problem Hitachi Drive Quality...

[Stereodude]

So I ordered 5 Hitachi 2TB 7K3000 (Deathstar) drives from Newegg. These are my first Hitachi / IBM drives since a 45GB 75GXP back in the day. They arrived reasonably well packed but it seems that one of the drives is bad out of the box. They all power on and spin up. I was doing a basic test on each Hard Drive with HD Tune as a quick check for basic operation and surprise surprise one of them fails with a read error. :tdown:

Then I found out that Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test software doesn't work on Sandy Bridge motherboards, so I'll have to test the drive later on another system. :cursin:

The high number of reported DOA HDs in the Newegg reviews prompted me to buy five even though I really only wanted four since I figured I would get a spare. I plan to make 2 2TB RAID-1 arrays in my new Sandy Bridge i7-2600K system.

I've used over 20 Samsung HD's of 1.5TB or larger and didn't have a single one that was bad out of the box. Way to go Hitachi!

 

[ddrueding]

Interesting. I ordered 6 of these from Newegg a few days ago. So far all I can say is that the BIOS detected them. I'll put them through the ringer early next week.

What tests would you suggest for working them out? Chipset is X58, so I'll try out the HDFT.

 

[LunarMist]

I find about 15-20% bad Samsung drives. I don't know what is up with the manufacturing, etc. :crap:

 

[Stereodude]

What tests would you suggest for working them out? Chipset is X58, so I'll try out the HDFT.

I was thinking to RAID-5 them temporarily and beat on the array with IOmeter for a few days.

 

[Stereodude]

So I tried to format the drive in question. It's been stuck at 2% for hours. :crap:

 

[Stereodude]

It finally got past 2%. Up to 13% now... wneddnce:

 

[Tannin]

I find about 15-20% bad Samsung drives. I don't know what is up with the manufacturing, etc. :crap:

Change your supplier. You can just about put your house on it that whoever is handling and shipping your drives is not doing it properly.

Samsung drives, properly handled, fail in service at a rate measured in tenths of a percent. Even Western Digital drives at their unlovely worst don't fail at 15-20% unless you drop them or otherwise abuse them.

 

[Stereodude]

So, the format finished overnight. It reports the drive has 224kB in bad sectors.

It's RMA time!

 

[time]

Great result. It sucks that we have to spend time proving stuff is bad. How about manufacturers have to pay you for your time doing their QA work for them?

Any reason you couldn't just use HDDScan/Speedfan etc instead of Hitachi DFT?

 

[Stereodude]

Great result. It sucks that we have to spend time proving stuff is bad. How about manufacturers have to pay you for your time doing their QA work for them?

I think it's cheaper to have OCZ manage their QA department. :colors:

Any reason you couldn't just use HDDScan/Speedfan etc instead of Hitachi DFT?

Didn't know about the first and didn't know the latter scanned HD's.

 

[LunarMist]

That just stinks. And soon it will be Seagate quality to look forward to. :hurl:

 

[BingBangBop]

That just stinks. And soon it will be Seagate quality to look forward to. :hurl:

I thought it was WD that bought them out, rather than Seagate.

 

[Stereodude]

It looks like I may have spoken too soon. I tried to do a full old school format on a second of the Hitachi drives and it's broken out in the ol' familiar whir, click, whir, click routine and is stuck at 0% in the format. :tdown:

 

[Stereodude]

And, that's all drive #2 does when powered up now. Whir, click, whir, click, whir, click. :cursin:

Trying to full format #3 now.

 

[LunarMist]

I thought it was WD that bought them out, rather than Seagate.

Apparently so.

 

[Howell]

Didn't know about the first and didn't know the latter scanned HD's.

The latter was once known as the IBM drive fitness test. A great tool but I've not had need of it for a while.

 

[Stereodude]

The latter was once known as the IBM drive fitness test. A great tool but I've not had need of it for a while.

I think you misunderstood my posts. I tried Hitachi's DFT, but it's incompatible with the Sandy Bridge chipset. I was under the impression HDDScan & Speedfan were two separate programs. Hence my comments about former and latter.

 

[time]

Just to clarify, HDDScan and SpeedFan allow you to run 'offline' self-tests on the drive. It seems to work with most drives, although on the Corsair Force SSD I tested yesterday, only SpeedFan launched the tests successfully.

With SpeedFan, pressing the Refresh button queries the drive about the test progress, and what the result is when it's finished.

HDDScan also includes block scan tests, including R/W verification and the old favorite, the butterfly read.

I have no idea why HDD manufacturers continued to supply DOS-based utilities when the necessary ATA commands can be sent just fine under Windows. Just inertia, I suppose.

 

[LunarMist]

WD diagnostics runs in Windows.

 

[Stereodude]

Well, I successfully full formatted two of the drives. They report back 0kB in bad sectors. The 5th and final drive is being formatted right now. Lets hope Hitachi only bats 40% for bad drives rather than 60%.

 

[Mercutio]

I've had uneven luck with the 1TB Hitachis. Perhaps a 20% DOA rate. I blamed it on shipping damage, since all my orders have been for just a couple drives at a time. They're still vastly better than my luck with 1TB+ Seagate drives. I don't think I've had a 2TB Seagate drive last nine months.

 

[Stereodude]

Drive #5 full formated with 0kB in bad sectors also, so I guess that just means 40% of Hitachi 7K300 2TB drives are defective out of the gate.

I'm not sure if want to RMA the bad two to Newegg immediately, or beat on the remaining 3 a little with IOmeter before I go to through the hassle of RMA'ing them in case another decides to die.

 

[LunarMist]

That is just awful. Either Newgeg packers are playing football with hard drives or they are a real POS.

 

[Stereodude]

They were pretty well packed. It looks like I got a slice of the raw styrofoam trays that are used to ship the drives from Hitachi. That was then wrapped in bubble wrap and put in a box with some packing paper.

 

[LunarMist]

All those dancing, perpendicularly aligned domains are not smiling now. Maybe Hibachi just gave up the ghost.

 

[Stereodude]

All those dancing, perpendicularly aligned domains are not smiling now. Maybe Hibachi just gave up the ghost.

Maybe I need to set them in front of the monitor, turn up the audio and give them some indoctrination.

 

[LunarMist]

Maybe I need to set them in front of the monitor, turn up the audio and give them some indoctrination.

I was going to link that, but figured everyone knew what I meant.

 

[Howell]

Maybe I need to set them in front of the monitor, turn up the audio and give them some indoctrination.

That's bizarre and as close to an acid trip as I want to get.

 

[Bozo]

I just upacked two Hitachi 2TB drives that were in retail packaging, and one of them is dead. Whirrr-click, whirrr-click.
Not even recognized by the BIOS.

 

[LunarMist]

Why are these so much more expensive than these? Is the quality really better?

 

[sdbardwick]

Why are these so much more expensive than these? Is the quality really better?

I don't know about actual quality, but advertised quality is better; Ultrastar error rate is 1 in 10^15, while Deskstar is 1 in 10^14 ( 1 in 113TB vs 1 in 11.3TB) and 5 year warranty vs. 3 year.

 

[Tannin]

Once upon a time, Ultrastars were ~ 10 times the price of Deskstars.

 

[ddrueding]

I recently considered the Ultras for a RAID array. With the number of ports available on modern motherboards and the advanced redundancy options available, it can't be worth the money.

 

[Stereodude]

So I came home today to find that one of my new craptacular 2TB 7200RPM Hitachi drives that had been marked as "unreadable" by Windows XP. I couldn't read anything off it, and Windows XP was giving the delayed write failure message in the system tray. The Disk Management Console listed it as "Unreadable". And, tada! It's attached to one of the 4 vulnerable Sandy Bridge SATA-II ports.

After powering off the PC and turning it back on the BIOS detected it and it seems that I can now read data from it. Not sure if this is the Sandy Bridge SATA recall bug or just another sign I should run away screaming from these Hitachi drives.

On another note, I got an RMA for the two bad Hitachi drives today from Newegg.

 

[LunarMist]

Are those the newer generation drives? Just about the oldest drives I have are the 2009 model 400GB x 5 platter Hibachis. Two of them have been running almost continuously since. It think they were better with lower density platters.

 

[Stereodude]

7K3000's... The latest.

 

[LunarMist]

Wow. That truly sucks. Maybe Seagate knows something.

 

[Stereodude]

So, I received the two replacement drives today from Newegg. The first one is already being long formatted. We'll see if they do as well as 2 bad drives out of 7 or if they do as poorly as 4 bad drives out of 7.

 

[Stereodude]

Well, I guess one of two replacement drive being good isn't so bad. One full formated with 0kb of bad sectors. The other is basically a whir/click special if anything tries to access it (like the BIOS on booting up).

I'm going to press Newegg real hard to paying for the return shipping this time around.

 

[Stereodude]

Well, I finally got the 8th drive from Newegg this past week and started testing it yesterday. It did a full format with 0 bad sectors and I'm copying some data to it and will put some use to it to make sure it doesn't die prematurely, but I guess between Hitachi & Newegg you have a 37.5% chance of getting a bad 2TB 7k3000 drive.