Caveat Emptor!

Jeff Zylstra · June 27, 2013, 11:28:51 AM

Just thought I'd issue a "buyer beware" warning on the new Seagate Momentus SSHD drives. I just bought a 500 Gig Momentus drive a couple of months ago in a new Dell Optiplex 7010. It just took a dirt nap after only 2 months. For those of you who aren't aware of them, the Momentus is a hybrid drive that uses a small Solid State Drive cache in conjunction with spinning platters.

My problems started out with Event ID 9 messages indicating IAStor as the subject of the event. The system would freeze, I mean even the time and date would freeze. Investigated and found several possible causes and recommendations. The first was not to use the IAStor driver, but rather use the Microsoft driver. Apparently the Microsoft driver is both faster and more stable. The second issue was a too aggressive Link State Power Management setting. I ended up turning it off completely.

To make a long story short, 2 different hard drive testing utilities saw messages in the SMART circuitry that the drive was damaged. Spinrite 6.0 wouldn't run on it, and I had a horrible time getting chkdsk to run as well, but I won't hate on Windows 7's automated startup recovery.

If you have these drives in any of your machines you should be a little cautious and make an image and/or at least a Windows backup.

Bob · June 27, 2013, 11:54:55 AM

Good to know, thanks Jeff!

Jeff Zylstra · June 27, 2013, 12:16:54 PM

Quote from: Bob Connor on June 27, 2013, 11:54:55 AM
Good to know, thanks Jeff!

No problem. Being that this was my personal computer I didn't image it right away, I had to repair the drive before I can back it up. Windows Backup is running right now, and I'm thinking of using my system rescue CD to clone the partitions as well, since I think that works at a lower level level that might not be affected by irregularities in the Windows file structure.

I wasn't even done loading all of the programs and old files off the old computer. Stupid me. When will I learn to do an image and backup right away!?

Conan_Ward · June 27, 2013, 01:32:17 PM

Is it still buyer beware if you got it for free?

I'm just using it for storage/games and not as a system drive and have been for a few months now, worst case, I lose the disc, i just tell steam to download everything again and the cloudsaves put my progress back. I think other games on the disc are MMO's, so install the client and it's good...

Thankfully in my situation, if I do have a bad one, its possibly my most replaceable drive.

Bloody Jack Kidd · June 27, 2013, 03:51:44 PM

My next Latitude is slated to have a hybrid drive... oh dear.

Jeff Zylstra · June 28, 2013, 09:25:48 AM

Quote from: Bloody Jack Kidd on June 27, 2013, 03:51:44 PM
My next Latitude is slated to have a hybrid drive... oh dear.

The ratings on TigerDirect and other websites say good things about them, but as we all know no one goes back after the drive fails to update the posts. It's been a long time since I've seen a system freeze to the point where the time and date is 2 days old. Brings me back to the old days of DOS!

On another note, I bought Spinrite 6.0 several years ago, and it is still "current" apparently and still works on all popular drives. I got a replacement drive that has been "refurbished", so I will check it out with Spinrite after I get good backups and good images of it.

On another note, apparently Windows 7 Pro has some issues with the new USB 3.0 drives. I can get 92% of the way through a Windows backup, then I get a "0x80070032" error relating to the USB drive being used as the target for the backup.

I think I'll go back to using my System Resue CD. I'm leaning towards using the NTFSClone utility, since it has a "Rescue" option that ignores bad sectors during cloning operations. Even though I ran CHKDSK twice and I think it is clean at the software level, the SMART circuitry in the drive was sending messages so I have to think that running DD to do a direct clone of the drives is going to fail when it hits the bad sectors. If anyone has words of wisdom, "I'm all ears".

Mark · June 28, 2013, 09:29:17 AM

If you have enough space, you could use the local drive as the backup destination, then script it to copy over to the USB drive once it's complete. Or manually move it, depending on if you're sitting there or scheduling backups.

just an idea.

Jeff Zylstra · June 28, 2013, 09:54:24 AM

Quote from: Mark on June 28, 2013, 09:29:17 AM
If you have enough space, you could use the local drive as the backup destination, then script it to copy over to the USB drive once it's complete. Or manually move it, depending on if you're sitting there or scheduling backups.

just an idea.

Right now I'm so untrusting of running Windows off from this drive, that I think I want to boot off from a CD and run some utility that ignores bad blocks on the hard drive. That is definitely a keeper for the backup after I get it running though, since the machine already has a second hard drive in it. Thanks, Mark. +1

Jeff Zylstra · July 08, 2013, 03:04:24 PM

Drama over, but I did learn a few things...

First, Linux is way more useful in dealing with Windows hard drive problems than Windows is. I used System Rescue CD and had very good luck with it once I polished up on my Linux again. My natural inclination is to mount a drive/device in order to access it in Linux. I have to remember that the utilities are smarter than I am and will do this if they need to.

The NTFSClone utility did not care that there were bad blocks on the drive and copied over everything on the partition which resulted in no lost data! Windows coughed and died quite easily during the process of copying the bad partition. I highly recommend System Rescue CD since it has RSync, TestDisk, NTFSClone, DD, Gedit, GParted and a few other handy utilities. Saved my rear end. You Unix/Linux gurus already know this, but I just want to encourage anyone who doesn't use it to at least familiarize yourself with a wonderful tool. Especially if you run a server.

Second, I am not all that impressed by USB drives. Whether it is a timing issue, cabling issue or whatever, USB drives seem to fail too often during backups and restores. I prefer eSATA drives if I have a choice, since I've never had an issue with my external IOSafe eSATA backup drive, but have frequent issues with USB drives that I use as secondary backup devices to take off site.

Third, apparently USB 3.0 is much more finicky than USB 2.X. I ended up plugging in my USB 3.0 drive into a 2.0 USB port on the back of my new computer in order to get it to work. The 3.0 port would get 92% done, and then crap out. The extra speed was not worth it. Take the reliability of 2.0 for backups.

A frustrating experience, but a good lesson. Even new computer hard drives crash, and backing up should be one of the FIRST things you do, and you shouldn't wait until everything is installed or you might not have anything.

Mark · July 08, 2013, 03:18:18 PM

Quote from: Jeff Zylstra on July 08, 2013, 03:04:24 PM
Even new computer hard drives crash....

Just a side note on this comment: 2 out of the 6 drives we ordered post-flooding have already gone bad. We ordered them just about as soon as Dell would let us. All 6 are in the same array, and luckily (see our RAID discussion! lol) both were not at the same time.

I do expect the other 4 to die. Meanwhile, the 6 in the other array -- pre-flooding -- are in superb condition.

You know the saying "sure don't make 'em like they used to."

Jeff Zylstra · July 08, 2013, 04:35:42 PM

Quote from: Mark on July 08, 2013, 03:18:18 PM
Quote from: Jeff Zylstra on July 08, 2013, 03:04:24 PM
Even new computer hard drives crash....

Just a side note on this comment: 2 out of the 6 drives we ordered post-flooding have already gone bad. We ordered them just about as soon as Dell would let us. All 6 are in the same array, and luckily (see our RAID discussion! lol) both were not at the same time.

I do expect the other 4 to die. Meanwhile, the 6 in the other array -- pre-flooding -- are in superb condition.

You know the saying "sure don't make 'em like they used to."

Given that you lose a lot more than the the value of the electronics when a hard drive dies, it would seem that someone somewhere would track this. Just wondering if anyone at all keeps track of the failure rate of hard drives? I would gladly give up a few milliseconds of speed for added reliability.

Mark · July 08, 2013, 04:43:16 PM

Consumer Reports? lol

Alice Mooney · July 08, 2013, 06:12:24 PM

go here and search "computer". used start date of 1/1/2010. Saw more than I thought I would.

http://www.recalls.gov/

Jeff Zylstra · July 09, 2013, 08:34:42 AM

Checked the Recalls.Gov site, but all it had were recalls for the power adapters on portable hard drives. Nothing for reliability. I didn't check Consumer Reports, but I'm not holding out any hope. I would think that things would have to get to a scandalous level before it hit their radar.

Jeff Zylstra · July 09, 2013, 10:40:22 AM

oh wouah ! C'est vraiment effrayant !

Translation - Holy cow, this is really scary! A near 10% failure rate for some drives? And I thought that they stopped making the old "death star" drives. Oh well.

Looks like large capacity drives are an almost certain failure at some point. Guess I won't be trusting them. Also looks like the 7200 RPM spin rates are more trouble too. Oh well.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/274022-32-drive-reliability

Since this website is in French, I'm not sure that Google translate is going to work or not. In case it doesn't, the direct link is in the Tom's Hardware article above.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/274022-32-drive-reliability

Mark · July 09, 2013, 10:46:46 AM

I didn't see any French..

Conan_Ward · November 21, 2013, 10:02:59 AM

So, figures not long after I get things sorted to use it as my system drive, I've had my momentus fail as well...meanwhile i've got a 120g drive hooked up in the same pc with a ribbon cable thats still chugging along...

Jeff Zylstra · November 21, 2013, 10:45:04 AM

Quote from: Conan_Ward on November 21, 2013, 10:02:59 AM
So, figures not long after I get things sorted to use it as my system drive, I've had my momentus fail as well...meanwhile i've got a 120g drive hooked up in the same pc with a ribbon cable thats still chugging along...

Sorry to hear that, Conan. Especially since they gave me a refurbished drive as a replacement in the new Dell machine. I guess I'm looking at that as a "good" thing, knowing that the drive has been gone through, fixed, checked and probably burned in. I doubt that they burn in each and every new drive, so I'm hoping that's a good omen.

I hope you backed it up. And Rick, I know you're busy right now, but please back up your Momentus! Makes life so much easier.