Hey guys, my freaking Seagate Exos 18 TB drives are dying like flies… What are your RMA experiences so far with your drives?
I handled everything so far via the retailer and it usually takes 3 weeks to get a replacement because the retailer sends the HDD to Seagate first. -.-
Verdict: Do not buy HDDs with less than 5 year warranty.
Seagate’s HDD RMA service is fast & friendly. Below the process they sent me last year after calling the help line. Once they receive the disk on their end you’ll normally get replacement shipping notification that day or the next morning. I had a bad run and RMA’d 4-5 disks within 2 months, no questions asked.
— 8< — From: discsupport@seagate.com — 8< —
Here is the information how to create RMA number:
To verify the warranty of your device, process the replacement online of your faulty drive and to review Seagate’s return policy, E-Commerce & RMA Terms and shipping instructions please go to: https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/warranty-and-replacements/
In case you have trouble completing the online form, be as kind to send us the following information and we will create the RMA on your behalf. Once the RMA is created, you will receive a confirmation email with the RMA number and the shipping and packing instructions.
-Full name and surname:
-Full address:
-Street number:
-City:
-State:
-Current Country:
-Postal Code:
-Phone:
-Email:
-Serial number of the device to be replaced:
Remember that sending the device to the address provided must be handled by you with your preferred shipping agency and we will take care of managing the delivery of the replacement of your device to your location.
[…]
The fact you said their dropping like flies. What temp are the drives in? Have you run crystaldiskinfo to see the temps etc? I have a mix of Seagate and WD. How is the power on all those drives? Do you have a UPS on your, do you have many power surges? Just questions to think about.
Please elaborate.
How many drives died?
If 10 drives died, but you have 1,000 drives, that’s not bad.
If 10 drives died, but you have 20 drives, that’s terrible.
And as @drhicom asked:
Are they internal or external drives?
How long have they been running?
If they died in a week or two, that is bad… and it points to a manufacturing problem.
If they died in a year or two, that is less bad… and it is more likely a temperature problem or a power problem. Do you use surge suppression?
If you work directly with Seagate, you might find that your warranty includes free data recovery.
If it works the same as when I had a Seagate drive failure, then they put the recovered data on yet another drive, and you get to keep both the drive with the recovered data and you also get a replacement for the failed drive.
I conducted my warranty claim over the phone.
I do not know if using their web site for warranty requests will include free data recovery.
Sample size is sufficient for parametric tests… The dead rate of my Seagate Drives is between 30-40%. Temperature in summer is 43°C. I had 0 problem with any one my WD drives but like every month a Seagate drive is producing SMART warnings. Time for me to RMA…
Had the same numbers here, with seagate SMR drives or Exos CMR (worse with SLR obviously). Seagate drives are terrible. I created a sub on reddit, and everyone told me it was impossible, my fault, or else. At least they fail “quick” so you can RMA.
I know this is an RMA thread but…
I’m not trying to stir up a great debate here but there is an underlying concern/issue. We’re all in this together even if not seeing eye to eye. We aren’t that far into Chia farming just yet. No doubt it’s early days but since most people here are Day 1 farmers, reporting health of drives and failure of drives should be fully communicated to all. It shouldn’t be about pride.
POST is a new POW and the hardware to do the job may change. If there is a trend emerging this can be a problem for Chia as a whole. Sending hard drives to their graves while farming Chia is not good for business. If you say oh, but it’s less energy? Okay, there’s that. But hard drive failures while farming Chia on enterprise grade hardware? That is a BIG ASS can of worms.
The longer we go along here the more everyone should be paying attention. One year out? That’s about now. What about moving towards 2 years? If people start reporting drives dropping like flies then it does make me wonder about some of the claims about drives not working 99.7% of the time according to Mr. Personality from that video about hard drive power usage.
Is there a core issue with POST on hard drive that is unlike a typical server environment? I’m a bit troubled by hearing of this, to be perfectly frank. I’m not into hysterics. But if Chia farmers are finding their drives dying and there is an abundance of warranty claims? Do I need to spell this out? GPU warranties. Guess what those say? Crypto mining voids warranties.
This is a big deal. I hope people disclose their details and swallow their pride and report failing hard drives. I realize too, that every server on earth kills drives eventually. This happens. But a reputation for this is not going to look good on Chia. Obviously.
So a few things come to my mind. Is it the size of the hard drive? Is this a brand issue? Could farming specific drives be released at some point, should Chia get to that level of stature? Is this a matter of heat? Is there an oddity to the work that farming Chia puts hard drives under that is different than a typical server environment? Is this much ado about nothing? Are the issues related to shucked external drives or are we talking about internal drives?
The troubling aspect, if I’m repeating myself, is that we are the first to do this. Cracks never appear right away. It takes time. My only question is whether we might be seeing some cracks.
Update: I’m not so much the one to say the sky is falling but this topic has definitely send me into some big picture negative thoughts. The eerie question for me is whether there is something in Chia itself while farming that is reeking havoc on hard drives. We have a small sample size but is this the start of something. I always look big picture. To me this is a concern at the highest possible level actually. I don’t think it’s matter of temps, nor is it a matter or brand reliability. We’re talking new Exos drives. Is there something fundamentally bad about farming Chia that is harmful to hard drives. It will just take a small stream of warranty claims to put the “mining/farming crypto voids warranty” into play. Hard drives dying while farming Chia (a supposedly light task) could literally kill Chia by my estimation. We are engaged in a new, unproven POW model and nobody should forget that.
Had good experience with Seagate.
No fuss when creating an RMA - told them I had bad sectors, referenced the SMART data, no silly questions or asking me to download tools to run on the drive.
Shipped the failing drive back with a pre-paid UPS label on 21st June.
Got my replacement drive back on 6th July.
They recovered my ‘data’ on the failing drive and shipped me another new drive with my ‘data’ on it. 
If anyone needs to create ‘data’ on a failing drive, you could use something like this powershell script;
$out = new-object byte[] 1073741824; (new-object Random).NextBytes($out); [IO.File]::WriteAllBytes('D:\DataPath\'+([guid]::NewGuid())+'.dat', $out)
…and call it from a batch file such as this;
@echo off
:RESTART
echo Creating random filename with data of 1024MB..
Powershell.exe -executionpolicy remotesigned -File guidfile.ps1
GOTO RESTART
pause
Windows of course, above, Linux not dissimilar…
Sent two Seagate 18TB today to different retailers for RMA. Let’s see how long this will take. Told them I prefer to get a 20 TB back and I willl pay the difference. Haha.
RMA implies a drive failure, and that is handled by the manufacturer.
You have retailers that act as a liaison between you and the manufacturer?
Don’t forget about Toni…
He was caught carrying during a DUI checkpoint, is a 3x loser, and had the book thrown at him.
He has a permit and doesn’t drink.
Permits are not issued for multiple offenders.
He was not charged for DUI. He was caught carrying at the checkpoint, which was a parole violation.
I don’t make the arrest reports. I am only relaying what took place.
Welcome to Europe. Retailers act as middlemen for the RMA of most products here.
You were given wrong information again!!!
The process described above is valid for Europe also. I’ve used the Seagate RMA centre in the Netherlands several times from another EU country and the return takes about 5 working days in total.
When you say “several times”, curious if that is a result of Chia farming or unrelated. Thank you. I have my ear to the ground in terms of hard drive failures as it related to Chia. Probably nothing, but I’m always curious.
The RMA process has been a bit slow for me.
I sent it on December 2021. They gave me an RMA number.
Finally UPS delivered my new drive 2 days ago. 8 months seems like a normal period for WD 
Little good thing, I sent blue drive, red pro arrived.