gb hd (RAID1)
(2) Seagate Constellation SAS 2TB 6 Gb hd (RAID1)
(2) OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB SATA 3
(2) Intel Pro/1000 PT Dual Server NIC (8 total)
ESXi 5.1 (running pfSense & 2 vm 2008 R2