The heat problem mentioned in this article makes me wonder why engineers fail to correct issues like these. It can't be that much more expensive to put a fan in the unit along with more ventilation. If it was me, I would have installed a fan inside the enclosure that would only turn on when the unit reaches a certain temperature. That way it still stays quiet, but when it gets heated up to the point where it can affect its life span, the fan will cool it down.
lol so first they have a bit of an issue with some firmware and such, but now they decide their 3TB drives should double as coffee warmers?!?!?
I used to consider Seagate pretty good mfg but honestly ever since their 1TB fiasco days I don't even consider them. I certainly don't want to see less competitors out there but they really need to get their acts in order.
I used to use Seagate exclusively... I had a RAID 0 array of 7200.10 320's, and one failed completely, erasing most of my papers and photos I'd saved from college. I also had a 500GB 7200.11, one of the few to not suffer from the .11's random fail bug- 5 months in to using it, the SATA connector snapped off (there was nothing putting pressure on it, it just snapped. I booted up my computer one morning and it couldn't find the drive). My last Seagate was a 1TB 7200.12, which started getting massive amounts of bad clusters 10 months in to using it. Thankfully it lasted long enough for me to transfer my files. Since then I've switched to Maxtor... I know you can't really use the retail drives in RAID arrays, but at least none of them have blown up on me.
RAID-0 is pretty much pointless... And are more acceptable to failures.
If your data was that important, then a backup drive should have been used, ESPECIALLY with a RAID-0 setup.
- MAXTOR is owned by Seagate and both "brands" come off the same assembly lines... Never heard of "Can't raid a retail drive" before. Most OEMs are single drive setups... a drive is a drive.
> Never heard of "Can't raid a retail drive" before. Most OEMs are single drive setups... a drive is a drive.
Not entirely true. The problem is that, in case of errors, the firmware on retail drives will keep trying reading the faulty sector for too long. This delay will make the RAID controller assume that the drive is gone and it will drop it out of the chain. This unnecessarily increases the load on the array due to the subsequent rebuild phase. If then another drive should fail under the increased load, you will most likely lose the whole array, while correcting the unreadable sector in the first place would have been trivial.
This is why most manufacturers also sell "RAID edition" HDDs which, other than a tweaked firmware, also have a considerably higher MTBF.
Oh... okay. I've not forgotten about enterprise class drives, for a REAL RAID setup, I wouldn't use consumer grade drives.
But for most home users, using off the shelf is usually fine. But still RAID-0 is useless compared to the speed to todays drives. The complexity, the overheard and errors aren't worth it.
Want to improve BOOT up time and startup of your apps, spend $150~$200 for an SSD.
Man, I had completely forgotten about this comment till I came back to this thread today. Thanks for the comments guys, I'm aware of all of this. The 2 .10's in RAID 0 were 320's that I was using as data drives, I'm aware that RAID 0 on physical disks doesn't help latency. I'm fairly sure Maxtor ans Seagate have different QC mechanisms, which make all the difference in the world... And after failures of 3 successive generations of their drives, I think I'll pass. I'm still pissed that I lost all that stuff (and yes, yes, I know I should have had a backup. It just wasn't possible at that time).
ALL brands have their bad batches. Maxtor, WD, Hitachi-IBM, etc... and even intel.
I have used lots of Seagates and Maxtors with good reliability. Yes, I've had failures - but not really any more than WD.
In the OLD days, Seagates were called "Sea-crates" typically used in cheap PCs ($2000+ computers) - I'd never touch those junky RLL drives. I bought Quantum SCSI drives which were higher end, more reliable and costs more money... and being SCSI - they were much faster. I miss Quantum. :( Today, I buy Seagates - they are easily quieter than most drives - with only Samsung just as quiet.
I still buy 1TB Seagates. I don't trust the 1.5~2TB drives from anyone. But the tech used in 2~3TB drives are filtered down to the 500GB drives (single 500GB platter) - so the density reliability issue is there - but the less-parts (heads and arms) factor does help. So todays 500GB drives are very thin... wow! ;)
The OP is nominally correct. While I wouldn't go so far as to say "NEVER use an on-demand cooling system", I'd say they're likely to do more harm than good unless carefully engineered and integrated with the HDD.
Rapid changes in temperature can kill a drive faster than elevated temps due to, e.g., thermal expansion/contraction of components (heads, platters, spindles, etc.), and air density changes which affect head ride height.
Those changes require active adjustment and compensation, and are necessary and common in today's drives/controllers. However, there are limits. Drive manufacturers specify a maximum temp change/time (even if it may not show in the data sheets available on their web site).
The best solution is to maintain a steady and moderate temperature change. The worst solution is a typical/cheap "bang-bang" controller that starts/stops when temperature limts are reached, and which causes rapid changes in the drive's temperature.
Case in point: The absolute worst thing you can do for your laptop drive after leaving it in the car for hours on a frigid day is drag it into a warm room and immediately start pounding on it. Virtually guaranteed to result in errors and reduced life (if not short-term failure).*
In short, active cooling is not necessarily bad, but stupid active cooling that causes wide temp swings over short periods in the drive can cause far worse problems than allowing the drive to run at an elevated and slowly changing temp.
This has been a problem for many years, and increasingly as tolerances decrease (especially with higher track densities). While drives/controllers continue to adapt and improve, it's still a significant factor, and the larger the media the worse the problem. For recent papers (sorry, don't have any recent freely available links), see:
* Yes, people talk about the "freeze your HDD" to try and recover it. (It may even work--never tried it.) But subjecting an HDD to that kind of rapid temperature change abuse even occassionally is guaranteed to kill it in short order.
It makes a lot of sense, even without the links. The hardest thing on a car is starting it in the dead of winter when there's no oil up in the engine. It grinds, and then as the friction causes it heat up quickly with cold oil it continues grinding until it is warm and coated in oil internally.
That is wrong. If you have a constant speed/always-on cooling system, it means that the drive changes in temperature as it wakes up, reads and writes, and more as it keeps running.
If you have on-demand, as the drive starts to warm the fan kicks in and keeps the drive at a more constant temperature, including increasing fan RPM as needed to keep the drive at the same temperature! Plus, with on-demand all those times you are not using the drive and it is sleeping and at low temperature, your fan isn't pulling in dust to clog up things.
Also, it IS high temperature that does damage. Granted, yes it has to change temperature to get to a high temp, but the more the temperature changes the more the different coefficients of expansion come into play. For example, you can stretch a rubber band all day long, but if you stretch it too far it starts to rip apart.
This or anyone else... should have minded the heat problems. There are external cases for HDs that have an 80mm cooling fan - low RPM.
My Seagate drives in my case (1TB) are currently 39c... I run my fan at LOW speed to keep the noise to pretty much silent. A drive hitting 50c+ would make me nervous... 60+ is VERY bad!
And for a 3TB drive holding that much data, RELIABILITY is most important! USB 3.0 and such are important features when moving that much data and it'll slow down when you're using the drive for what it is intended?!
BAD BAD BAD
The dock is a handy, but a wider one would be nicer... there are other dock-drive designs out there, some with dual docks. Generic versions that allows you to put in ANY drive would be the way to go. OR better yet... use the HOT-SWAP abilities of eSATA and pop your drive into a drive bay on your computer - NO DOCK NEEDED!
Theres about 60+ options on Newegg. Many docks, you just plug in your drive - sans case.
Heat problems are one of the reasons why I'm starting to shy away from Seagate drives after using them for a few years. A few months ago, I noticed that one of my WD 1TB HDDs was exhibiting some odd file read issues. When I opened up my server, I found it right above a Seagate 1TB HDD, and when I tried to pull the Seagate drive out, it was almost too hot to touch!
Of course a (mechanical) hard drive will produce heat, but the Seagate seemed to be in a league of its own compared to all the other drives in my file server. I'm really not sure what brand to even go with now... I purchased a Samsung drive based on recommendations, and that drive died after only two months (the whole random disappearing act leading to refusing to ever show up). I recently purchased a WD 2TB drive that came up clean in a full-disk error check, so we'll see how that goes!
Your server is not set up correctly, blame it not the drive. A proper case configuration for stacked drives leaves at least 1cm or so between each and ample cool intake airflow through the drive rack. In that scenario you will have no problem cooling any 7200 RPM drive, or with higher airflow rate, 10K RPM drives too.
Also, there is not a significant difference in operating power or running temp of equivalent drives from Seagate vs other brands. Single-digit # of degrees is not enough to matter one way or the other till you reach the upper limits.
There is a 120mm fan running air over the hard drives in question and there is an actual space in between the drives... they are not literally sitting on each other.
The case is a Lian Li PC V2000B which has room for 10 HDDs in a 5x2 array. Optimally, I tried to leave an empty (HDD) space between each drive, but this was not entirely possible, so I had to not give them extra "breathing room."
While my spiel is technically purely anecdotal at best... I have similar WD drives that are working just fine and the one that was producing file read errors and hanging on reading files was the one that sat directly above the Seagate "Inferno." It is probably good to note that the WD drive was also one of their "Green" drives, which I assume also has lower temperature thresholds given that its a 5400RPM drive.
I still do run other Seagate drives in my PC, but I believe that they have that extra "buffer" between them and other drives now.
Get some sexy hot-swap drive-bays for the 5.25" external slots. That way when you *need* the hot-swap compatible drive ccontroller you are set to show off your ZFS awesomeness.
There is a brand called i/O that lasted as long as I had it until it was stolen, never gave a single error, and connected properly to every computer I plugged it into, without having to go into disk manager, run commands, etc., to plug in. And MOST BENEFICIALLY it didn't come with any files on the disk. So (I don't remember the size of it), if it was a 300GB drive, then, when I plugged it in, it ACTUALLY SAID 300GB. It didn't even say 299.7. It said 300. If I remember correctly there was a scattered file or two on it, but I didn't think they were programs (but could have been wrong - notice I didn't even know what the double-cord was for at the time), and they didn't try to initiate themselves. But all it took to delete them was to hit "delete". And then it was listed as a full 300GB drive (or whatever size it was).
Although, that particular brand name is a bit hard to Google. This was back when Google was actually a search engine, about 2 years ago (as in, it had other products, but the search engine actually worked?), and it took a while to find their website then. Which was done to find out why it came with an extra USB plug on the cord... one of those drives that has two USB plugs so you can plug in both if using only one makes it slow. AND it warns about overheating "only use both if you're having trouble". ANOTHER thing that is never done by other companies.
Then the Target closest to my dad;s house stopped selling it and I could never find it again.
Call me biased, but I have used several WDC MyBooks and they never let me down. They have more room for ventilation. A few weeks I had this drive (2 TB) and after one day I had seen enough.
Poorly designed, never wanted to go into standby/sleep mode and overheating.
Yes, you can disable the sleep mode, but then IT IS ALWAYS spanning when attached to your PC and Windows up and running. Even when you power-down your PC and you leave the drive connected to the mains, the drive is so stupid to power up again by itself.
Yeah, this confuses me too. But it's not just Seagate. All external manufacturers are doing it, from big names (Seagate, Samsung, WD) to off-brands (Fantom, Cavalry). Market factors push for a drive that is small (no space for air ventilation) and cheap (no money for quality metal materials to radiate heat).
I recently had to RMA a Samsung HDD for this reason. Small package, no ventilation. It would heat up to 55C and then the SMART would register read/write errors. And this was a "low-power" 5400RPM drive!
I bought a WD green drive in an enclosure. Doesn't solve the heat problem, but those drives are pretty hearty and I'm using it only for backup. If I were to use it more extensively, I think the only solution is to buy a HDD and enclosure separately.
because they're too busy marketing external drives as the next best thing, when people don't realize how horrid most external drive solutions are when it comes to temperature.
Not only that, but it's a humorous double win for HDD manufacturers (and double loss for consumers). They're charging you *more* than to buy it with an enclosure , and it will burn out years faster! double win as far as money goes.
2TB internal: $100 now. 2TB External - $125-150 (enclosures are a piece of plastic that costs them next to nothing to manufacture and they are usually priced at 25-50).. Not only that, but if the enclosure doesn't support USB3 or Sata2, you might lose it (even if the internal hard drive supports it).
Remember Google's study of 100,000 SATA/PATA hard drives in its data centers?
One conclusion: There isn't as much of a correlation between drive temperature and failure rate as might be expected... excessively cooled drives actually failed more often than drives that ran a bit hot.
engineers can only point out problems and solution, management then decides NOT to implement them to save money.
In the xbox RROD, the xbox scratched disks, and many other cases there are documentations showing that the engineers pointed out the problem and devised a solution... management decided its not worth the money and that they know better.
The maximum integer which can be represented with 32 bits is 4294967295 i.e. 2^32 - 1 which allows for 4294967296 values. The article is worded incorrectly.
To be more precise, all that BIOS does is read the first sector of the drive, check for the signature at the end, and if it matches, then it jumps to the real mode x86 code at the beginning. It is actually partition scheme agnostic. Now some BIOSes are not quite partition scheme agnostic and will rely on the contents of the first sector being in the MBR format, luckily GPT support a protective MBR.
"The drives themselves are standard 3.5” hard drives in a plastic enclosure designed to mate with GoFlex Desk adapters that add USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or Ethernet connectivity to the drive."
It"s not as easy as just plugging in a hard drive with a RJ45 to a router, there needs to be some kind of CPU in between the two. NAS performance through Ethernet varies greatly.
Is it such a big deal that Windows doesn't boot from GPT drives if the BIOS is not EFI-capable? Whoever spends 400+ USD on a drive probably just needs lots of storage space for plain data. It's unlikely that there is no fast boot drive present in any system this drive is plugged into. Actually, since the first expansive 3 TB drives are bought by enthusiasts, chances are that the customers are already using an SSD as a boot drive.
That said, in a realistic setting for a performance workstation with Windows 7 x64 installed on a 80+ GB SSD, there won't be a problem. You can connect the drive to the internal SATA connector, partition it with GPT and start using it, while your BIOS doesn't need to know anything about EFI or GPT. The heat issues might also look better when using the drive internally.
I don't understand why Seagate is holding back with selling the internal model. An estimated 95% of users will never even try to boot from it, and for the rest (who do want to boot from it but don't know about the 2+ TB issues), there could be a red warning note inside the box explaining the juicy details. After all, those who spend such an amount of money on a hard drive are not exactly the kind of people who have no clue about hard drives at all.
One of Seagates biggest advantages has been that their external hard drives come with a 5 year warranty. Why would they go to a two year warranty on the most expensive drive they sell? If anything they should have at least gone with three years. If they don't even trust this drive then I sure won't. I'll be waiting for Western Digital to have their drive out.
Too many platters, contributing to bearing wear and heat. IMO, the high price is partially to offset the higher chance of failure/RMA replacement cost even with a mere 2 year warranty. Of course it's also due to being the biggest drive available, the high end capacity luxury tax.
why not just get a raid card that has 64big lba and raid the drives in a raid0? I got a software raid5 card with pci-e 4x speed and 4 sata ports on it for 130 bucks. Its not a 3ware but it writes just as fast as my other computer can send it data. Plus if youre looking for that much space a raid is probably a good idea and you should get 3x 2tb drives and do a raid5 anyway for redundancy.
No wait, 300 songs is only 15 CDs, so let's say 1,000 or so songs, but either way that's a hell of a lot less then how many songs you're actually going to want, if human brains were actually capable of remembering all of them and if computers were capable of finding and properly formatting all of them.
Isn't there any program that you give it the files (suppose your are going to copy / backup ~ 3TB of data ) you are going to copy , and set a temperature threshold , so that when it reaches that temperature, it stops , or reduces the speed of , copying and when temp. gets normal and it cools down, continues in normal mode. ?!
I notice some posters have commented on using RAID 5 with very large disc sizes
If you do the math using the drive specs and published bit error rates you will find that a RAID 5 array using 1Tb+ discs very soon has a probability not possibility of having a disc error when rebuilding the array.
For this reason I went to RAID6. (using a dedicated controller to handle the parity calculations).
Please remember that RAID arrays are not a backup device.
Until Seagate fixes their longevity issues and can offer a five year warranty that has a better failure rate I'll be sticking with other companies like Western Digital and Hitachi. I used to love Seagate. :(
Anand, did you actually review the power management features of this drive ? I had the 2 TB model.
I noticed the same temperature issues and slowless at high temperatures. In my case I got 65 celsius as well.
Bigger issue I found the power management features, or better said lack of or poor implementation of them. This drive is supposed to be left attached to your PC. There's no on/off switch. So it will power-on and off depending on whether you switch your PC on and whether you access the drive.
Funny thing it will completely behaves by itself, it has its own will.
It willl automatically power on again after you SHUTDOWN your computer and you leave it plugged into the mains.
If you enable sleep mode, it will disable itself when it is not accessed for the specified period. But... it won't go into a sleep mode (= shutting down the drive), no it will unplug in Windows, and after a short period automatically re-insert itself. This means you will see popups or hear beeps indicating that device manager is triggered.
This is just plain stupid and indicating it's a bad product......
I've never seen a drive that has an on/off switch! Except for the kind that you have to plug in separately, and that kinds of ruins the point of an "external drive" in the first place. Some public places don't even have accessible plugs, they literally put a lock on them. In other words no one would ever buy one unless they just don't know drives sometimes have separate plugs and therefore don't exhaustively evaluate the packing to ensure that the one they are getting doesn't.
Anand, I was curious if you were going to talk about the current USB 3.0 implementation and I was quite glad to see that you did make a note of it! :) But I'm curious... do you know of any motherboard manufacturers that have a better USB 3.0 implementation on the P55 chipset? I know the P55 is literally the red-headed stepchild in regard to its PCI-E bus compared to the X58 (uses PCI-E 1.1 compared to actual 2.0 lanes, has far fewer, etc), but as an example, my ASUS P7P55D-E motherboard uses that "combiner thingy-ma-bob" to combine the PCI-E lanes for SATA 6Gbs functionality. Do any boards do that for USB 3.0?
Not sure what you mean here. I know for a fact that AMD boards with ATI chipsets use a real PCIe 2.0 x1 lane to the NEC USB 3.0 host controller.
There is no chipset yet with native USB 3.0 support. All motherboards maker use the same NEC USB 3.0 controller. Though, it seems there are controllers from VIA around, but I didn't see them yet.
They're talking about P55 and LGA-1156. AMD hasn't made an Intel-compatible chipset in a very long time, and even if they had a P55 compatible license and the desire to make one, LGA-1156's PCIe controller isn't on the chipset.
As a side note, that's also why LGA-1336 is going to be dead soon after LGA-1155 replaces LGA-1156; the Sandy Bridge derived Nehalem/Westmere replacement is going to have the PCIe controller on die.
I understand saying that Seagate hasn't released this as a stand-alone drive because the PC hardware just isn't ready yet, but I was hoping they'd try it out on a Mac as well since it sounds like it should just work. It's a shame they won't sell it stand-alone and just label it 'For Intel Mac with EFI' (or hell, just sell it online with a note "For EFI machines only" label for PC users that do have working EFI or an extra internal disk) for the time being because I really don't want to buy another external case.
10 years ago Seagate is all about quality. Not any more. Every retail drives ( more than 5) I bought from Seagate in the past five years gone bad before the 5-year warranty.
The problem with Seagate drives? They are too hot.
WD only gives you 3-year warranty for their drives, but I'm buying them exclusively now.
Hard to believe the engineers could be thick enough to put a mesh grille on the side for looks only, without providing any actual ventilation. A major oversight IMO, especially if you tend to pound on your hardware.
I realize this site and its standing on the web, but Google's test results show that hard drive temp isn't a factor for failure rates - at least not in the same manner in which people get all uptight about it.
I have a laptop at home where the hard drive runs constantly around 50*C and it hasn't ever failed on me. I have a desktop system that has drives that run below 40*C and it's gone through three already.
"One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels. Such correlations have been repeatedly highlighted by previous studies, but we are unable to confirm them by observing our population. Although our data do not allow us to conclude that there is no such correlation, it provides strong evidence to suggest that other effects may be more prominent in affecting disk drive reliability in the context of a professionally managed data center deployment."
Interpret how you will, but if Seagate says this drive is fine without any active cooling, then why do people need to ding the drive for this "oversight"? It's all perceived performance stats in the PC realm - if it's hot, cool it down. If it's cool, don't bother it.
I don't have it in front of me, but IIRC the temperature range of that Google study was something like 10-50C, and they found that the sweet spot was 30-40C. 60C+ (as in this Seagate drive) isn't a "perceived" problem, it's a measurable one; re-read the paragraph where Anand found transfer rates dropping by 60%+ as the drive went into that range.
Never ceases to amaze me why computer and drive manufacturers do not design cases with natural convection, struck me the other day at work when the IT boffins had a major crash due to a faulty fan in the server room. WTF there were three of them standing around designing a new air conditioning system for the server room. I got the step ladder and removed 4 panels from the false ceiling to allow the heat to escape into the roofspace, instant temperature drop, so why cant we employ the same thinking to computer cases and drive cases vent the top and the bottom ensuring hot air rising will pull cold air in from the bottom, obviously spillage issues with moisture getting in the vents, so the vents can be on the sides near the top with the fins slanted downwards still allowing hot air to escape.
32-bit Windows 7 also supports GPT. However, only for *data* disks/arrays; even if the capacity is less than 2 TB. Formatting using GPT can be done in "Computer Management."
2 TB may seem like a huge amount of memory to some. But it is an increasingly paltry amount of memory for those who edit video (especially uncompressed) and who work with Blu-ray Discs (copying a disc to another disc, copying discs to a computer, authoring discs, leaving those disc projects on the computer for a while, etc.).
oh wait that was ram... still. I could use 3tb right now but 5 platters - that's too many. I'll be waiting. My current setup is 3 500gb seagate baracuda 7200.12s in raid 0 backed up by a 2tb cuda. That way I've got only 3 platters spinning for low noise, reliability, and high data density. Though this thing uses 600gb platters which is nice I think I'll wait a bit maybe we'll get some higher data density per platter while we're waiting for microsoft and motherboard vendors to get this 2tb cap fixed.
anyone know? i have an external 2.5" drive hanging off my apple extreme router that spins 24/7 but was wondering if newer external drives have some power savings features.
I am very confused on why the 3tb drives were not released as OEM. People looking for this kind of space are not looking to put the OS on that drive.
Why not release the 3tb drives now, let us create GPT partitions in Windows and use the storage space. I need 12 terabytes ASAP! I would rather 4 drives instead of 6. Hopefully WD catches up soon.
I didn't knew long heat means performance degradation in such a way that it reaches the jaw-dropping 1mb/s. In these cases, flash ssd seem to have the advantage. However, we still have to wait until ssd become more capacitous than hdd, to the point that creating a hdd is no longer worth it.
Get a Western Digital MyBook 3.0, they only come in 1 TB and 2 TB flavours, but these keep itself cool. After copying 700 GB of data, temperate was steady at 43 celsius.
Not. Seagate is terrible. In my own experience, it's been the only hard-drive out of many to fail. By far, I've had at least 4 Hitachi, 4 WD's, and a Samsung and none of them have failed. Then again, there's also the user-reported failure rates which report Seagate among the top...
you're doing a really great job on SSDs, but heres one paragraph I really disagree with:
"... and sequential performance is actually down from the 2TB drive due in part to the fact that we've got a smaller cache and generally less performance optimized drive with this external 3TB unit compared to the 2TB internal drive. Over USB 3.0 we actually get much better sequential performance apparently due to some additional buffering done by the USB 3 controller."
You're running into some bottleneck here using the internal SATA for the 3 TB drive. Was it in IDE mode? Or maybe just SATA1? If you take a look at the performance over capacity using this SATA port I bet you'll see a straight line at ~120 MB/s until about 1.5 TB and then a drop similar to what you're showing on the page "Performance vs. Capacity".
The reason is simple: on that page you're showing the drive hitting performance >120 MB/s over the entire first 1.5 TB using the USB 3 connection. This test is a sequential test over the entire drive, so ne pauses in between. Were this speed due to a buffer it had to be at least 1.5 TB big. Otherwise what you're seeing here is the real sequential performance of the drive.
And HDD caches influence real world benchmarks, but do not influence such sequential tests (think of it: even 64 MB are filled in just 0.5 s for such a drive, afterwards it's just plain "write them as fast as you can").
With some minor modifications to the MBR and FIlesystem code, the bare Hard Drive can be booted from without EFI and used in DOS and Windows 98SE. The USB 2.0 Interface can be used in Windows 98SE with a couple of Patches.
It makes no sense, unless they just didn't think to test what might happen to the drive temperature when stuck inside that little box and made to write data (who does that?)
If it was cost, then that's stupid.
I expect these are quite expensive already, being new and 3TB. What's an extra $50 or whatever to get a decent case with some proper cooling vents or even a fan?
I definitely wouldn't buy one of these, not until they made a better case, and even then, I want to see the reliability of the drive itself.
On the 2 paragraph, 4th page you said: "While you can plug a SATA power cable directly into the drive, the enclosure prevents you from sticking a SATA data cable in there - not without trimming away part of the plastic surrounding the cable’s SATA connector at least."
You don't need to trim it. The SATA cable from the Asus boards are slightly thinner connectors. You should be able to do it. I've done it on the Seagate GoFlex 500GB PRO review: http://www.hardwarebbq.com/2010/12/seagate-freeage...
Infact, when you run Crystal DIsk Information even when the drive is connected via USB mode, it detects the model but it will show that its scaled down to SATA 150 (I got a USB 2.0 as a sample).
I have (or had) this 3 TB drive, and three months later it has died. The error; drive needs formatting. So in hopes it was the enclosure I bought a USB to SATA tester and have confirmed it is the drive. I knew better not to stray from the 1 and 1.5 TB drives which have always been reliable. The one lousy time I don't have backups for two directories I copied over....shaking my head in disgust.
Worthless piece of shit company that makes worthless products. I hope they lose every lawsuits and bankrupt. Again death to this piece of shit company.
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gigahertz20 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
The heat problem mentioned in this article makes me wonder why engineers fail to correct issues like these. It can't be that much more expensive to put a fan in the unit along with more ventilation. If it was me, I would have installed a fan inside the enclosure that would only turn on when the unit reaches a certain temperature. That way it still stays quiet, but when it gets heated up to the point where it can affect its life span, the fan will cool it down.MarkLuvsCS - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
lol so first they have a bit of an issue with some firmware and such, but now they decide their 3TB drives should double as coffee warmers?!?!?I used to consider Seagate pretty good mfg but honestly ever since their 1TB fiasco days I don't even consider them. I certainly don't want to see less competitors out there but they really need to get their acts in order.
siuol11 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I used to use Seagate exclusively... I had a RAID 0 array of 7200.10 320's, and one failed completely, erasing most of my papers and photos I'd saved from college. I also had a 500GB 7200.11, one of the few to not suffer from the .11's random fail bug- 5 months in to using it, the SATA connector snapped off (there was nothing putting pressure on it, it just snapped. I booted up my computer one morning and it couldn't find the drive). My last Seagate was a 1TB 7200.12, which started getting massive amounts of bad clusters 10 months in to using it. Thankfully it lasted long enough for me to transfer my files.Since then I've switched to Maxtor... I know you can't really use the retail drives in RAID arrays, but at least none of them have blown up on me.
Belard - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
RAID-0 is pretty much pointless... And are more acceptable to failures.If your data was that important, then a backup drive should have been used, ESPECIALLY with a RAID-0 setup.
- MAXTOR is owned by Seagate and both "brands" come off the same assembly lines... Never heard of "Can't raid a retail drive" before. Most OEMs are single drive setups... a drive is a drive.
xded - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
> Never heard of "Can't raid a retail drive" before. Most OEMs are single drive setups... a drive is a drive.Not entirely true. The problem is that, in case of errors, the firmware on retail drives will keep trying reading the faulty sector for too long. This delay will make the RAID controller assume that the drive is gone and it will drop it out of the chain. This unnecessarily increases the load on the array due to the subsequent rebuild phase. If then another drive should fail under the increased load, you will most likely lose the whole array, while correcting the unreadable sector in the first place would have been trivial.
This is why most manufacturers also sell "RAID edition" HDDs which, other than a tweaked firmware, also have a considerably higher MTBF.
For further information, see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Re...
see
Belard - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Oh... okay. I've not forgotten about enterprise class drives, for a REAL RAID setup, I wouldn't use consumer grade drives.But for most home users, using off the shelf is usually fine. But still RAID-0 is useless compared to the speed to todays drives. The complexity, the overheard and errors aren't worth it.
Want to improve BOOT up time and startup of your apps, spend $150~$200 for an SSD.
pcfxer - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Complexity? You must be retarded.You can geom Mirror, ZFS RAID-Z, HFS+ RAID or use the onboard software RAID.
If you know what you are doing RAID is fine, but thinking RAID will improve game load speeds is lol-eriffic.
siuol11 - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
Man, I had completely forgotten about this comment till I came back to this thread today. Thanks for the comments guys, I'm aware of all of this. The 2 .10's in RAID 0 were 320's that I was using as data drives, I'm aware that RAID 0 on physical disks doesn't help latency.I'm fairly sure Maxtor ans Seagate have different QC mechanisms, which make all the difference in the world... And after failures of 3 successive generations of their drives, I think I'll pass. I'm still pissed that I lost all that stuff (and yes, yes, I know I should have had a backup. It just wasn't possible at that time).
Wolfpup - Thursday, September 16, 2010 - link
Yikes, this gives me yet MORE reason to avoid "RAID" 0.adamdz - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
But you had a backup, right? So you were able to get all your papers and photos back, right?And, yeah Maxtor is owned by Seagate and it was always garbage.
Belard - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
ALL brands have their bad batches. Maxtor, WD, Hitachi-IBM, etc... and even intel.I have used lots of Seagates and Maxtors with good reliability. Yes, I've had failures - but not really any more than WD.
In the OLD days, Seagates were called "Sea-crates" typically used in cheap PCs ($2000+ computers) - I'd never touch those junky RLL drives. I bought Quantum SCSI drives which were higher end, more reliable and costs more money... and being SCSI - they were much faster. I miss Quantum. :( Today, I buy Seagates - they are easily quieter than most drives - with only Samsung just as quiet.
I still buy 1TB Seagates. I don't trust the 1.5~2TB drives from anyone. But the tech used in 2~3TB drives are filtered down to the 500GB drives (single 500GB platter) - so the density reliability issue is there - but the less-parts (heads and arms) factor does help. So todays 500GB drives are very thin... wow! ;)
mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
....But since WD is THE WORST manufacturer of external hard drives, this post means you are definitely NOT recommending Seagate, then, correct?mino - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
You should NEVER use an on-demand cooling system with magnetic storage.Hard disks are an order of magnitude more sensitive to temperature changes than pure high temperatures.
Jonathan Dum - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Interesting. Proof to back up that claim?has407 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
The OP is nominally correct. While I wouldn't go so far as to say "NEVER use an on-demand cooling system", I'd say they're likely to do more harm than good unless carefully engineered and integrated with the HDD.Rapid changes in temperature can kill a drive faster than elevated temps due to, e.g., thermal expansion/contraction of components (heads, platters, spindles, etc.), and air density changes which affect head ride height.
Those changes require active adjustment and compensation, and are necessary and common in today's drives/controllers. However, there are limits. Drive manufacturers specify a maximum temp change/time (even if it may not show in the data sheets available on their web site).
The best solution is to maintain a steady and moderate temperature change. The worst solution is a typical/cheap "bang-bang" controller that starts/stops when temperature limts are reached, and which causes rapid changes in the drive's temperature.
Case in point: The absolute worst thing you can do for your laptop drive after leaving it in the car for hours on a frigid day is drag it into a warm room and immediately start pounding on it. Virtually guaranteed to result in errors and reduced life (if not short-term failure).*
In short, active cooling is not necessarily bad, but stupid active cooling that causes wide temp swings over short periods in the drive can cause far worse problems than allowing the drive to run at an elevated and slowly changing temp.
This has been a problem for many years, and increasingly as tolerances decrease (especially with higher track densities). While drives/controllers continue to adapt and improve, it's still a significant factor, and the larger the media the worse the problem. For recent papers (sorry, don't have any recent freely available links), see:
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ...
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=ht...
* Yes, people talk about the "freeze your HDD" to try and recover it. (It may even work--never tried it.) But subjecting an HDD to that kind of rapid temperature change abuse even occassionally is guaranteed to kill it in short order.
JonnyDough - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
It makes a lot of sense, even without the links. The hardest thing on a car is starting it in the dead of winter when there's no oil up in the engine. It grinds, and then as the friction causes it heat up quickly with cold oil it continues grinding until it is warm and coated in oil internally.mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
That is wrong. If you have a constant speed/always-on cooling system, it means that the drive changes in temperature as it wakes up, reads and writes, and more as it keeps running.If you have on-demand, as the drive starts to warm the fan kicks in and keeps the drive at a more constant temperature, including increasing fan RPM as needed to keep the drive at the same temperature! Plus, with on-demand all those times you are not using the drive and it is sleeping and at low temperature, your fan isn't pulling in dust to clog up things.
Also, it IS high temperature that does damage. Granted, yes it has to change temperature to get to a high temp, but the more the temperature changes the more the different coefficients of expansion come into play. For example, you can stretch a rubber band all day long, but if you stretch it too far it starts to rip apart.
Belard - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
This or anyone else... should have minded the heat problems. There are external cases for HDs that have an 80mm cooling fan - low RPM.My Seagate drives in my case (1TB) are currently 39c... I run my fan at LOW speed to keep the noise to pretty much silent. A drive hitting 50c+ would make me nervous... 60+ is VERY bad!
And for a 3TB drive holding that much data, RELIABILITY is most important! USB 3.0 and such are important features when moving that much data and it'll slow down when you're using the drive for what it is intended?!
BAD BAD BAD
The dock is a handy, but a wider one would be nicer... there are other dock-drive designs out there, some with dual docks. Generic versions that allows you to put in ANY drive would be the way to go. OR better yet... use the HOT-SWAP abilities of eSATA and pop your drive into a drive bay on your computer - NO DOCK NEEDED!
Theres about 60+ options on Newegg. Many docks, you just plug in your drive - sans case.
Aikouka - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Heat problems are one of the reasons why I'm starting to shy away from Seagate drives after using them for a few years. A few months ago, I noticed that one of my WD 1TB HDDs was exhibiting some odd file read issues. When I opened up my server, I found it right above a Seagate 1TB HDD, and when I tried to pull the Seagate drive out, it was almost too hot to touch!Of course a (mechanical) hard drive will produce heat, but the Seagate seemed to be in a league of its own compared to all the other drives in my file server. I'm really not sure what brand to even go with now... I purchased a Samsung drive based on recommendations, and that drive died after only two months (the whole random disappearing act leading to refusing to ever show up). I recently purchased a WD 2TB drive that came up clean in a full-disk error check, so we'll see how that goes!
mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Your server is not set up correctly, blame it not the drive. A proper case configuration for stacked drives leaves at least 1cm or so between each and ample cool intake airflow through the drive rack. In that scenario you will have no problem cooling any 7200 RPM drive, or with higher airflow rate, 10K RPM drives too.Also, there is not a significant difference in operating power or running temp of equivalent drives from Seagate vs other brands. Single-digit # of degrees is not enough to matter one way or the other till you reach the upper limits.
Aikouka - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
There is a 120mm fan running air over the hard drives in question and there is an actual space in between the drives... they are not literally sitting on each other.The case is a Lian Li PC V2000B which has room for 10 HDDs in a 5x2 array. Optimally, I tried to leave an empty (HDD) space between each drive, but this was not entirely possible, so I had to not give them extra "breathing room."
While my spiel is technically purely anecdotal at best... I have similar WD drives that are working just fine and the one that was producing file read errors and hanging on reading files was the one that sat directly above the Seagate "Inferno." It is probably good to note that the WD drive was also one of their "Green" drives, which I assume also has lower temperature thresholds given that its a 5400RPM drive.
I still do run other Seagate drives in my PC, but I believe that they have that extra "buffer" between them and other drives now.
pcfxer - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Get some sexy hot-swap drive-bays for the 5.25" external slots. That way when you *need* the hot-swap compatible drive ccontroller you are set to show off your ZFS awesomeness.mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
There is a brand called i/O that lasted as long as I had it until it was stolen, never gave a single error, and connected properly to every computer I plugged it into, without having to go into disk manager, run commands, etc., to plug in. And MOST BENEFICIALLY it didn't come with any files on the disk. So (I don't remember the size of it), if it was a 300GB drive, then, when I plugged it in, it ACTUALLY SAID 300GB. It didn't even say 299.7. It said 300. If I remember correctly there was a scattered file or two on it, but I didn't think they were programs (but could have been wrong - notice I didn't even know what the double-cord was for at the time), and they didn't try to initiate themselves. But all it took to delete them was to hit "delete". And then it was listed as a full 300GB drive (or whatever size it was).Although, that particular brand name is a bit hard to Google. This was back when Google was actually a search engine, about 2 years ago (as in, it had other products, but the search engine actually worked?), and it took a while to find their website then. Which was done to find out why it came with an extra USB plug on the cord... one of those drives that has two USB plugs so you can plug in both if using only one makes it slow. AND it warns about overheating "only use both if you're having trouble". ANOTHER thing that is never done by other companies.
Then the Target closest to my dad;s house stopped selling it and I could never find it again.
loekf - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Call me biased, but I have used several WDC MyBooks and they never let me down. They have more room for ventilation. A few weeks I had this drive (2 TB) and after one day I had seen enough.Poorly designed, never wanted to go into standby/sleep mode and overheating.
Yes, you can disable the sleep mode, but then IT IS ALWAYS spanning when attached to your PC and Windows up and running. Even when you power-down your PC and you leave the drive connected to the mains, the drive is so stupid to power up again by itself.
ricamiller - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Why couldn't you just remove the hard drive from the case and insert it into something like a Thermaltake docking station with esata?There's no enclosure so wouldn't this solve the heat problem?
Drag0nFire - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Yeah, this confuses me too. But it's not just Seagate. All external manufacturers are doing it, from big names (Seagate, Samsung, WD) to off-brands (Fantom, Cavalry). Market factors push for a drive that is small (no space for air ventilation) and cheap (no money for quality metal materials to radiate heat).I recently had to RMA a Samsung HDD for this reason. Small package, no ventilation. It would heat up to 55C and then the SMART would register read/write errors. And this was a "low-power" 5400RPM drive!
I bought a WD green drive in an enclosure. Doesn't solve the heat problem, but those drives are pretty hearty and I'm using it only for backup. If I were to use it more extensively, I think the only solution is to buy a HDD and enclosure separately.
designerfx - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
because they're too busy marketing external drives as the next best thing, when people don't realize how horrid most external drive solutions are when it comes to temperature.Not only that, but it's a humorous double win for HDD manufacturers (and double loss for consumers). They're charging you *more* than to buy it with an enclosure , and it will burn out years faster! double win as far as money goes.
2TB internal: $100 now. 2TB External - $125-150 (enclosures are a piece of plastic that costs them next to nothing to manufacture and they are usually priced at 25-50).. Not only that, but if the enclosure doesn't support USB3 or Sata2, you might lose it (even if the internal hard drive supports it).
jjzeal007 - Thursday, September 16, 2010 - link
Remember Google's study of 100,000 SATA/PATA hard drives in its data centers?One conclusion: There isn't as much of a correlation between drive temperature and failure rate as might be expected... excessively cooled drives actually failed more often than drives that ran a bit hot.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-...
Wolfpup - Thursday, September 16, 2010 - link
Yeah, I'm just baffled by how products like this keep getting released to the public by tech companies. That's COMPLETELY unacceptable.What's nuts is in every other way it seems perfect for what it is! I was interested in buying one until getting to the heat issue
taltamir - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
engineers can only point out problems and solution, management then decides NOT to implement them to save money.In the xbox RROD, the xbox scratched disks, and many other cases there are documentations showing that the engineers pointed out the problem and devised a solution... management decided its not worth the money and that they know better.
zdzichu - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
In first performance table you switched results for SATA and USB3.0 of 3TB drive.oc3an - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
The maximum integer which can be represented with 32 bits is 4294967295 i.e. 2^32 - 1 which allows for 4294967296 values. The article is worded incorrectly.mino - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
"...so the largest partition you can have in a MBR partitioned drive is 4294967296 * 512-bytes or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes..."Are you sure that is an incorrect wording?
mino - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
BIOS does support booting from GPT.It is the Windows boot loader that cannot boot from GPT on BIOS systems.
As a matter of fact I am writing this from Gigabyte 780G board running Ubuntu 10.04 on top of GPT(on top of LVM on top of MD on top of GPT).
yuhong - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
To be more precise, all that BIOS does is read the first sector of the drive, check for the signature at the end, and if it matches, then it jumps to the real mode x86 code at the beginning. It is actually partition scheme agnostic. Now some BIOSes are not quite partition scheme agnostic and will rely on the contents of the first sector being in the MBR format, luckily GPT support a protective MBR.baker269 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I would love to see what the Ethernet speeds are like. Not that great I would guess since it's not a true NAS, but still would be nice.mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
?? It doesn't have an ethernet interface does it? Speeds would be similar enough to any current-gen 7200 RPM drive already in a system on your LAN.baker269 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
From the forth paragraph of the article."The drives themselves are standard 3.5” hard drives in a plastic enclosure designed to mate with GoFlex Desk adapters that add USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or Ethernet connectivity to the drive."
It"s not as easy as just plugging in a hard drive with a RJ45 to a router, there needs to be some kind of CPU in between the two. NAS performance through Ethernet varies greatly.
derkurt - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Is it such a big deal that Windows doesn't boot from GPT drives if the BIOS is not EFI-capable? Whoever spends 400+ USD on a drive probably just needs lots of storage space for plain data. It's unlikely that there is no fast boot drive present in any system this drive is plugged into. Actually, since the first expansive 3 TB drives are bought by enthusiasts, chances are that the customers are already using an SSD as a boot drive.That said, in a realistic setting for a performance workstation with Windows 7 x64 installed on a 80+ GB SSD, there won't be a problem. You can connect the drive to the internal SATA connector, partition it with GPT and start using it, while your BIOS doesn't need to know anything about EFI or GPT. The heat issues might also look better when using the drive internally.
I don't understand why Seagate is holding back with selling the internal model. An estimated 95% of users will never even try to boot from it, and for the rest (who do want to boot from it but don't know about the 2+ TB issues), there could be a red warning note inside the box explaining the juicy details. After all, those who spend such an amount of money on a hard drive are not exactly the kind of people who have no clue about hard drives at all.
dryloch - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
One of Seagates biggest advantages has been that their external hard drives come with a 5 year warranty. Why would they go to a two year warranty on the most expensive drive they sell? If anything they should have at least gone with three years. If they don't even trust this drive then I sure won't. I'll be waiting for Western Digital to have their drive out.mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Too many platters, contributing to bearing wear and heat. IMO, the high price is partially to offset the higher chance of failure/RMA replacement cost even with a mere 2 year warranty. Of course it's also due to being the biggest drive available, the high end capacity luxury tax.shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
why not just get a raid card that has 64big lba and raid the drives in a raid0? I got a software raid5 card with pci-e 4x speed and 4 sata ports on it for 130 bucks. Its not a 3ware but it writes just as fast as my other computer can send it data. Plus if youre looking for that much space a raid is probably a good idea and you should get 3x 2tb drives and do a raid5 anyway for redundancy.shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
64bit* lba ... cant type before coffee sry.ClagMaster - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
You say 9.4ZB is an absurd amount of data.I say that 2TB is an absurd amount of data.
I have been using a 160GB drive paritioned into 3 partions and for six years I am not challenged with space.
shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Ive got over 1tb in just my music collection so 2tb isnt really that big of a number.mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Not really, just 200 or 300 songs in a proper format and your drive will be filled...mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
No wait, 300 songs is only 15 CDs, so let's say 1,000 or so songs, but either way that's a hell of a lot less then how many songs you're actually going to want, if human brains were actually capable of remembering all of them and if computers were capable of finding and properly formatting all of them.cjs150 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Ripping Blu-ray disks chews through a lot of hard disk space. Add in a daughter with lots of music and 2TB is not enough.I am looking for 6TB storage in a RAID 5 for my home as enough to keep me going at least for the next 5-6 years
abrar - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Isn't there any program that you give it the files (suppose your are going to copy / backup ~ 3TB of data ) you are going to copy , and set a temperature threshold , so that when it reaches that temperature, it stops , or reduces the speed of , copying and when temp. gets normal and it cools down, continues in normal mode. ?!that is quiet and idea !
mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Uh I thought SpeedFan did that.Quilty997 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I notice some posters have commented on using RAID 5 with very large disc sizesIf you do the math using the drive specs and published bit error rates you will find that a RAID 5 array using 1Tb+ discs very soon has a probability not possibility of having a disc error when rebuilding the array.
For this reason I went to RAID6. (using a dedicated controller to handle the parity calculations).
Please remember that RAID arrays are not a backup device.
Michael REMY - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
i can't image the day, even not for my ennemy, where it comes a 3TD hard drive will fail...What a lost it will be !
mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Why would you store valuable data on any one drive alone? Backups, backups backups.JonnyDough - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Until Seagate fixes their longevity issues and can offer a five year warranty that has a better failure rate I'll be sticking with other companies like Western Digital and Hitachi. I used to love Seagate. :(loekf - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Anand, did you actually review the power management features of this drive ? I had the 2 TB model.I noticed the same temperature issues and slowless at high temperatures. In my case I got 65 celsius as well.
Bigger issue I found the power management features, or better said lack of or poor implementation of them. This drive is supposed to be left attached to your PC. There's no on/off switch. So it will power-on and off depending on whether you switch your PC on and whether you access the drive.
Funny thing it will completely behaves by itself, it has its own will.
It willl automatically power on again after you SHUTDOWN your computer and you leave it plugged into the mains.
If you enable sleep mode, it will disable itself when it is not accessed for the specified period. But... it won't go into a sleep mode (= shutting down the drive), no it will unplug in Windows, and after a short period automatically re-insert itself. This means you will see popups or hear beeps indicating that device manager is triggered.
This is just plain stupid and indicating it's a bad product......
mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
I've never seen a drive that has an on/off switch! Except for the kind that you have to plug in separately, and that kinds of ruins the point of an "external drive" in the first place. Some public places don't even have accessible plugs, they literally put a lock on them. In other words no one would ever buy one unless they just don't know drives sometimes have separate plugs and therefore don't exhaustively evaluate the packing to ensure that the one they are getting doesn't.Aikouka - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Anand, I was curious if you were going to talk about the current USB 3.0 implementation and I was quite glad to see that you did make a note of it! :) But I'm curious... do you know of any motherboard manufacturers that have a better USB 3.0 implementation on the P55 chipset? I know the P55 is literally the red-headed stepchild in regard to its PCI-E bus compared to the X58 (uses PCI-E 1.1 compared to actual 2.0 lanes, has far fewer, etc), but as an example, my ASUS P7P55D-E motherboard uses that "combiner thingy-ma-bob" to combine the PCI-E lanes for SATA 6Gbs functionality. Do any boards do that for USB 3.0?loekf - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Not sure what you mean here. I know for a fact that AMD boards with ATI chipsets use a real PCIe 2.0 x1 lane to the NEC USB 3.0 host controller.There is no chipset yet with native USB 3.0 support. All motherboards maker use the same NEC USB 3.0 controller. Though, it seems there are controllers from VIA around, but I didn't see them yet.
GeorgeH - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
They're talking about P55 and LGA-1156. AMD hasn't made an Intel-compatible chipset in a very long time, and even if they had a P55 compatible license and the desire to make one, LGA-1156's PCIe controller isn't on the chipset.As a side note, that's also why LGA-1336 is going to be dead soon after LGA-1155 replaces LGA-1156; the Sandy Bridge derived Nehalem/Westmere replacement is going to have the PCIe controller on die.
snakeInTheGrass - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I understand saying that Seagate hasn't released this as a stand-alone drive because the PC hardware just isn't ready yet, but I was hoping they'd try it out on a Mac as well since it sounds like it should just work. It's a shame they won't sell it stand-alone and just label it 'For Intel Mac with EFI' (or hell, just sell it online with a note "For EFI machines only" label for PC users that do have working EFI or an extra internal disk) for the time being because I really don't want to buy another external case.mxnerd - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
10 years ago Seagate is all about quality. Not any more. Every retail drives ( more than 5) I bought from Seagate in the past five years gone bad before the 5-year warranty.The problem with Seagate drives? They are too hot.
WD only gives you 3-year warranty for their drives, but I'm buying them exclusively now.
mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
WHY WOULD ANYONE WHO AS ANY BRAND KNOWLEDGE EVER BUY A WD EXTERNAL DRIVE??!?Sottilde - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Hard to believe the engineers could be thick enough to put a mesh grille on the side for looks only, without providing any actual ventilation. A major oversight IMO, especially if you tend to pound on your hardware.Indigo64 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I realize this site and its standing on the web, but Google's test results show that hard drive temp isn't a factor for failure rates - at least not in the same manner in which people get all uptight about it.I have a laptop at home where the hard drive runs constantly around 50*C and it hasn't ever failed on me. I have a desktop system that has drives that run below 40*C and it's gone through three already.
"One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent
pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature
drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels.
Such correlations have been repeatedly highlighted
by previous studies, but we are unable to confirm them
by observing our population. Although our data do not
allow us to conclude that there is no such correlation,
it provides strong evidence to suggest that other effects
may be more prominent in affecting disk drive reliability
in the context of a professionally managed data center
deployment."
Interpret how you will, but if Seagate says this drive is fine without any active cooling, then why do people need to ding the drive for this "oversight"? It's all perceived performance stats in the PC realm - if it's hot, cool it down. If it's cool, don't bother it.
GeorgeH - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I don't have it in front of me, but IIRC the temperature range of that Google study was something like 10-50C, and they found that the sweet spot was 30-40C. 60C+ (as in this Seagate drive) isn't a "perceived" problem, it's a measurable one; re-read the paragraph where Anand found transfer rates dropping by 60%+ as the drive went into that range.wiak - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
ooh the irony ;)conwayboys - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Never ceases to amaze me why computer and drive manufacturers do not design cases with natural convection, struck me the other day at work when the IT boffins had a major crash due to a faulty fan in the server room. WTF there were three of them standing around designing a new air conditioning system for the server room. I got the step ladder and removed 4 panels from the false ceiling to allow the heat to escape into the roofspace, instant temperature drop, so why cant we employ the same thinking to computer cases and drive cases vent the top and the bottom ensuring hot air rising will pull cold air in from the bottom, obviously spillage issues with moisture getting in the vents, so the vents can be on the sides near the top with the fins slanted downwards still allowing hot air to escape.compuser2010 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
32-bit Windows 7 also supports GPT. However, only for *data* disks/arrays; even if the capacity is less than 2 TB. Formatting using GPT can be done in "Computer Management."2 TB may seem like a huge amount of memory to some. But it is an increasingly paltry amount of memory for those who edit video (especially uncompressed) and who work with Blu-ray Discs (copying a disc to another disc, copying discs to a computer, authoring discs, leaving those disc projects on the computer for a while, etc.).
Randomblame - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
oh wait that was ram... still. I could use 3tb right now but 5 platters - that's too many. I'll be waiting. My current setup is 3 500gb seagate baracuda 7200.12s in raid 0 backed up by a 2tb cuda. That way I've got only 3 platters spinning for low noise, reliability, and high data density. Though this thing uses 600gb platters which is nice I think I'll wait a bit maybe we'll get some higher data density per platter while we're waiting for microsoft and motherboard vendors to get this 2tb cap fixed.futbol4me - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
anyone know? i have an external 2.5" drive hanging off my apple extreme router that spins 24/7 but was wondering if newer external drives have some power savings features.Pastuch - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I am very confused on why the 3tb drives were not released as OEM. People looking for this kind of space are not looking to put the OS on that drive.Why not release the 3tb drives now, let us create GPT partitions in Windows and use the storage space. I need 12 terabytes ASAP! I would rather 4 drives instead of 6. Hopefully WD catches up soon.
Bytales - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - link
I didn't knew long heat means performance degradation in such a way that it reaches the jaw-dropping 1mb/s.In these cases, flash ssd seem to have the advantage. However, we still have to wait until ssd become more capacitous than hdd, to the point that creating a hdd is no longer worth it.
loekf - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link
Get a Western Digital MyBook 3.0, they only come in 1 TB and 2 TB flavours, but these keep itself cool. After copying 700 GB of data, temperate was steady at 43 celsius.mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Except, don't, because they require a separate plug, are absolutely humangous (literally, about 3" in DEPTH!), and will last about 2 weeks.dragunover - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Not.Seagate is terrible. In my own experience, it's been the only hard-drive out of many to fail. By far, I've had at least 4 Hitachi, 4 WD's, and a Samsung and none of them have failed. Then again, there's also the user-reported failure rates which report Seagate among the top...
MrSpadge - Saturday, September 4, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,you're doing a really great job on SSDs, but heres one paragraph I really disagree with:
"... and sequential performance is actually down from the 2TB drive due in part to the fact that we've got a smaller cache and generally less performance optimized drive with this external 3TB unit compared to the 2TB internal drive. Over USB 3.0 we actually get much better sequential performance apparently due to some additional buffering done by the USB 3 controller."
You're running into some bottleneck here using the internal SATA for the 3 TB drive. Was it in IDE mode? Or maybe just SATA1? If you take a look at the performance over capacity using this SATA port I bet you'll see a straight line at ~120 MB/s until about 1.5 TB and then a drop similar to what you're showing on the page "Performance vs. Capacity".
The reason is simple: on that page you're showing the drive hitting performance >120 MB/s over the entire first 1.5 TB using the USB 3 connection. This test is a sequential test over the entire drive, so ne pauses in between. Were this speed due to a buffer it had to be at least 1.5 TB big. Otherwise what you're seeing here is the real sequential performance of the drive.
And HDD caches influence real world benchmarks, but do not influence such sequential tests (think of it: even 64 MB are filled in just 0.5 s for such a drive, afterwards it's just plain "write them as fast as you can").
Best regards,
MrS
Rloew - Friday, October 1, 2010 - link
With some minor modifications to the MBR and FIlesystem code, the bare Hard Drive can be booted from without EFI and used in DOS and Windows 98SE. The USB 2.0 Interface can be used in Windows 98SE with a couple of Patches.Agent24 - Monday, October 18, 2010 - link
It makes no sense, unless they just didn't think to test what might happen to the drive temperature when stuck inside that little box and made to write data (who does that?)If it was cost, then that's stupid.
I expect these are quite expensive already, being new and 3TB. What's an extra $50 or whatever to get a decent case with some proper cooling vents or even a fan?
I definitely wouldn't buy one of these, not until they made a better case, and even then, I want to see the reliability of the drive itself.
The Sorcerer - Saturday, December 25, 2010 - link
On the 2 paragraph, 4th page you said:"While you can plug a SATA power cable directly into the drive, the enclosure prevents you from sticking a SATA data cable in there - not without trimming away part of the plastic surrounding the cable’s SATA connector at least."
You don't need to trim it. The SATA cable from the Asus boards are slightly thinner connectors. You should be able to do it. I've done it on the Seagate GoFlex 500GB PRO review:
http://www.hardwarebbq.com/2010/12/seagate-freeage...
Infact, when you run Crystal DIsk Information even when the drive is connected via USB mode, it detects the model but it will show that its scaled down to SATA 150 (I got a USB 2.0 as a sample).
Just my 2 cents :).
infoage2000 - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link
I have (or had) this 3 TB drive, and three months later it has died. The error; drive needs formatting. So in hopes it was the enclosure I bought a USB to SATA tester and have confirmed it is the drive. I knew better not to stray from the 1 and 1.5 TB drives which have always been reliable. The one lousy time I don't have backups for two directories I copied over....shaking my head in disgust.BurnSeagate - Saturday, December 17, 2016 - link
Worthless piece of shit company that makes worthless products. I hope they lose every lawsuits and bankrupt. Again death to this piece of shit company.