My Gigabyte Bit Me - - A Tale of Woe

[Corey340]

Once upon a time, a SageTV user got bored with the extra money he had and decided to upgrade the data drive on his media center. Several days later, a man in a brown uniform brought him two brand new shiny 1.5 terabyte drives. He was very excited at the prospect of adding three terabytes to his media center but thought that maybe he should mirror them. After all, 1.5TB should be enough, right?? Wrong.

Why waste 1.5TB when you can put it into another computer.

So, he replaced the tiny 500GB drive with the 1.5TB monster and went on merrily recording all his favorite shows without erasing ANYTHING.

Time passed (tic-toc) and one day after work, he grabbed the Streamzap remote from his holster (wait... this isn't a western) from his kid, turned off the cartoon network and to his horror, SageTV told him he had no recorded shows.

editors note: Blah, blah... story is getting too long... wrap it up!

Well, the drive partially failed (S.M.A.R.T is D.U.M.B.) and now he spends all his time copying 1.3TB of recordings to the other drive with write caching turned off.

The moral of the story is, if you have large capacity drives, mirror them or you will have to write your own tale of woe.

[SHS]

Seagate?, 1.5 TB models have know failing at alarming rate.

[Oats]

Originally Posted by SHS

Seagate?, 1.5 TB models have know failing at alarming rate.

Me and a friend both got 3 of these right after they fixed the firmware issue. Haven't had any problems at all. But if you have one you need to make sure you have the newest firmware or you could run into some problems.

[pir]

FWIW I've been running a single Western Digital "Green Power" WD15EADS 1.5 TB drive (two partitions) in my HTPC for coming up on a year with no issues whatsoever.

It runs cool, is "Fast Enough" and is HUGE. It's about 1/3 full, and I have a crap-ton of stuff on there. Eventually I'll start to worry about back-up, by then, I should be able to pick up a couple more 1.5's for less than the first one. I doubt I'll mirror, more likely just routine off-line backups. I have multiple backups already of music & photos -- and no backups at all for TV or movies -- but hey, it's just TV. If I lose a few shows, I'll go buy 'em or stream 'em. I would certainly lament losing my movie jukebox, since I won't want to re-rip (and convert to h.264!) all those DVDs again... maybe I should start backing up sooner, rather than later...

I did run it as a test setup for about 3 months before replacing my old gear with it -- since most drives (in my experience) that fail, fail early.

[simonen]

I bought 2 1.5TB seagates and both failed (had latest firmware). They were doing a lot of clicking after about 1 month and was getting the BSOD. I put the replacements in my NAS and mirrored them. Put 2 (1TB) WDs in my server, because I know I can reply on those and they get used daily.

[davephan]

Were you able to get Seagate to replace the drives? If so, what was the process? What information do you need to tell them? How long does it take? It would help to be prepared in case I have a drive failure.

I have 4 - 1.5 TB Seagate drives. So far, they are all running without problems. I should have RAID, but I don't. Usually RAID will protect your files, but I have seen RAID fail, although not very often. I think I will use RAID on my next SageTV computer. Most of my video files could be lost, and I could get more videos to fill up the drives again, so I am not too concerned with loosing a drive - although it hasn't happened yet. Maybe I would feel different after a drive loss. I do have some video files I do not want to loose that are backed up to USB hard drives. My photos are stored on four different hard drives.

Dave

[mayamaniac]

http://support.seagate.com/customer/...validation.jsp

As long as the drives are under warranty, they will replace them. From my experience, they replace the drives with little or no questions asked.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

http://support.seagate.com/customer/...validation.jsp

As long as the drives are under warranty, they will replace them. From my experience, they replace the drives with little or no questions asked.

I'm about to send one back to Seagate. I don't have a seashell case. How have you packaged yours in the past? Have you always used SeaShell cases, or have you gotten away with another type of packaging?

Thanks,