- 7200 RPM 32MB Cache
- SATA 3.0Gb/s
- 1 yrs
Luck of the draw
12/07/2013
This review is from: Seagate BarraCuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
Pros:
+ Best price per GB (when purchased in Aug 2009)
+ Great sequential performance
Cons:
* High failure rate (4/8 drive failures*)
*failures are not catastrophic, but decommissioned based on the recommendation of the smartctl reported data. 4 of the 8 drives encountered 1000 to 4000 reallocated sectors per the smart ctl stats.
Overall Review:
I ran 7 of these drives in a linux raid 6 array running 24/7. Average temperature readings for the drives were approximately 28 to 34 degrees C as reported by the drive.
All drives were shipped with the CC1H firmware after some issues arose from various customers.
Data turnover was around 5-10GB/week, with a read-heavy sequential IO workload. of mostly sequential access (e.g. large video files)
Linux MD Stripes were set to 128KB chunks, so most disk IO would have been in 32 sector (x 4KB/sector) reads/writes.
1 of the 8 failed at the 3 year operating mark.
3 of the 8 failed at the 4 year 5 month mark.
I still have 4 that are running within the healthy threshold. 0,1,31,1 reallocated sectors. 1 failures was replaced with an identical 9VS4SQV6, the other 2 were replaced with a ST3000DM001 & ST3000VX000 versions which have about 6 months/2hours of spin time on them w/out issue. One drive is pending replacement as of 2013-12-07.
The 4 drives that failed had serials of:
9VS1L9MM
9VS1JLL9
9VS1K5GQ
9VS2AJ7H
The 4 still in commission are:
9VS2B9ZS (4 years, 9 months, 1day - 0 reallocated sectors)
9VS2AJN0 (4 years, 3 months, 25days - 1 reallocated sector)
9VS4SQV6 (1 year, 9 months, 6days - 31 reallocated sectors)
9VS2A5TW (4 years, 3 months, 25days - 1 reallocated sector)
It appears that the 9VS1xxxx batches of drives along with the early 9VS2Axxx all got within a smartctl recommended failure, while the other 9VS2A5xx and beyond are in excellent repair.
Though this is a limited sample set, drive reliability appears to be based on the luck and manufacturing conditions of various batches as I've experienced drive failures in arrays typically of the same batch.
Other readers, when buying lots of drives, try to purchase from diverse sources as to spread the risk of disk failure across multiple batches.
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- Donald L.
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Verified Owner
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Owned For:
more than 1 year
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