4TB drive from Seagate

[BingBangBop]

I just noticed this: Seagate Ships World's First 4TB External HDD.

 

[MaxBurn]

Cool. Need eight and a RAID controller for them.

 

[CougTek]

The reliability of Seagate's 2TB drives is poor, their 3TB drives are dreadful so their 4TB must be simply aweful. Seems like a safe way to lose a lot of data.

 

[BingBangBop]

The reliability of Seagate's 2TB drives is poor, their 3TB drives are dreadful so their 4TB must be simply aweful. Seems like a safe way to lose a lot of data.

I'm not going to disagree. As a potential cause, I contend that it isn't the drives as much as the distribution channel. How drives are treated after they leave the factory matters a lot in their reliability. Seagate has the biggest distribution so their drives go everywhere and I would contend that many, if not most, don't treat the drives with the care it need to get a reliable drive to the consumer.

I know that margins are small but both Seagate and WD, because they are so big, need to invest in better packaging to maintain reliability with the expectation that the drives will be abused before they meet the final consumer. i.e. blister packs suck.

 

[Mercutio]

I hate Seagate almost as much as WD at this point and that's saying something. As much as I would love to pull 32 drives out of service and replace them with a mere eight, it's not going to happen if Seagate is my only option.

 

[ddrueding]

I'll get one as soon as a usual suspect begins offering them.

I won't put anything important on it, of course, but I will beat the snot out of it and see what happens.

Does anyone have a tool for beating the snot out of a drive? Something that could fill the drive, check the integrity of the contents, read/write test, and empty it repeatedly?

 

[Mercutio]

Spinrite, but I don't know if it will operate with huge drives.
You could also script something simple with dd on a *nix machine.

dd if=/dev/yes of=/mnt/hdd

Would fill a drive up with repeating ones eventually.

 

[Will Rickards]

Create a big backup and do restores and wipes over and over?
Backup programs usually have a verify contents setting.

 

[Handruin]

I'll get one as soon as a usual suspect begins offering them.

I won't put anything important on it, of course, but I will beat the snot out of it and see what happens.

Does anyone have a tool for beating the snot out of a drive? Something that could fill the drive, check the integrity of the contents, read/write test, and empty it repeatedly?

Would the tool matter if it did it at the filesystem level or a lower level?

 

[ddrueding]

I don't think so. It would be great if it could just generate the data, then check that it was written correctly a few times, then repeat.

 

[time]

Can't find a free one in the Windows world, but Hard Disk Sentinel Pro is only $35 and should do what you want.

 

[Handruin]

Another C# tool to try and build? :-D How about having it create thousands of 4KB zip files until the drive is full and SHA1 verify them all? Rinse, repeat, count the number of times, and report errors.

 

[timwhit]

I just wrote a really simple Java application that will fill a disk and then read back what it wrote and make sure it's the same.

You can extract the jar file from the zip and then run from the command line like this: java -jar diskcheck.jar d:\

I have tested it on Windows and Linux and appears to work fine on both.

Source is included if you want to make sure it's not doing anything nefarious.

You'll probably need JDK 1.6 to run this, I haven't tested with anything older.

 

[timwhit]

Another C# tool to try and build? :-D How about having it create thousands of 4KB zip files until the drive is full and SHA1 verify them all? Rinse, repeat, count the number of times, and report errors.

My solution is a bit simpler and only writes text.

 

[ddrueding]

What text does it write?

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

 

[Handruin]

Nice. Does it fill the drive once, verify, and then stop?

 

[Mercutio]

SHA1 verify them all?

Sounds like a good way to burn in a CPU as well.

 

[timwhit]

What text does it write?

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

The first paragraph of lorem ipsum.

 

[timwhit]

Nice. Does it fill the drive once, verify, and then stop?

Yes. It deletes its test file before exiting. I could make it loop if someone is interested.

 

[Handruin]

Sounded like having it repeat would be useful for a drive burn-in.

 

[time]

Erm, the tool I linked to times the reads for each block to try to detect failing media.

But I would have thought you could just check the SMART data after you'd tested to see if reallocations had occurred.

 

[Stereodude]

The real question is will the 4TB drives require another round of firmware / drivers updates for all the SATA controllers since they only support up to 3TB drives? :rofl:

 

[ddrueding]

Perhaps that is the reason they shipped as USB first?

 

[CougTek]

HGST launched a 4TB desktop drive today. More practical and versatile than Seagate's external drive IMO. Almost certainly more reliable too.

 

[Mercutio]

The real question is will the 4TB drives require another round of firmware / drivers updates for all the SATA controllers since they only support up to 3TB drives? :rofl:

Maybe they'll show up as 1.75TB when I connect them to my x58 motherboards instead of 750GB.

 

[timwhit]

Sounded like having it repeat would be useful for a drive burn-in.

I updated it to support running a set number of loops or forever.

To run it forever, run like this:

java -jar diskcheck.0.2.jar c:\ -1

To run it once omit the last argument, or put in the desired number of runs.

I also added the current speed and total data written.

 

[Chewy509]

Anandtech review of the GoFlex version of it...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4758/seagates-goflex-desk-4tb-external-hdd-review

 

[Handruin]

I'm shocked it's a 7200RPM drive. I would have expected a weird 5237RPM oddness like they usually do for those first-release large drives.