ST2000DL003 Barracuda - 2TB

Anyone know why these drives are not listed on the official compatibility list for the NV+ v2?

Thanks...

-lj

I also migrated these 2 Barracudas from Duo to Ultra 2 and for now they are just fine...

I bought two of these drives for a new Ultra 4+ in Dec 2011. They were cheap, green, from a reputable manufacturer and on the Hardware Compatibility List...

They ran fine for a month or so but really only used for music streaming for a Sonos system. I then bought another 2 in Jan 2012 to fill the unit and allow me to store all my DVD's, Photo's, Home Movies and PC/Mac backups on it.

While installing the second pair of drives, I had a 'disk failure detected' during the expansion process (X-RAID2). After raising a thread elsewhere on the forum and a ticket with Netgear to ask for help, I found that a factory reset followed by a data restore from backup was needed to get me up and running. The drive reported as dead miraculously came alive and all seemed well.

Roll forward to today (Mar 2012) and after daily use (but not intensive use by any means), I have a different drive reported as failed. My volume is therefore not protected but data is still accessible (incremental USB backup running as I write this). If another drive goes, I'll be neck deep in the smelly stuff.

While looking on the Forums to solve my expansion problem in January, I came across lots of reports of problems with these drives in various models of ReadyNAS. Although similar, my situation at the time was not identical. Today, however, I am a full member of the 'DO NOT BUY SEAGATE ST2000DL003 DRIVES FOR YOUR READYNAS' club.

I will be researching a replacement and will not base my decision on cost.

For those interested, here is the full model number and firmware version of the drives I bought: -

Model: ST2000DL003-9VT166
Firmware: CC3C

I am with you 100% on this. I bought a new Pro 6 with 6 of these drives. I've had to RMA 4 (or 5) of them now. However, I've had far more disc failures where the Readynas marks the drives as dead. Readynas Support have been helpful in that they've managed to coax these discs to life after they are marked as dead. Although they'd not been able to do much more. I guess that it was a mistake that this drive ever made it to the HCL, but I think the real fault must lie with Seagate for selling such a faulty drive and even worse not fixing this with a firmware update, or even acknowledging the problem.

I've replaced two of the drives with enterprise class drives and as soon as disc drives prices drop again I'll be replacing the other four. Until then the unti is surviving with all high disc activity curtailed. For example Time Machine will cause a drive to fail within minutes.

As a long time Seagate user, I have to agree that this drive is to be avoided. Especially if you connect to the NAS with Macs. For some reason it seems to not like Macs. The problems this drive has had is one reason I expanded my NVX units with Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630 drives (along with the fact that the 3TB drives at the time were just about $20 more than the 2TB drives).

They may do fine in PC applications but seem to have problems in RAID configurations.

I've been running two of these drives in a ReadyNas NV+ V2 (Raid 0) for about a month now with no problems. I can access them from my MacPro running Lion with no problems.

-lj

Do you have Time Machine enabled to the NAS? I don't see the drives failing solely with Macs but with anything that causes a lot of disc access. For example using Rsync over ssh from a Linux box to backup a lot of very small files also causes them to drop out.

Yes - I have Time Machine backups enabled backing up about 2TB of data.

-lj

I wonder if it's the fact that you have Raid0 that helps then? That would cut the disc writes literally by 50% to a single drive.

Do you have this exact same drive:

ST2000DL003-9VT166

.
Anyway good luck with them

Yup, same drive. I don't know the firmware version tho...

I've just switched over to X-RAID2. I'll see how that goes and update this thread in a week or two...

-lj