Yousuf Khan said:
Just throwing some ideas out.
What else (physically) has remained common between these sets of drives?
They are the same brand and model with the same firmware and the same
origin of production. The shipping carrier has been the same. Not any errors
logged without the Seagates in my daily use system and multiple components
are new now than when this situation began (cables, fans, power supply). I
have used the same APC 750VA UPS.
Have you tested the SATA cable(s)?
I didn't "test" with a tester but have tried existing cables used on drives
in the
machine that have worked and are working without problem with other drives
and also tried the new cables that came with the SATA RAID card.
What about the SATA port that they are being attached to?
Tried on both the RAID card and on the motherboard SATA. Original drives
failed while attached to the RAID card and others have failed as single
drives on the motherboard SATA ports.
Maybe your power supply is good enough for your previous drives, but it
gets saturated when you put these additional drives in?
Brand new Enermax 425W Modu 80+ with 3 rails. Power supply was
a different unit when I first starting buying these drives. These
single-platter,
modern-technology drives don't use much power, even at spinup.
Is there enough cooling in the locations you put the drives into?
Entry-level Chenbro SOHO server case with fan that blows over the hard
disks with a dedicated fan from the front of the case thru the hard drive
cage. The drives run at 31 deg C.
So maybe try moving the drives around a bit?
Original failures were in a hot-swap cage and the latest failures
were in the non-hotswap cage. Cooling is way above the level of
pretty much all desktop cases with a 120 mm at the rear of the
case, the dedicated hard drive fan and the power supply with a
120 mm fan in it. Yes I run the fans at low speed but there is
plenty of airflow as temps of everything are in the low 30's.
Again (and again) though, that there are so many buyers of these
drives experiencing similar failures says something is up elsewhere.
I told Seagate that if they intend to ship me yet 2 more drives of
the same kind, they may want to send them via another carrier
in case they are being mishandled in some way in shipment.
I told them that I don't intend to keep sending these drives back
to them at ten bucks a pop, and my time is valuable and my
data needs a reliable place to reside! I also asked for a final
solution to the problem perhaps sending out a different model
or refunding my out-of-pocket costs so I can go out and buy
another brand (that may be the ultimate test that I will be
performing if Seagate gives me a refund). They are going
to contact me again later today.
Tony