Hard Disk Life when used in DVR

[CCTV_Suppliers 0]

At home, I have an older JPEG2000 DVR, running 24/7. In it, are the two original hard drives, going on their 5th year now. Bought them at Staples Department Store locally.

 

There is a definite problem that Seagate does not want to admit. Instead of trying to contain this situation, I heard and even was told that the end users are at fault blaming everyone else but themselves. The last correspondence with them was very short and they have assessed that the problem is caused by heat built ups, dirty and dusty environments and even inadequate or incorrect installation of drives causing problems. But they have no explanation why the similar drives bough over three months ago are performing exceptionally well. As matter of fact, similar drives still perform well even after 5 years of constant use of 24/7 without any hiccup...

 

What Seagate does next will determine their loyalty to customers... So far they do not admit nor have any fixes except recent release of new firmware that suppose to address these problems. Even though they do replace these drives under warranty, it takes over a month before you see "reconditioned" drives coming your direction. Just make sure you keep the receipt when you bought such drives, so that they will be forced to honor their warranty period.

 

All drive manufacturers had similar problems in the past and dependent how they handled "damage control" determined what happens to their sales... and thus far Seagate has not shown much of any sign that they intend to fix these problems. Remember what happened to Maxtor??

 

We are testing drives right now from WD, Samsung and even Hitachi. Only time will tell if these drives are good. I know many use them and I'd like to see feedback on what everyone thinks of these manufacturers and the performance of their respective drives.

[cachecreekcctv 0]

For some reason, I cannot use Seagate drives in my Avermedia installs. The Seagates quit working on three different occasions, in 3 different locations. I ended up using Western Digital basic drives. I was out of town, and in a hurry, so went to Staples (department store) and bought them. Still working as far as I know. I thought that the problem was just with the "incompatibility" of Seagate and Avermedia ? I have Seagate's in many of my External Hard Drive Enclosures as "backups", just can't use them in any of the Avermedias I have installed.

[survtech 0]

WD has its own set of issues, especially with the WD5000YS 500GB and other RE2 drives. We have nearly 800 of them in 35 RAIDs that were installed in November, 2006. At first, the failure rate was very low, which pleasantly surprised us. However, since early 2008, the failure rate has climbed to the point that we are replacing 4-5 drives every couple of weeks. This seems to be happening to other users as well - if you do a web search on WD5000YS failure rate, you will find a number of complaints.

 

The funny thing is that WD is not being very forthcoming on the cause(s) or cure(s) for the problems. We specified WD drives for our 2006 storage upgrade because we were very happy with their support. They were very proactive replacing the drives in our original RAID systems. WD Provided 830 250GB RE drives for free to replace the desktop drives that were failing in our original SCSI/PATA RAIDs.

 

Now, they are dragging their feet and ignoring our requests for resolution of the problems. We did get them to analyze some returned drives and they claimed that 80% of them had no faults so we started testing them ourselves after they were kicked out by our RAIDs and found over 90% were either totally dead (they wouldn't even register in the test computer's BIOS) or DLG Diagnostics reported an error. WD has not commented on that since it was brought to their attention, other than to tell us to stop testing the removed drives. The odder thing is that we started testing the removed drives ourselves based on their recommendation. They even provided us with the SATA-to-PATA convertor we used to test the drives.

 

Heat is not an issue with us since our RAIDs are in an environmentally-controlled room that is kept at 68 degrees by redundant AC units with cooling aisles. WD even admits that none of the returned drives have recorded excessive heat.

[Soundy 1]

Every manufacturer has traditionally had the occasional bad batch or series of drives, be it WD's particular model of 500s or Seagate's line of 1TB units... while other drives of theirs may work flawlessly. I wouldn't dismiss either brand based solely on that.

 

Where the problem really arises is how each them deals with their issues and stands behind their products, and more importantly, their customers.

 

I haven't had significantly more or worse problems with either brand failing (yet.... touch wood), but while I've not yet had a problem returning failed Seagate drives for RMA, Western Digital has been a whole other story. Their warranty status check is misleading at best - even six-month-old drives have shown up as "in limited warranty" and offered me a "customer loyalty" option of "upgrading" to new, larger drives... at about the same as I'd pay for those drives retail. Gee, thanks, WD. Yet on contacting them to ask about it, I've been told that the drives were still fully covered and eligible for direct warranty replacement... hmmmmm.

[CCTV_Suppliers 0]

From what I read thus far, look like WD has even more problems..

 

We are testing heavily with Samsung and Hitachi... Anyone used them with any success? How is their technical support or better yet, warranty response?

 

What is anyone to do when such giant manufacturers can play games like these and get away with with it. One thing for sure, they are effective their own business and customer loyalty slowly is slipping away from them...

 

Few engineers have been testing both Hitachi and Samsung drives... but time will tell if they will survive. Pricing is no more favorable than Seagate nor WD, but if they work, then Seagate and WD can and will loose market share... regardless how big they are.

 

I know this - since Seagate dropped NextLevel service, which was an outside contractor dealing with Seagate's all customer service, RMA and other issues and since Seagate is trying to do their job (cost reduction measures of course), the entire communication with the Seagate is in the toilette... We can not contact their local rep for days and even weeks and even then, getting a lot of lip talk and nothing more. They are shipping the wrong product replacements or not shipping them at all, or shipping them to someone else other than intended... Coupled with the latest batches of drive problems and their tight lip attitude blaming the customers does and will effective their future business for the worse.

 

GE Security is exclusively using Seagate drives and I can tell you - failure rates are higher than our additions... It makes no sense and we all are forced to look at other avenues and manufacturers..

 

Too bad for Seagate and now with WD (based on some of our member's experience with WD), looks like if Hitachi and Samsung do better job, they can sweep the market... and I hope they do to teach both Seagate and WD a very expensive lesson.

[catseyenu 0]

The current Seagate 500GB, 1 & 1.5TB rash of drive failures seem to be attributed to bad firmware but I don't believe the SV-35 AV series is affected.

Oops, looks like some of the SV35's are involved in this fiasco.

 

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128092&view=findpost&p=830686

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)

 

Q: What Seagate drives are affected by this "drive hang after power cycle" issue?

A: The following product types may be affected by this problem:

Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 (SATA), DiamondMax 22, FreeAgent Desk, Maxtor OneTouch 4, Pipeline HD, Pipeline HD Pro, SV35.3, and SV35.4. While only some percentage of the drives will be susceptible to this issue, Seagate recommends that all drives in these families be update d to the latest firmware!

[cctvexpert 0]

Agreed they all have issues at times and it is hit and miss. What is still the best policy is if possible stress test the drives before sending them out. Many companies will have a burn in process for anywhere from a day to a week or until they fill the drive and have a couple of passes through. Again, this does not speak to the longevity but you can assume that if you got it to perform acceptably through the burn in phase your failure rates should be reduced significantly.

 

Also important to note is alot of people make a mistake and put a "DVR" drive inside a RAID machine. There are drives that are meant for a DVR but yet not for a RAID but for the most part RAID drives will perform well with DVRs.