BEWARE unreliable Seagate HDs (esp. 7200.11 & 7200.14)

I saw this article:
http://www.myce.com/news/class-action ... 3tb-barracuda-hdds-78515/

Basically the 7200.11 and the 3TB 7200.14 have an extremely high failure rate.

So I thought I better check my Amiga which also uses a 7200.11 . I didn't believe what the command-line SMART tool on my Amiga was telling me, so I plugged it into my PC - it confirmed my worst fears:

1952 bad blocks (reallocated sectors)

I'm surprised my Amiga is even still working at all (most Windows PCs would have become unusably slow & crashy after 10 to 100 bad blocks).

At this point I fear for my data's integrity, but at least I have most of my files synced/backed-up to my PC (thanks to FolderSync2+FTP Mount+File Zilla+AmigaAttributes+some scripts).

Oops!

I wonder what's in my X1000 as original. Fortunately I make regular backups to my second 2TD WD Green disk using BackUp

I remember when I was working as a technician at the university a long time ago and personell got new machines with IBM deathstar (deskstar ) 20-40-60-80GB in them. They pretty much all failed within a year

Given that a 3TB HDD has almost 6 million sectors, having 2000 bad ones is not such a big deal.

As you can see, they have been reallocated automatically by the drive, the OS didn't even see them as bad.

Once the OS reports a bad sector is when you should start to worry.

OTOH using a 3TB HDD is stupid anyway. If it dies, 3TB of data is lost for good. You only need to drop it or hit it by accident and it is dead.

Even nowadays 80GB or 160GB is plenty of space for OS, programs and data.

If you need to store huge amounts of data, you shouldn't save it on a single harddrive but rather on a RAID of some kind which does not lose anything if only one of many disks fails.

@thomas
I shall have to disagree with most of what you said
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My HD isn't 3TB! But anyway, the relative number of bad sectors is irrelevant:

A large/increasing number of "bad blocks" indicates that the hard drive is physically failing (many possible mechanisms, so no point in arguing about exactly what "failing" means). Not only that, but typically the HD is having great difficulty reading even some "good" sectors, so (for example) Windows will run really slowly (or even freeze for long periods). I've seen this very often.

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No. By the time the OS sees any "true" bad sectors, the HD has likely already catastrophically failed, and data recovery may be impossible.

It may be the case that HDs are "supposed" to handle a few bad sectors, through automatic recovery & correction, but in my experience they perform very badly (recovery & correction takes a long time compared to the few milliseconds a read/write should take), and above a few bad sectors they likely indicate HD will soon fail.

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Buying new HDs below (say) 500MB is almost impossible (they'll be very old stock at best).

It's also wrong to say 160GB is "plenty of space". That depends entirely on what you are doing. Certainly MORE LIKELY on an Amiga, but that's not a guarantee by any means.

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In an ideal world, yes. But frequent backups are a good alternative. And I don't think Amigas support RAID anyway...

@Deniil
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Just open Media Toolbox and you will see what drive you have. Open mounter and you will also see what drive you have. My X1000 came with an Hitachi drive.

@xenic

IBM and Hitachi drives are off the same assembly line AFAIK, unless that has changed again.

@All, personally I have managed to plug 3x 500GB drives into my sam440 and partitioned everything in such a way as to have lots of mirrors present.

not raid at all but independent filesystems

I've already been bitten once in losing everything on an A4000 due to HDD failure

It doesn't really take a genius to figure out that if you're squeezing 3TB (or whatever) of data into a space the same size and using the same technology as you'd get.. perhaps 500MB twenty years ago... then you've squashed the sectors so close together, made the platters thinner, put more platters in, more drive heads... yeah, it's not going to be as reliable. When you're working at that scale it doesn't take much to damage a sector. I'm sure if you experiment with attacking CD and Blu-ray with a scourer you'll find that CDs are more reliable too. It's *exactly* the same principle, even down to more data per layer and more layers.

If you want reliable, you are probably better off with an SSD as you cut out mechanical failure. But regardless, always back up. Never trust a data storage medium.

A follow-up to my first post:

I used Linux to copy the entire Amiga harddrive onto an identical harddrive (yes, it's another 7200.11 but this currently only has 1 bad sector, so fine as a temporary measure).

The strange thing is that even though I copied /dev/sdd to /dev/sde (or something like that), which should be an exact copy of the entire drive, the Amiga couldn't see any partitions because the RDB was corrupt or missing. Linux doesn't (or shouldn't) assume MBR or GPT at that level of abstraction, so I'm puzzled why the RDB was nuked.

(Note: Thankfully no unrecoverable sectors were detected by Linux, so it performed a fully copy.)

First I had to initialise the drive using Media Toolbox, but then of course the partitions were missing. So I then restore the RDB from a binary backup I'd made with Media Toolbox... But oddly OS4.1FE's Media Toolbox refused to restore the backup it'd made, so I had to use the old 68k util ReadRDB instead!!! Seems like a nasty OS4 bug :(

That gave me all my partitions. The 3rd-party SFScheck confirmed all my partitions (except SFS2 one it can't check) were not corrupted. I then used RHash to generate hashes of all the files on the main partitions, copied this to my PC, modified the stored paths to match those on my PC, and then used the Windows port of RHash to compare the file hashes. Amazingly no corruption (well 1 byte in 1 file, but that appears to have occurred in the original FTP network backing-up from Amiga to PC, without going into details).

So now I am looking to copy my temporary 7200.11 HD onto my shiny new HD. Since my new HD uses Advanced Format (aka 4K sectors), I'm going to have to align all my partitions to 8 cylinder boundaries, and then possibly use 4096 byte blocks with SFS (even though this isn't officially supported anymore on OS4). Shame that OS4 lacks the ability to move/resize partitions, without destroying their contents.

@ChrisH

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Did you use dd? That's the only way you're likely to get an exact copy of the drive. You also need to make sure you copy /dev/sdd rather than /dev/sdd1, but it sounds like you've done that.

@Chris

Yes, higher density put a lot higher demand on things, but it's not the same technology as 500MB disks. Yeah, sure, platters and heads, but that's pretty much it. Someone won the nobel prize in physics for some quantum mechanics discovery that made it possible to compress data far more denser than before and still read and write reliably.

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I find SSDs to fail a lot more often than harddisks (except when someone makes a bad batch, like these 7200.11 and 7200.14, and the old 20-80GB IBM DeathStar (ehrm, DeskStar) disks).

SSDs are also a lot denser than harddisks.

@Chris Quote:
Something better than dd, which copes with failing HDs :).

@Deniil
I personally don't trust SSDs yet, although they are much improved over what they used to be. (SSDs have limited write cycles.)

@ChrisH

I use Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital drives.
I've had about 50 disks so far, ranging from 80 GB to 3 TB, both 2.5" and 3.5", and the Seagate have gone bad more often than the others.

Now I only use Seagate when I get them for free, and I only use them in Raid.

I also have not used SSD yet. They cost more and may have a reduced lifespan.

Just follow-up my progress recovering my Amiga:

Since my new HD had a different size, and was Advance Format (4K sectors), I had to recreate my partitions from scratch (rather than just copying the RDB).

I then used BackItAllUp to copy all my partitions from my old HD to my new one overnight. Chose it partly because it's by Colin Wenzel (the guy responsible for AmigaDOS on OS4) so presumably should be accurate copying soft links & stuff (I saw the popular BackUp recently had a bug fix in handling soft links on OS4.1FE), and partly because I could set-up all the partition copies in advance & just leave it running overnight. The interface looks really retro/ugly, but functionally worked fine. It also has nice facility to copy the time-stamps for folders.

I then used BackUp to verify each partition one at a time, just to be sure. It found that comments (and protection bits) of folders were not copied, and also gave some wierd warnings about soft links, and even wierder warning about some protection bits... but the soft links seem to work, and the protection bits look correct, so maybe comparison bug(s) in BackUp?

Since I wanted to ensure an exact copy of comments & soft links, I then used by little shell utility of mine called AmigaAttributes (the version on my homepage is way out of date, I should probably upload a new version) to backup & restore comments, soft links & protections bits exactly. Still got wierd warnings about soft links & protection bits, but comments were fixed, so I think other warnings are bug in BackUp.

edit: I've now renamed the new partitions to be the same as the old ones, and successfully booted with the new HD :) . Although I haven't provided much detail in these posts, I hope they may be of some use to anyone else who runs into a similar problem...

@ChrisH

Could you send me a log of the weird output from BackUp?
It really shouldn't give any warnings if all is fine.
What could probably happen is if a file is read protected, it can't read it. It could also have problems with softlinks that point to devices or assigns that aren't mounted.

Still, would be very interesting to see what files it came up with these warnings for.

I don't trust any magnetic media storage device and especially those darn CD/DVD's arghhh

!

I've now installed SMARTdock so I get warned of any future SMART failures:
http://os4depot.net/index.php?functio ... ility/docky/smartdock.lha