Solid Block of Ise

Well, I’ve officially decided to move the last two remaining Seagate-drives from my server to my workstation. This sucks, but I’m going to have to be pragmatic about this - they were (for whatever reasons) causing the machine to be unstable, and an unstable server is simply unacceptable.

Supposedly there are a lot of people out there who are perfectly happy with Seagate-drives, but my patience is at an end. I wrote about this back in June (in Swedish) and even though I started to become very disenchanted with Seagate then I felt that maybe things would be sorted out in the future. Thus, I left them unplugged in the server, awaiting a chassi-change.

That chassi-change happened a month ago, yet the problems persist. The only conclusion I can draw is that Seagate-drives are somehow flawed when it comes to being in my server. My workstation currently runs all Seagate-drives, and some of the problems persist, but the difference is that my workstation is not mission-critical. I’m fine with rebooting it every few days. The server however, I cannot accept. I also cannot accept the lockups, DMA-errors and general weirdness that follows in the wake of the Seagate-drives. I cannot accept that whenever the Seagate-drives are attached the server will lockup if the load-average goes above 0.50 since under that load the Seagate-drives for whatever reason decide to squeeze their brains out through the IDE-channel. Unplug them and the machine will run happily under whatever load-average it gets.

I don’t know the causes for the problems, but I do know that a lot of people are experiencing similar problems. The symptom is always the same. The constant culprit is Seagate-drives. I no longer have the time or patience trying to find out why my drives are acting funky, and instead moving them to a less vital computer. After a lot of troubleshooting the problems persist, and while it would be easy for someone else to write off my server as temperamental and fussy about drives that is not the case - virtually every other brand of drives work fine in it, even the old Maxtor 80 gigabyte-drives that I always assumed would fail within the first year. I shrugged at it, since they’d been a free gift, but they’ve been ticking along steadily for more than four years now. This is unlike the Seagate-drives, who have all been causes for more or less intense degrees of grief.

No more of that now.

The days of Seagate-drives in my computers is once again numbered - and this time I’m not going to question my own judgment. Instead, the two drives will be moved into my workstation, and in time all Seagate-drives will be phased out of my life. Whether that phasing will come from them failing and getting junked or from me buying newer drives is really something that doesn’t concern me.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.