Four drive failures in 4 months - what can be going on?

  • Thread starter Thread starter David Millan
  • Start date Start date
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David Millan

Setup:
Motherboard : ASUS P4C800 Deluxe

Timeline.
September. Replaced 2 small SCSI drives with 2 Western Digital 160Gb
SATA drives [sourced from Ebuyer] in a RAID 0 array. 3 other small
SCSI drives retained in PC tower. Worked perfectly

October. One of the new SATA drives fails. I put the failure down to
bad luck Waited ages for the replacement but when it was installed the
PC again worked perfectly.

November. The other of the original SATA drives failed. I put it down
to bad luck AND a bad batch of drives sourced by Ebuyer. To save a bit
of time I ask Ebuyer for a refund and bought another of the same drive
from them.

25 December. BOTH SATA drives fail. Waiting to hear from Ebuyer for
the RMA numbers. Cannot get a refund as one of the drives is over 31
days old.


Before I decide about what to do any suggestions please on what could
be going wrong here?

Temperature/Power
The large tower has 2 cooling fans and this motherboard has run for a
year with 5 SCSI drives and before that, on another motherboard, with
no problems.

RAID 0
This RAID setup and the SATA drives is what is new since September



__

Regards

David
 
25 December. BOTH SATA drives fail. Waiting to hear from Ebuyer for
the RMA numbers. Cannot get a refund as one of the drives is over 31
days old.
Click to expand...

Yes you can. Sale of Goods Act and all that.

Hellraiser............>
 
David said:
Setup:
Motherboard : ASUS P4C800 Deluxe

Timeline.
September. Replaced 2 small SCSI drives with 2 Western Digital 160Gb
SATA drives [sourced from Ebuyer] in a RAID 0 array. 3 other small
SCSI drives retained in PC tower. Worked perfectly

October. One of the new SATA drives fails. I put the failure down to
bad luck Waited ages for the replacement but when it was installed the
PC again worked perfectly.

November. The other of the original SATA drives failed. I put it down
to bad luck AND a bad batch of drives sourced by Ebuyer. To save a bit
of time I ask Ebuyer for a refund and bought another of the same drive
from them.

25 December. BOTH SATA drives fail. Waiting to hear from Ebuyer for
the RMA numbers. Cannot get a refund as one of the drives is over 31
days old.


Before I decide about what to do any suggestions please on what could
be going wrong here?

Temperature/Power
The large tower has 2 cooling fans and this motherboard has run for a
year with 5 SCSI drives and before that, on another motherboard, with
no problems.

RAID 0
This RAID setup and the SATA drives is what is new since September
Click to expand...
What power supply is in there?
Sounds like a lot of kit for it to be driving

--
Alex

"I laugh in the face of danger , then I hide until it goes away"

www.drzoidberg.co.uk
www.sffh.co.uk
www.ebayfaq.co.uk
 
Before I decide about what to do any suggestions please on what could
be going wrong here?

Temperature/Power
The large tower has 2 cooling fans and this motherboard has run for a
year with 5 SCSI drives and before that, on another motherboard, with
no problems.

RAID 0
This RAID setup and the SATA drives is what is new since September
Click to expand...

I would suspect power first, then the drives. I have about 40 SATA
drives in a few servers. I run a 2 drive mirror or a 6 drive RAID 5 with
them and have not had one fault.

I run 550W power supplies in the units with 6 drives, and 450W in the
others. Are you purchasing OEM drives - with a 1 year warranty? If you
are, try and get the commercial drives that have the 3+ year warranty if
you can find them.
 
It's no coincindence that Maxtor and Western Digital reduced their
warranties to one year from three. I recently had a 160GB Maxtor
fail. I stick with Seagate now.
 
Temperature/Power
The large tower has 2 cooling fans and this motherboard has run for a
year with 5 SCSI drives and before that, on another motherboard, with
no problems.
Click to expand...
You need to check the temperature the drives are running at (SMART
software) - even if there's plenty of cool air in the case there can
be localised hotspots, especially if the drives are stacked up on top
of each other. Anything over about 40 degrees will significantly
shorten the life of your drives.
 
Jaimie Vandenbergh said:
You mean _increased_ their warranties to 3 years from one.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/maxtor_warranty_boost/

And WD are three year on desktop drives, 5 on server.
Click to expand...
No, he means _reduced_...
What happened, was earlier in the year, following several years of
regularly increasing warranties on basic drives, several manufacturers,
reduced the warranty on the normal desktop IDE drives to 1 year. The
reason is simple, when dealing with drives costing less than $100, it is
just not economic to offer a longer warranty, if even a small failure rate
is likely. The announcement you are pointing too, is WD, putting _some_
drives 'back up' to the longer warranty. Note the careful reference to
'enterprise' drives, and that it does not apply to drives 'bought through
retail channels'.
Currently, Seagate have the best warranty on basic drives, followed by
Samsung, who have a 3 year 'across the board' warranty, with Maxtor, and
WD, then following with nearly as good support, _on their premium models_.
The basic models still only carry a one year warranty from these
companies...

Best Wishes
 
Depends where yah live guys. MOst drives in Canada are 3 year warranties. If
you had the option why would you buy a 1 year warranty product instead of a
three year if the price differential is close to zero? Also why would you
keep buying the same brand of drive if it failed more than twice? Even IBM
who used to make very good drives had a bad run on a couple of models.
Sounds like you have power, heat or pbad product design problems. Usually
heat is not a problem unless its really excessive or you keep powering up
and powering down and heating the drive up and down. Constant warm or hot is
much better on the drive than temperature cycling. Obviously cool is best of
all.
 
Regarding warranty period: unless I'm mistaken, all drives (and
everything else) sold in the EU will automatically have at least a 2-
year warranty, whatever the manufacturer says.

E.g., from Seagate's web site (typo theirs): Product sold into an EU
member authroized distributor will carry a 2 year limited warranty. The
additional year will be applied when an RMA request is being made, after
a system check has verified that the product was sold through an EU
member distributor and is being returned in an EU member state. The 2
year EU warranty is only in effect for purchases on or after the 3rd
April 2004.

Best wishes,
 
Mitchell said:
It's no coincindence that Maxtor and Western Digital reduced their
warranties to one year from three. I recently had a 160GB Maxtor fail.
I stick with Seagate now.
Click to expand...

Who have increased theirs from three years to five.
 
No, he means _reduced_...
What happened, was earlier in the year, following several years of
regularly increasing warranties on basic drives, several manufacturers,
reduced the warranty on the normal desktop IDE drives to 1 year.
Click to expand...

Yep. Looked like those mfrs who didn't already only give one year
decided to sneak their cheap lines down to the lowest common
denominator.
The announcement you are pointing too, is WD, [maxtor]
putting _some_
drives 'back up' to the longer warranty. Note the careful reference to
'enterprise' drives, and that it does not apply to drives 'bought through
retail channels'.
Click to expand...

It doesn't say that... "The company also increased the warranty period
for internal desktop PC drives to three years". The ATA Enterprise
drives are upped to 5 years, so bringing them into parity with the
SCSI Enterprise drives.

However - hunting a bit more (on shopping sites with specs), I
initially only found 3yr warranties until ... IDE DiamondMax 8 and 9
drives are 1 year RTB, though series 10 and all SATA are 3 years.
You're quite right.

Hitachi (spit) start at 2 years
WD's are 3 years for domestic drives, AFAICS
Samsung 3 years
Excelstor (!) 3 years
Currently, Seagate have the best warranty on basic drives,
Click to expand...
Five years
followed by
Samsung, who have a 3 year 'across the board' warranty, with Maxtor, and
WD, then following with nearly as good support, _on their premium models_.
The basic models still only carry a one year warranty from these
companies...
Click to expand...

Last time I had a hard drive fail in use was a 60gig Hitachi, at 18
months. RMA'd, replaced with 80gig. The one before that was a 1gig
Seagate, at two years. RMA'd for the same model, 1996 or so. I've been
pretty lucky with my own disks.

Occasionally I'll pick one up from the "too small to bother using"
pile and it'll not work, but I don't really count those.

At work we get through Hitachi/IBM drives at a ridiculous rate - but
then they're mostly laptop drives, with the occasional ancient 4gig
SCSI...

Cheers - Jaimie
 
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