Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB

I now seem to have 4 error free drives as well. I am noticing reads from the NAS not being anywhere near the speed my 4 320G drives were though. Hope to have more empirical evidence soon.

We have reallocated sector counts on ST31500341AS drives (firmware CC1H)
and the reallocated count is keep increasing. Now, it is 6 for the drive that run less than 150 hours.
This is a replacement drive shipped directly from Seagate.
The original drive (firmware SD17) has loud metal clink noises when the drive spins and idle.
Thus, RMA and now we got another trouble drive.

Called Seagate to resolve but no solution.
It seems that they know about the issue but try to hide and blame the third party software that detected the reallocated sector count, which is “S.M.A.R.T. - Industrial standard”. The technician/warranty supports are not willing to let us talk with their supervisor/Team Lead when asked. The only thing that they can do is to issue a RMA and we have to pay for shipping cost of their brand-new defective drive and get another defective drive back even we just got the replacement drive less than 2 weeks. If you plan to contact Seagate’s supports, try to submit a case online before call and get resp. name, his/her alias (you can find this online on the last column of your case), and their team lead name.

It seems that the only way for Seagate to admit the issue and get it solved is via a “Class Action Lawsuit”.
Just keep all screenshots and video records about the drive issues for lawsuit and send complaint letters to Seagate’s Executives about their drive and their customer supports.

Seagate’s Executives:
Stephen J. Luczo, Chairman of the Board, CEO and President
Bob Whitmore, CTO
Brian Dexheimer (Division President, Consumer Solutions)

Seagate Technology Headquarters
920 Disc Dr
Scotts Valley, CA 95066
Phone: (720) 684-3344
Fax: (405) 324-4774
Contact: Ralph Picker - Manager, Global Customer Respo

Of the 4 drives I am currently running, one has 1 sector re-allocation, and the other just grew to 4 and will be replaced. I wanted 4 good drives. I have now check out 8 drives, and this will be the 9th. Far from happy. Seagate always did well for me before, but they need to get it together. This is terrible.

I initially bought four of these drives for my diskless ReadyNAS NV+ I put them in the ReadyNAS and within a week or two RMA'd two of them due to sector reallocations errors. A third one has generated some sector reallocations, but seems to have settled with a number under 10 (I don't recall the exact number).

Around the same time I bought my ReadyNAS, I also bought a cheap DLink NAS that I was going to use as a back-up. I bought three more of the 1.5TB drives (two for the DLink and one to have on hand as a spare). I've been unhappy with the DLink NAS and just bought a second diskless ReadyNAS. So, here's my dilemma: Do I buy one more 1.5TB drive and it it, along with the three "extra" 1.5TB drives (two from the DLink and the spare) in the second ReadyNAS? Or, do I just buy four 1TB drives for the second ReadyNAS? I hate to spend another $400 or so for four 1TB drives, but I'm concerned about the reliability issues with the 1.5TB drives.

I bought (4) 1.5TB Seagates about 1.5 weeks ago.

(1) has 1 Relocatted
(1) has 4 Relocated (grew from 1 to 4 today)

I have one 1.5tb drive. Seagate obviously. Its the CC1G firmware. I have one Reallocated sector after 88 hours.

Besides that, seems like a solid drive so far.

Spin Up Time 0 Start Stop Count 21 Reallocated Sector Count 1 Power On Hours 134 Spin Retry Count 0 Power Cycle Count 13 Temperature Celsius 39 Current Pending Sector 0 Offline Uncorrectable 0 UDMA CRC Error Count 0 Head Flying Hours 159175782957171

Thats the Smart info so far, if it means anything.


Doing a restore currently. It's running at an average of 10mb, from USB connected HDD to Nas. Taking a heck of a long time.

I have 4 1.5TB drives, firmware SD1A, and after 3-4 months my reallocated sector count has remained at 0.

I have 4 of these drives in one of my NV+.

All 4 drives are SD1A firmware, having upgraded from SD17 and errors started before the SD1A firmware was applied. Counts are as follows:

1) Realloc Count: 13, Spin Retry: 1
2) Realloc Count: 6, Spin Retry: 25
3) Realloc Count: 10, Spin Retry: 3
4) Realloc Count: 1, Spin Retry: 19

Every so often the NV+ will mail me to say there are growing SMART errors. At one point, just switching the NAS box off and back on caused the Reallocated Sector Count to increase.

I have lost any confidence I had in Seagate drives and all 4 are being replaced by WD 1TB drives - the 1.5TB drives are total junk.

Balders.

The problem does not seem to be limited to just the 1.5 TB drives. For the past year or two, the quality of the 1 TB and the 500 GB drives has decreased significantly as well.

Personally, I've purchased a total of seven 1 TB seagate drives in the last 12 months and 4 of these have developed reallocated sector problems (and one of the warranty replacements developed problems). It may also be of interest to note that I started by buying only the enterprise versions of the drives (NS series) but when 2 of the original 4 drives developed problems I decided there was no point paying more for the enterprise drives since they were no better than the home drives (AS series).

In another case, a friend purchased four 1 TB drives and had 2 of these develop problems.

Most recently another friend purchased a ReadyNAS Duo with two 500 GB drives and one of the two drives started reported reallocated sectors and then completely failed before he got round to replacing it.

This is hardly scientific but based on my direct experiences, I put Seagate reliability at no better than 50% over the first 12 months of operation. Their warranty costs must be killing them. By the way, I did complain loudly at having to replace a replacement drive and got a prepaid shipping label from them for free - I didn't have to pay to return the "replacement".

Can anyone advise on which brands may be more reliable these days as I'm getting pretty sick of Seagate myself.

Hi,

I just got 4 ST31500341AS drives with Firmware SD17. The compatibility list says, that they are supported only with firmware SD1A (or newer).

I got the firmware SD1B from seagate.com, but the software wouldn't update the drives. It says, the update is only for P/N 9JU138-300 or 9JU138-366. My drives have the P/N 9JU138-500. I checked the individual serial numbers on seagate.com and the result for all drives was, they are not affected by the bug, whish is fixed with the actual software.

Now I have 4 drives with firmware SD17, which is the newest one there is (for these drives) and the compatibility list says I have to have a newer firmware.

What should I do? :?:

Greetings
msinn