RAID card killing HDD?

[moocow]

Well I got a very nice X'mas & New Year gift of multiple dead HDD. I got 3 Seagate 7200.11 that were plug into a 3Ware RAID card which all end up dead within a single week. I know 7200.11 had problems but 2 of those drives just came back from RMA from a few months ago (I crack open one new last month). The server completely hard lock when it try to access the degraded array and all the data and partition were gone when I hard rebooted. Seatool will detect the drive but it will fail the long test immediately and return an error code.

[3.0charlie]

I had 4 7200.12s die while in Raid 5 using a 3Ware 9650SE-4, happened last year... now all has been fine using Samsung F1s, and still a 9650SE-8. Coincidence?

[moocow]

Hmm this doesn't sound good. I don't have the cash to replace the Seagate with WD. Even if I RMA the drives the problem will probably repeat itself.

[enaberif]

The 1TB .11s were the worst for failures. I have a couple 500's that are going strong. It was also during a period so check when you bought the drives.

[moocow]

I have a 7200.11 500GB that also died on me at the same time. However, this drive was in my Hackintosh and it was making the clicking noise of death. I had to hold it upside down and at a 45 degree to get data off it. There's a 30+ page thread about how poorly the 7200.11 perform in RAID.

RAID problems with 7200.11 drives: unified thread - Seagate Community Forums

[MARSTG]

Originally Posted by moocow

There's a 30+ page thread about how poorly the 7200.11 perform in RAID

That is a very well known issue for the 7200.11 Seagate HDD family. Seagate was even courageous enough to hide behind the finger saying : "oh well, if it works in regular IDE and AHCI mode that is enough for us, those drives are not meant for high performance use, please use enterprise class drives" pointing to Constellation, or NS drives. As long as you use them in single drive mode all is ok, but seems to be a firmware issue after all. The drives were performing poorly on no matter what raid controller , be it 3Ware/LSI, Intel or nVidia

[moocow]

Actually, I noticed some bad sector counts when I pulled them out from a Synology NAS which was running in RAID 1 as well. It seem any kind of RAID including Intel gimp up the drives.