Thailand floods and Seagate HD prices

[Percival P. Cassidy]

A few weeks ago 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT bare drives were $130 at
NewEgg; by the end of last week they were $250. But on Saturday I bought
the retail version of the same drive at the Chicago-area Fry's for $160
(limit one per customer).

Two weeks ago I bought a retail-package 2TB Barracuda LP at Best Buy for
$100; this week the regular price is shown as $90, and they are on sale
for $75 -- and they do price adjustments within 30 days. NewEgg no
longer lists them.

Those drives are all made in China, but I think that some components or
sub-assemblies come from the flood-affected factories in Thailand.

Perce

 

[mscotgrove]

A few weeks ago 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT bare drives were $130 at
NewEgg; by the end of last week they were $250. But on Saturday I bought
the retail version of the same drive at the Chicago-area Fry's for $160
(limit one per customer).

Two weeks ago I bought a retail-package 2TB Barracuda LP at Best Buy for
$100; this week the regular price is shown as $90, and they are on sale
for $75 -- and they do price adjustments within 30 days. NewEgg no
longer lists them.

Those drives are all made in China, but I think that some components or
sub-assemblies come from the flood-affected factories in Thailand.

Perce

2 weeks ago I bought a 2TB WD drive for £79.99. Yesterday they were
about £120, both at PC World. Online prices looked similar.

Michael
www.cnwrecovery.com

 

[Rod Speed]

(e-mail address removed) wrote

2 weeks ago I bought a 2TB WD drive for £79.99. Yesterday they
were about £120, both at PC World. Online prices looked similar.

I've automated the price check with the 2TB drives I currently buy, the
Samsung greens and have only seen a $10 jump from $75 to $85 australian.

I also monitor the 3TB drives waiting to see when they are the best $/GB, they
are nothing like that yet, and have seen a jump from $149 to $165 with those.

Those are the best prices available in my country.

 

[Krypsis]

A few weeks ago 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT bare drives were $130 at
NewEgg; by the end of last week they were $250. But on Saturday I bought
the retail version of the same drive at the Chicago-area Fry's for $160
(limit one per customer).

Two weeks ago I bought a retail-package 2TB Barracuda LP at Best Buy for
$100; this week the regular price is shown as $90, and they are on sale
for $75 -- and they do price adjustments within 30 days. NewEgg no
longer lists them.

Those drives are all made in China, but I think that some components or
sub-assemblies come from the flood-affected factories in Thailand.

Perce

After having 3 out of 5 Seagate 1 Terabyte drives die recently, and
being assured that the remaining 2 will soon suffer a similar fate, I no
longer buy Seagate drives.

 

[GMAN]

After having 3 out of 5 Seagate 1 Terabyte drives die recently, and
being assured that the remaining 2 will soon suffer a similar fate, I no
longer buy Seagate drives.

You did get the memo about the firmware update to prevent this??????? The
firmware was released way over a year ago to fix the issues for the 750Gb thru
the 1.5 TB drives.

 

[Krypsis]

You did get the memo about the firmware update to prevent this??????? The
firmware was released way over a year ago to fix the issues for the 750Gb thru
the 1.5 TB drives.

No memo but I found out the bad news from the dealer from whom I
purchased the drives. After losing the first drive, I contacted Seagate
and updated the firmware. I was warned by the dealer rep that the fix
wasn't a guarantee as his experience was that the entire 7200.11 batch
was faulty and the update merely stopgap. He was right, shortly after
the update I lost two more. The remaining 2 drives are no longer in a
raid 5 configuration and are, for want of a better term, spares. They
will not be used for critical duties.

Seagate is well and truly off my radar now!

 

[Arno]

On 3/11/2011 2:43 PM, GMAN wrote: [...]

You did get the memo about the firmware update to prevent this??????? The
firmware was released way over a year ago to fix the issues for the 750Gb thru
the 1.5 TB drives.

No memo but I found out the bad news from the dealer from whom I
purchased the drives. After losing the first drive, I contacted Seagate
and updated the firmware. I was warned by the dealer rep that the fix
wasn't a guarantee as his experience was that the entire 7200.11 batch
was faulty and the update merely stopgap.

Interesting. So there is some other mess-up in there as well.

He was right, shortly after
the update I lost two more. The remaining 2 drives are no longer in a
raid 5 configuration and are, for want of a better term, spares. They
will not be used for critical duties.

Seagate is well and truly off my radar now!

Unfortunately, they are about to buy the Samsung HDD division.
And WD will buy the Hitachi Storage Division. Not good.
And at least for large storage spaces, SSD is not an alternative.

Arno

 

[GMAN]

You did get the memo about the firmware update to prevent this??????? The
firmware was released way over a year ago to fix the issues for the 750Gb thru
the 1.5 TB drives.

No memo but I found out the bad news from the dealer from whom I
purchased the drives. After losing the first drive, I contacted Seagate
and updated the firmware. I was warned by the dealer rep that the fix
wasn't a guarantee as his experience was that the entire 7200.11 batch
was faulty and the update merely stopgap. He was right, shortly after
the update I lost two more. The remaining 2 drives are no longer in a
raid 5 configuration and are, for want of a better term, spares. They
will not be used for critical duties.

Seagate is well and truly off my radar now!
[/QUOTE]
The 7200.11 are not enterprise drives and for the life of me i dont
understand why it suprises you that they fail in a RAID environment.



http://forums.storagereview.com/index.
php/topic/29208-how-to-use-desktop-drives-in-raid-without-tlererccctl/


"Hard drive manufacturers are drawing a distinction between "desktop" grade
and "enterprise" grade drives. The "desktop" grade drives can take a long time
(~2 minutes) to respond when they find an error, which causes most RAID
systems to label them as failed and drop them from the array.

The solution provided by the manufacturers is for us to purchase the
"enterprise" grade drives, at twice the cost, which report errors promptly
enough so that this isn't a problem. This "enterprise" feature is called TLER,
ERC, and CCTL.

 

[Krypsis]

The 7200.11 are not enterprise drives and for the life of me i dont
understand why it suprises you that they fail in a RAID environment.

My "RAID5 array" was only ever turned on when required to store or
access data and this would amount to no more than a few hours a week.
Hardly an "enterprise" system. Had I wanted a 100% duty cycle storage
system, then I would have purchased the appropriate drives for it, most
probably 10 or 15k SCSI. My needs simply didn't warrant such expense.

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.
php/topic/29208-how-to-use-desktop-drives-in-raid-without-tlererccctl/


"Hard drive manufacturers are drawing a distinction between "desktop" grade
and "enterprise" grade drives. The "desktop" grade drives can take a long time
(~2 minutes) to respond when they find an error, which causes most RAID
systems to label them as failed and drop them from the array.

Neither the platter surface nor the heads are the source of the problems
I experienced. The drive would simply "brick" itself due to firmware
issues. One of my drives, which I supposedly purchased as "new" had
already been back to the factory for repair. It was then onsold as new
through normal retail outlets. I only found this out when I contacted
Seagate with my issues via their helpdesk and quoted the relevant
numbers to them. Nice one Seagate. And, yes, it came with complete
factory sealed packaging. as did all the others.

The solution provided by the manufacturers is for us to purchase the
"enterprise" grade drives, at twice the cost, which report errors promptly
enough so that this isn't a problem. This "enterprise" feature is called TLER,
ERC, and CCTL.

As stated above, my needs aren't in any way as severe as an "enterprise"
so desktop drives were all I figured I needed. Besides, one drive failed
in my daily desktop. Unlike the RAID systemn, the desktop motherboard
does power the drive down when not in use which, in my case, was
probably 80% - 90% of the time.

 

[shawn]

A few weeks ago 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT bare drives were $130 at
NewEgg; by the end of last week they were $250. But on Saturday I bought
the retail version of the same drive at the Chicago-area Fry's for $160
(limit one per customer).

Two weeks ago I bought a retail-package 2TB Barracuda LP at Best Buy for
$100; this week the regular price is shown as $90, and they are on sale
for $75 -- and they do price adjustments within 30 days. NewEgg no
longer lists them.

Those drives are all made in China, but I think that some components or
sub-assemblies come from the flood-affected factories in Thailand.

That won't last for long. On Newegg.com the 1TB Western Digital Caviar
Green has gone from about $50 a month ago to $129. It's also gone from
free shipping to $7.29 for shipping. The same sort of price increase
is happening with the rest of the 1TB and larger drives from all
manufacturers. Even the prices for 500GB drives are getting out of
hand with the cheapest on Newegg being the Samsung Spinpoing F3EG
500GB 5400RPM at $99.99 and $7.28 for shipping.

 

[Arno]

On 4/11/2011 5:04 AM, GMAN wrote:

[...]
That was not my point. My point was that desktop drives can take sometimes as
long as 2 minutes to retry and correct week or bad sectors. Usually this
amount of time is enough for most hardware or software raid systems to throw
up a fit and mark the drive bad and insist that it be removed from the array.

I have been running several RAID1 and RAID 5/6 arrays on consumer-grade
disks 24/7 for about 10 years now. The only issues I ever had
are that about 1-2 times a year the last 3-4 years (running
in IDE and SATA 2.5" notebook disks), a disk drops out of the
array(s) and becomes completely unresponsive. That happens with
Seagate, Samsung and WD drives and I have not been able to identify
a pattern. It is not a kernel issue (this is Linux software
RAID), as the drive stays unresponsive until power-cycled.
Then it comes back cleanly, no errors, no SMART error log
entries and hot-plugs fine.

My take is that if you have a dumb hardware controller (most are
pretty dumb) or it is hard to get to the individual drives,
these "RAID" drives may be worth the extra money, otherwise they
probably are not. Side note: Because of the disks dropping out,
I run 3-way RAID1 or RAID6, so I have time to reactivate
the locked-up drive at my leisure as the arrays are still
redundant.

Arno

 

[GMAN]

The 7200.11 are not enterprise drives and for the life of me i dont
understand why it suprises you that they fail in a RAID environment.

My "RAID5 array" was only ever turned on when required to store or
access data and this would amount to no more than a few hours a week.
Hardly an "enterprise" system. Had I wanted a 100% duty cycle storage
system, then I would have purchased the appropriate drives for it, most
probably 10 or 15k SCSI. My needs simply didn't warrant such expense.[/QUOTE]


That was not my point. My point was that desktop drives can take sometimes as
long as 2 minutes to retry and correct week or bad sectors. Usually this
amount of time is enough for most hardware or software raid systems to throw
up a fit and mark the drive bad and insist that it be removed from the array.

 

[GMAN]

That won't last for long. On Newegg.com the 1TB Western Digital Caviar
Green has gone from about $50 a month ago to $129. It's also gone from
free shipping to $7.29 for shipping. The same sort of price increase
is happening with the rest of the 1TB and larger drives from all
manufacturers. Even the prices for 500GB drives are getting out of
hand with the cheapest on Newegg being the Samsung Spinpoing F3EG
500GB 5400RPM at $99.99 and $7.28 for shipping.

I just resorted to going down to my local target and buying up quick a couple
of the 2TB WD Elements drives that they still had on the shelf for $79 . I had
went into Best Buy to buy a 2TB drive and they stated were all out in all of
the western region of the USA. So i walked next door to TARGET, they had 4
2TB WD Elements drives. I bought all 4 at $79 each. I am keeping two of them
as external drives for storing audio and video for my NAS, and then i cracked
the two others open and took the 2TB WD green drives out and are using them
internally.

 

[Ed Light]

2TB WD Elements drives. I bought all 4 at $79 each. I am keeping two of them
as external drives for storing audio and video for my NAS, and then i cracked
the two others open and took the 2TB WD green drives out and are using them
internally.

Some of those drives in there will break on regular SATA power as they
use lower power. Specifically at least some "EAVS" drives.

I could not get WD to tell me what voltage is supposed to go to what
pin. I suppose it could be measured off the feed in the enclosure.

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[Ed Light]

My take is that if you have a dumb hardware controller (most are
pretty dumb) or it is hard to get to the individual drives,
these "RAID" drives may be worth the extra money, otherwise they
probably are not.

The WD RE drives have extra anti-vibration, anti-shock measures in them.
Some kind of active sensing and compensation. The 500 GB one, according
to newegg user reviews, has an unusally good record for almost no
lemons. Maybe because of less platters than the bigger ones.

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[GMAN]

On 4/11/2011 5:04 AM, GMAN wrote:

[...]
That was not my point. My point was that desktop drives can take sometimes as

long as 2 minutes to retry and correct week or bad sectors. Usually this
amount of time is enough for most hardware or software raid systems to throw
up a fit and mark the drive bad and insist that it be removed from the array.

I have been running several RAID1 and RAID 5/6 arrays on consumer-grade
disks 24/7 for about 10 years now. The only issues I ever had
are that about 1-2 times a year the last 3-4 years (running
in IDE and SATA 2.5" notebook disks), a disk drops out of the
array(s) and becomes completely unresponsive. That happens with
Seagate, Samsung and WD drives and I have not been able to identify
a pattern. It is not a kernel issue (this is Linux software
RAID), as the drive stays unresponsive until power-cycled.
Then it comes back cleanly, no errors, no SMART error log
entries and hot-plugs fine.

My take is that if you have a dumb hardware controller (most are
pretty dumb) or it is hard to get to the individual drives,
these "RAID" drives may be worth the extra money, otherwise they
probably are not. Side note: Because of the disks dropping out,
I run 3-way RAID1 or RAID6, so I have time to reactivate
the locked-up drive at my leisure as the arrays are still
redundant.

Arno

Thats my exact point. Drives should not just drop out of a raid array for no
reason.

 

[GMAN]

Some of those drives in there will break on regular SATA power as they
use lower power. Specifically at least some "EAVS" drives.

I could not get WD to tell me what voltage is supposed to go to what
pin. I suppose it could be measured off the feed in the enclosure.

The drives in the WD 2TB Elements drives are the standard WD20EARX 3.5"
Green desktop drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136891


Right on the drive they say
5VDC 0.70A
12VDC 0.55A

Acually last christmas, they were in many of the elements cases, they were
supplying the WD black 7200RPM versions of the 2TB drive since they had a
shortage of the green drives in the later part of 2010..

I have read that about the EAVS drives and the 5v issue. That sounds a little
fishy to me because if they claim SATA II compliance, they must operate within
the specs layed out by the standards set.

 

[Ed Light]

I have read that about the EAVS drives and the 5v issue. That sounds a little
fishy to me because if they claim SATA II compliance, they must operate within
the specs layed out by the standards set.

Someone bought one or more bare EAVS drives at Frys and they broke. WD
fixed them to work normally.
--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[Ed Light]

I have read that about the EAVS drives and the 5v issue.

Any idea what the voltage inputs are?

--
Ed Light

Better World News TV Channel:
http://realnews.com

Iraq Veterans Against the War and Related:
http://ivaw.org
http://couragetoresist.org
http://antiwar.com

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[Percival P. Cassidy]

After having 3 out of 5 Seagate 1 Terabyte drives die recently, and
being assured that the remaining 2 will soon suffer a similar fate, I no
longer buy Seagate drives.

Except for one Seagate drive that bricked after its 5-yr warranty had
expired and after having sat unused for many months, all the dead drives
I have sitting around here are WD.

I do have a couple of Seagate SATA drives that needed their firmware
updated, but they have been running 24/7 since with no problems.

BTW, I was wrong about one thing: although the "bare drive" Barracuda XT
drives were indeed made in China, the retail-pack one was made in
Thailand. I'm using them in a DIY FreeNAS box: the "bare" drives are in
RAIDZ1, and the retail one is a "hot spare."

And I did get my $25 credit from Best Buy for the Barracuda LP.

Perce