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New Seagate Barracuda 2TB drive bad out of box or me being overly anxious for nothing?

Biru_cs

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Hello. I had purchased an external 2TB Seagate Expansion Drive back in January of 2021. It always showed 100% health in HD Sentinel and had no issues whatsoever, up until about a week ago (Oct 6th) where it seemed to have failed while I was out for a few hours. I immediately started to save what I could to another PC (which was fortunately more than 80% of my files) and went to buy another drive to replace it.

It boiled down to 2 options:
  • Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM008, 7200 RPM w/ 256MB cache
  • Western Digital Blue 2TB WD20EZAZ, 7200 RPM w/ 256MB cache (product page on store says 7200 RPM, but it might actually be 5400RPM since that's what WD states in their product brief paper)

After reading some forum posts and product reviews, I, somewhat hurriedly as I needed a new drive, gave Seagate another try and ordered the Barracuda 2TB drive. When I got to the store to get it a couple days later I noticed it only came in a anti-static bag, so I asked the employee to wrap it in a more protective material as I wanted to be sure it would be protected while I was returning home, which they did.

After returning home and installing it I turned my PC on and I immediately noticed a noise coming from the new Barracuda drive, - it was the head "unlocking" from the ramp and getting on the platters after spinning up.
1728742747042.png


Worried that the drive might be DOA, I ran a bunch of tests on it:
  • 2x h2testw's read/write verification test (for 1 out of 2 TB as I didn't want to completely fill the drive up),
  • 3x HD Tune Pro's surface test (but only for 80% of the disk as I used the trial version),
  • 2x HDDScan's surface & butterfly tests (for the full disk surface this time),
  • 2x short & 2x extended SMART tests using Seagate's SeaTools (the extended tests took about 4h 30min each),
  • 1x HD Sentinel's surface read test & write-read surface test (the latter is running as I'm typing this).
All of the tests (except the last one as it's not completed yet) came back with zero errors or abnormalities and the transfer speeds of the disk are as expected (~210-220MB/sec, according to Seagate's data sheet). It is also almost silent - I have to get really close to my PC's case and even then I can barely hear it operating during testing. The only times I can hear any noise from the disk are on PC startup, where the head "unlocks" from the ramp and goes over the platter area as I stated above, and on shutdown where the head returns to the ramp. I searched a bit more for the noise on product reviews and found one where a customer contacted Seagate about it and they replied to them with "it's a normal noise during operation, the disk is designed like this".

Now, to be fair, I did not expect it to be 100% silent. It's a mechanical HDD after all, of course it will make some noise. However, it's the specific type of noise that concerns me, as I've only heard it on old or failing drives, including the previous Expansion drive which started making noises right after failure and especially on shutdowns. This alone tempts me to return it and get the WD Blue drive instead if possible, for which I haven't found any review stating anything about noise (except any DOA drives) and I think comes in it's own box. Nevertheless, I think it might just be me being overly anxious for nothing at the end of the day and that I should trust the test results and stick with the Seagate Barracuda drive.

Is the noise (and/or packaging) of the Seagate drive something to worry about or not?

(Note: To answer some more questions which I'm sure you'll have: yes, I'll be buying another drive for taking backups and I'll update the post with HD Sentinel's write-read surface test results when it finishes.)
 

Solaris17

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Its fine. It was first initialization.

it's the specific type of noise that concerns me, as I've only heard it on old or failing drives

Fun fact, its the firmware that controls this. As you have mentioned:

It is also almost silent - I have to get really close to my PC's case and even then I can barely hear it operating during testing.

Data center HDDs for example scream. So dont subscribe too much to 1996 HDD mentality. Run your tests, take a xanex and enjoy your drive.
 

Biru_cs

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Sorry for the late reply, I just got back home. HD Sentinel's write-read surface test also came back with zero errors whatsoever.

hdsentinel1.png


So I think after all this testing I can finally start using the drive normally.
 

Solaris17

Super Dainty Moderator
Staff member
Joined
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Messages
27,077 (3.83/day)
Location
Alabama
System Name RogueOne
Processor Xeon W9-3495x
Motherboard ASUS w790E Sage SE
Cooling SilverStone XE360-4677
Memory 128gb Gskill Zeta R5 DDR5 RDIMMs
Video Card(s) MSI SUPRIM Liquid X 4090
Storage 1x 2TB WD SN850X | 2x 8TB GAMMIX S70
Display(s) 49" Philips Evnia OLED (49M2C8900)
Case Thermaltake Core P3 Pro Snow
Audio Device(s) Moondrop S8's on schitt Gunnr
Power Supply Seasonic Prime TX-1600
Mouse Razer Viper mini signature edition (mercury white)
Keyboard Monsgeek M3 Lavender, Moondrop Luna lights
VR HMD Quest 3
Software Windows 11 Pro Workstation
Benchmark Scores I dont have time for that.
Sorry for the late reply, I just got back home. HD Sentinel's write-read surface test also came back with zero errors whatsoever.

View attachment 367309

So I think after all this testing I can finally start using the drive normally.

enjoy!
 
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