Reliability of Seagate 3TB DM Drives
/We've seen several Seagate 3TB DM series hard drives in for recovery within a few days of each other. These are more specifically model ST3000DM01. While the DM series of Seagate drives have been problematic, the 3TB model seems to be by far the worst. Our fears have been confirmed with the latest hard drive stats from online backup company Backblaze in their Q2 hard drive failure rate report.
Seagate 3TB DM series drive (model ST3000DM001)
As you'll see from the chart, while the 4TB DM drives have a failure rate of about 3% recently, the 3TB model shows over 28% in the last 3 quarters. Those are unbelievable numbers.
What's worse is that these drives tend to have head stack issues and they don't abide by the usual rules used to find a donor head stack so many times more than 1 drive will need to be purchased in order to find a suitable donor.
We have had success in getting data back from these drives when brought to us very early after symptoms of drive failure first start. However, we have also seen cases where the drive cannot be identified by any hardware imaging tool. This then becomes a much more expensive problem for the client. Therefore, if you have one of these drives make sure you have good and current backups of the data and if your drive is already starting to have issues and you don't have backups, get it to a data recovery expert ASAP.
For more info about Backblaze cloud-based backups, click here.