Hi all,
Having had a large number of Ironwolf HDDs fail it has come to my attention while speaking to Seagate that these drives may not to have been suitable for holding Chia plots. Indeed I have information from them which could potentially constitute an admittance of this. Seagate have failed to offer a workable compromise solution.
I have already spoken to a number of people in this position and want to gauge how many more people have been affected. We are considering taking action against them, the action will be for misselling / selling products not fit for intended use, and also for a loss of data.
If you have had Seagate drive failures, send me a DM or post a little info below in the first instance with HDD type, numbers, and size in TB. It’s just research for now; I need to get an idea of how many people are affected.
EDIT: There is a growing likelikood the issue could be more prevalent in the 14tb versions.
What was Seagate’s reason(s) for the drives not being suitable for holding Chia plots?
Is it both Ironwolf and Exos models?
I am asking because you have both models listed in the title of your posting, but only Ironwolf listed in the body of your message.
How did you come to know of those other folks that are having Ironwolf (and Exos) drive failures while being used for Chia?
I dont accept that theyre not suitable for chia even if the manufacturer said so, theyll say anything alot of the time to avoid warranty.
The main causes of mass failure are overheating, humidity, but that takes time, the third option that causes many to fail in short space of time is the power adapters ppl use that arent good for drives and kill them.
Good luck taking seagate to court , they no doubt have deeper pockets than you!
Are you using any adapters / converters to power your dying drives?
If not, how are they powered?
In one of several emails I have from Seagate “…the chia plots can be the reason for such high failure rate as we have seen happening to other customers as well”
I only have personal experience of Ironwolf but have been contacted by Exos users as well.
I am part of a group who all mined Chia with high end kit, and some stored small numbers of plots on Ironwolfs. I stored large numbers, and have had a massive failure rate.
As I said earlier I am researching at present, it’s early days but I think there are lots of people unhappy. I only wanted to play my own shot and get my issue resolved, but tehy’re not willing to do that so to take anything further, we need some real numbers and the signs are there that they could exist.
Hi,
They have offered to replace like with like, so they’re not trying to avoid warranty.
I’m just not going to spend resources refilling drives that are likely to fail again. That’s where we’re at.
I am respectfully also not going to get into a discussion about how to power drives, I am fully educated. The same goes for any action we may take, it is early days of course.
Every drive that is replaced loses its associated data and therefore needs to be reworked. I am not willing to enter into the cycle of failure you seem comfortable with. Rather than have that situation, I offered a swap for m.2 or SSD up the the same monetary value. I can use those for other things.
I’m not asking you to agree re the 3% failure rate but the fact remains, 3% is well out of kilter with normal failure rates. I am surprised you think I want too much; what that suggests to me about you, saddens me.
So, maybe respectfully you can provide more info about the problem? So far, the only thing that I know is that if Wed is after Tue, that may be a good enough cause for those drives to fail, as such sue them (“…the chia plots can be the reason for such high failure rate as we have seen happening to other customers as well”).
That is the nature of any drive, or rather any media. Given enough time, paper may disintegrate, capacitors evaporate, … Therefore, people do something called backups
Those are mechanical drives. When the stepper motor moves heads, it always produces clicks. Depending on acoustical design of a drive, those clicks could be more or less pronounced, but have nothing to do with drive operations.
This is the only operation that drive performs, so it is the same as saying that car’s problem is not driving forward or in reverse.
So, basically you have no data, no evidence of problems, but are willing to sue a big client in hopes that they will settle to not waste time on this?
If this would be a real problem, this forum would be full of people writing about it. Personally, I really think that Seagate are one of the lowest quality drives, but every product has good and bad quality manufacturers.
Seagate’s use of the verb “can” is ridiculous.
That is like them writing: “…the videos can be the reason for such high failure rate as we have seen happening to other customers as well”
– or –
“…the NTFS can be the reason for such high failure rate as we have seen happening to other customers as well”
Lodging plot files is probably one of the least burdensome efforts that a drive can perform.
Write once, and periodically read portions of the files, is about the minimum you can ask from a drive. A floppy disk can do that.
If the drives are under warranty, then Seagate should honor your warranty claims. And some (perhaps all?) of their drives come with free data recovery during the warranty period.
I had one Seagate drive failure. An external 14 TB drive.
Model: STEL14000400
They recovered my plots, and placed them on two drives (a 10 TB drive and a 4 TB drive). They also shipped me a STEL14000400 drive to replace my failed drive.
And I got to keep them all. I verified that with them.
If they are giving you a hard time, it could be that due to Chia, they are seeing more drive failures than usual, and someone decided to deny claims that involve drives with plots.
Now unless the terms of the sale states that the warranty is void, upon storing plots, then Seagate has to honor its warranty. I guess that they could have that in small print in their warranty agreement. But wherever they might have a “plot” exclusion, it would have had to have been in place at the time of your purchase.
You wrote the above and about lots of drive failures. But you did not explicitly state whether or not you put in warranty claims. Did you? And is Seagate denying your warranty claims?
You’re missing the point. It is quite simple, Chia kills the drives much quicker than advertised, Chis is not suited to those drives, and on the basis that the drives were purchased for that use they are failing to deliver. Rather than continuing a perpetual loop which keeps costing us and Seagate, the proposal is to have Seagate offer alternatives and that involves a change of use.
Maybe I did miss the point, although you would need to work harder to state which one.
However, as already stated, you have provided zero evidence to support your claims. It really looks to me that you should be banned from this forum for spewing misleading information.
Good post Seymour.
Re warranty, 2 HDDs have been sent back, data lost, new ones received.
4 others need sending back and the warranty will of course swap them like for like but I dont see any value in swapping them for empty drives that will need replotting and could well fail again.
If they would save the data as well, there would be no issue. But I suspect that volume of returns means they can no longer be arsed to do that.