Seagate ST2000DM001 are really crap

As a followup to my earlier article about tearing apart one of the Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB hard drives, I can now say they are one of the worst drives I've ever used.

A couple years back, when the 3TB drives were first hitting the streets in reasonable prices, I decided to upgrade my file server. I'd collected a large number of 1TB drives over time that I wanted to consolidate to a single 4x3TB drive stack.

The price on the Seagate drives was the best at the time, though I'd had better luck in the past with Western Digital drives, I decided to save a few bucks. Not only that, Seagate is a Minnesota company. I like to support local businesses.

While I was in money-saving mode, I opted to go with external drives as my donors, since they were cheaper than the bare drives (why is that? it's absurd). I tore four external drives apart to get my donors for my server expansion/consolidation.


Fast forward some time, one of the Seagate's failed. Not unusual for hard drives to fail. In the past, I'd simply submit it to the manufacturer for a replacement and operate off a backup in the meantime. However, apparently since these were originally external drives (Seagate branded mind you) they were considered OEM and not covered by Seagate. I'd late find out all four drives were similarly denied replacement.

I replaced that first failed drive with a WD 3TB and got things back up and running. About 9 months later I had another of the Seagates fail. I was able to replace it (with a WD) and get my data back, since I'd fully prepared for a single drive failure. What I could not recover from was the back-to-back failure of the remaining two Seagates in my server. In the span of a week, three of these drives failed, with the loss of all data on them.

Now, I've discovered some similar stories of pre-mature failure of these drives. There's a firmware update that I was hopeful would help, but the software failed to recognize the drives after their failure.

I noticed that the drives were very hot (in their well ventilated case with "automatic" fans), much hotter than the WD drives above and below them. Now, I can't say whether they were hot as part of the failure or if the heat hastened their demise. What I can say is that four of four drives failed (three in a span of days). I've had drives, from a variety of manufacturers, fail over the years. What I have not had was every drive from one place fail (and at once!).

I cannot in good conscience recommend these drives for anything you hold dear (and copying 3TB of anything takes a good bit of time, so....).

On a side note, I bought WD Green drives (having used them for years and found them to be solid performers), but after reading this, think I will choose Reds in the future.