Another one bites the dust...
I have 2 OWC Elite-Al Pro Qx2 sitting on my desktop. They safeguard the library of photos and videos that I have created over the years.
The first OWC Elite-Al Pro Qx2 houses 4 Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green drives. Since inception I've had 2-3 drives fail.
The second OWC Elite-Al Pro Qx2 houses 4 Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB 7200.11 drives (ST31500341AS). Since inception I've had nearly 10 fail.
I've had the RAID enclosure with the Western Digital drives almost twice as long as I've had the RAID enclosure with the Seagate drives.
I've sent the OWC Elite-Al Pro Qx2 housing the Seagate drives back to OWC twice to have it checked for problems. Each time OWC has sent me a new (refurbished) enclosure.
Without a doubt in my mind the Seagate drives are not RAID worthy. They definitely don't play well with the OWC Qx2 enclosure.
It's no one's fault. I'm not blaming Seagate or OWC. I probably shouldn't have used a non-RAID specific drive in a RAID box.
It's nice that the WD Caviar Greens are so reliable though. Love them.
Update: Looking through the shipping receipts I last received warranty returned drives from Seagate on 11/6/12 and 5/3/13. One of them was NOT a ST31500341AS but rather a ST1500DM003. The ST1500DM003 has 64MB cache versus the 32MB cache ST31500341AS.
I absolutely love Seagate, I have 20+ drives and the ones that aren't Seagate ones are the ones that came with laptops or when I needed, they were more than 30% cheaper or Seagates were sold out. I've had two Seagates that died and the company was so quick and honest to replace them for me that I wouldn't buy anything else, except on these conditions I mentioned. Even if their products weren't top notch, I'd still buy their drives due to their commitment to their customer.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong. Seagate's warranty has covered and replaced every single failed drive. And it's no coincidence that the drives fail at such a high rate. No doubt the RAID partitioning from the OWC is not compatible with this drive!
DeleteCharles, maybe you should try some RAID-designed drives, like Western Digital RED or something equivalent on Seagate
ReplyDeleteThanks Pelayo. Enterprise drives are definitely worth their money when they house valuable data!
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