2 out of 7 Hitachi 7K1000.B DOA, what to do?

R

Rakinos

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 31, 2001
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Just received my order from zipzoomfly of seven 1TB 7K1000.Bs, and two of them have the click of death (with some beep sounds thrown in there), and aren't even recognized two different computers (why must the Deathstars continue to haunt me!). What would you guys do in my situation? I'm going to be using them in a RAID array, and I've always been told its best to use drives from the same batch/firmware.

RMA the two drives to Hitachi?
Send the two dead ones back to ZZF?
Force ZZF to send me a whole new batch just in case something happened to the rest of the drives that presents itself later?
Something I haven't even fathomed?

Any/all input is much appreciated, I've never had this issue before, ZZF used the giant nice foam shipping box and everything.
 
RMA with ZZF. Were they shipped properly?
It sounds like ZZF's handling has been careless again. While they pack right more often than not, they seem to use untrained monkies to pick and pack, who routinely drop things.
(Many things I have gotten from ZZF have had corners crushed, despite being packed perfectly. So I'm positive it happened in handling at some point.)

Also, NO. Never use drives from the same batch, ALWAYS the same firmware. But NEVER the same batch. That means they hit MTBF at around the same time, which leads to multiple drives failing at the same time. Never a good thing, that.
 
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Any ideas as to how one tells the firmware on the hitachi drives (I don't see any number that is immediately obvious)? They seem to be different enough via the numbers silk-screened on the top of the PCB (firmware #?, idk), maybe just having them all made in June of this year makes them similar enough for the array (Raid 6) .

Edit: I'm currently running drive fitness tests on the other drives, but its going rather slowly, and I've only gotten through two of the drives (no problems on either). I probably won't bother getting the other drives through the test before requesting the RMA with ZZF, just to get the ball rolling on the two that I know for a fact are dead.
 
Hitachi GST DFTs take longer, because they actually do exercising tests. Meaning, the armature and motor are getting worked. It will take a while.

7K1000's do not have firmware markings; only E7K's get firmware markings. AFAIK there's only two firmware versions on the 7K1000's, and the switchover was made sometime back in January. I could be wrong; I don't work with the 7K1000's as much as the E7Ks.
 
AreEss said:
Hitachi GST DFTs take longer, because they actually do exercising tests. Meaning, the armature and motor are getting worked. It will take a while.

7K1000's do not have firmware markings; only E7K's get firmware markings. AFAIK there's only two firmware versions on the 7K1000's, and the switchover was made sometime back in January. I could be wrong; I don't work with the 7K1000's as much as the E7Ks.
Click to expand...

Wonderfully insightful, much thanks for the information!
 
No problem. Generally speaking, Hitachi doesn't have a lot of firmware churn. They get it right the first time, more often than not.
If you're uncertain, the bootable Hitachi diagnostics should have the firmware utilities on them still.
 
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