[geeks] Interesting sale on 1.5TB Seagate SATA drives

[Aaron Finley]

> Wondering if this could be because those 1,5TB Seagates have been a
> 'troublesome line' of drives, correct me if I'm wrong; I really don't
> know; it's just there were some line recently that produced some
> scenarios of unwanted incidents.

These drives have been very problematic.

Please see:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-barracuda-1-5TB-freezing,6558.html

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST31500341AS-1-5TB-Barracuda-Cache/dp/B00066IJPQ

>From the first review:

"I and many others have been experiencing serious problems with these
drives including:

* dropping out of RAID configurations for no apparent reason
* being ejected from a RAID configuration due to read / write errors
* freezing for up to 30 seconds

These problems have been reported on Linux, Vista, XP, and OS X and
appear to be related to how the drives flush their write cache. In
many cases, the drives work fine for days or weeks before problems
appear. In my case, I bought five of these for my Qnap TS-509 Pro and
they worked great for about two weeks under various read / write
loads. Since then, I've had all three of the problems mentioned above
on different drives and they are growing progressively worse. The
latest problem was three of the five drives disappearing from the
RAID5 volume while I was attempting to copy the files to a different
NAS.

A work-around that has been successful for some is to disable the disk
write cache. Other than the obvious performance penalty and reduced
lifespan this causes, some systems do not provide a means of disabling
disk write cache (such as the Qnap).

References to these problems can be found on many forum threads:

Qnap: http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=142&t=8826
Netgear: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=20435&start=60&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
Synology: http://www.synology.com/enu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&p=47101
AVSForum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1080005
macrumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=571843
Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=933053
Slashdot: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1003109&cid=25458241
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B00066IJPQ/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

The most informative thread may be found on Seagate's own support
forum, where it appears Seagate is blaming everyone but themselves for
the problem:

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=2390&view=by_date_ascending&page=1"