Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166

dkerr wrote:
The ST2000DL003-9VT166 drives are not reliable in ReadyNAS systems, at least with firmware CC32. No one has been able to find newer firmware to try to establish whether that would fix them. In the absence of official word from either Seagate or Netgear/ReadyNAS I would not use these drives.

Thanks - I'll be returning them!

You have 30 days to exchange them, you could maybe wait a day or so, and see if the document from beisser is helpful.

StephenB wrote:
You have 30 days to exchange them, you could maybe wait a day or so, and see if the document from beisser is helpful.

Not a terrible idea . . . especially since I'd need to wait until the return was processed before I'd be able to pickup new drives. How quickly have these things been failing when they do fail? Is there data loss, or it is just a nuisance?

Also - does anyone know if every ST2000DL003 has the problem, or just the "9VT166" ?

Thanks,
Chris

For what it's worth, I've installed 2 of these in a Pro 6. I'm about 12 hours in and so far no obvious issues . . .

The problem will not appear in 12 hours. It could be several weeks, then one day you'll get a drive failure detected email (make sure that you have email alerts turned on and test that it works). The channel will report as "dead". Sometimes simply shutting down, turning off and turning back on will cause the volume to resync. Sometimes you need to take the drive out, "erase" it elsewhere and plug it back in to cause the resync.

My last failure was June 21st. Prior to that was June 12th... June 2nd... May 22nd... March 23rd... March 11th. You get the idea -- these are not drives you can trust.

DAK

I've got 6 of these in an Ultra6 with no problems whatsoever over the last 4 months. Firmware for all is CC3C if that helps anyone.

beisser wrote:
dkerr wrote: beisser wrote: well i said we are working on a doc, so be patient please. I have been... very patient... 9+ months. How much longer are you asking us to be patient? The "dead" drive problem happens so frequently for me that I have lost patience. DAK dont blame me for seagate taking so long to fix their harddrives.. we will publish the doc with links to the files when its ready.

I don't blame you for Seagate's problem. I don't blame you for anything.

I do blame ReadyNAS for putting these drives on the HCL when they clearly had no business being there.

Appropriate customer service would be to give a date when you expect that document to be ready. Excellent customer service would be working round the clock to get it done. You can probably guess what sort of customer service I think "don't blame me, be patient" is.

When you are waiting for another company to solve a problem it is impossible to provide a date for anything. The original version of these drives may have worked fine. This happens when companies start "tweaking" their products and do not change the model numbers. This is one reason there is no longer an HCL for memory modules, they companies changed the chip arrangement and they were no longer reliable. The old ones worked, the new ones with the same model did not. This also happened with another manufacturer when they changed a drive around, but kept the same model number.

PapaBear wrote:
When you are waiting for another company to solve a problem it is impossible to provide a date for anything.

I'm neutral on how you want to run PR and not looking to contribute to the ill will in some of the threads, but maybe it might be (or might have been) a good move to pull the drive from the HCL, and even a super-move to ask Amazon not stop bundling them (which is the deal I bought my Pro 6 with). I will promptly return my pitchfork to the shed.

PapaBear wrote:
... This happens when companies start "tweaking" their products and do not change the model numbers.

I hear that! Compaq did this to a company I was consulting for years back - the same model laptop with the same SKU, but suddenly the laptops started coming with Atheros wireless cards instead of Intel (or maybe the other way around). It was a huge pain in the ass to not only mirror and update the Windows 2000 images, but also to have to check before deploying the image which card was installed. I don't recall why they didn't do the driver installation post-image as a fix, but there was a reason... :roll:

stannenb wrote:

I decided to do a warranty return of a couple of disks that had failed out of my ReadyNAS just to see what happened. Seagate is, at the moment, out of stock of this model disk drive, with no expected ship date. So, at this point, I have a bunch of disks that "fail" regularly and were made, retroactively, incompatible with my ReadyNAS and no clear path to make them compatible. This is rather unfortunate and raises questions, to me, about what sort of testing is done to include a disk on the HCL and the commitment there is to standing behind past assertions of compatibility.

Seagate's back in stock and shipped two replacement drives that came with the CC32 revision firmware. So, that didn't help.