Trouble with 3TB drives?

A month ago I bought my first 3TB drive (Seagate) and it had a bunch of bad sectors so I returned it the same day, then I ordered a second one (WD) and it had no bad sectors but the GPT table kept getting corrupted and kept needing reformatting, so after a week that's returned too.

What I'm not sure about is if the GPT corruption was caused to the drive itself or if the P151 is somehow incompatible with it. I'm running Win7 and have all the latest drivers, but it became corrupt 3 times with no SMART errors. It always became corrupt after I copied over 2TB to it, and each time I was doing something different before it corrupted the GPT (1 - WinRAR compression, 2 - Teracopy, 3 - Windows Explorer copy). The last time it actually crapped out right in the middle of the transfer.

Has anyone had such problems? I don't know if I should buy another 3TB drive or stick to 2TB

UPDATE: Ordered a new drive, same problems. Will update if I find a solution

 

damn, this sounds like reaaaally bad luck id go for another try, after all, three is the charm right? ive had my seagate 3TB for several months now and cant complain, very happy with it (model #: ST33000651AS)

cheers

 

if a hard drive gets over 55 degrees it'll crap out pretty fast
over 50 shortens the lifespan a good amount too

 

These are 3.5" HDD's we're talking about, right? Personally, I don't trust 3tb HDD's, and am outright terrified of 4tb ones. I'd definitely recommend sticking to 2tb drives, and keeping everything backed up.

 

couldnt help it, my old 2tb drive was filled to the brink so i HAD to sell it off and swap it for a 3tb one. also switched from usb2 to usb3, a decision i deff dont regret. no probs so far and nice transfer speeds (before: 19-27 Mb/s, now: 55-77 Mb/s)

cheers

 

I just say use multiple external HDD's.

 

@jaybee83
have you written over 2tb to the 3tb drive yet? As I mentioned the corruption seems to occur after passing the 2tb mbr barrier. After googling around I saw a similar problem here, leading me to question if it's a laptop component or firmware causing the problem

 

@E.Blar: nah, too much of a hassle, one single external drive is much more practical ^^

@synce: i copied my whole 2tb drive onto the 3tb one all at once, took me like half a day or so. right now im at 1.87 TB occupied drive space. i hope nothings gonna happen once i reach the 2TB mark....

 

Yeah make sure you have backups of your backups... I sent my drive back to Newegg and I guess I'll find out in a few days if they consider it defective, until then I'm not gambling on another 3tb

 

keep us updated!

 

soooo....after researching a bit i suggest that this problem might be connected to ur Intel Rapid Storage Technology version? try and install the newest available version and check again if the 3TB HDDs work properly now...

link: intel drivers pour Raid/Sata/Ata/Ahci

cheers

 

Thanks I'll try 11.5.0.11149 beta since I'm having the same problems with the replacement drive, although I'm not sure why Intel wouldn't have drivers with proper 3TB support on their own site. At this point though it's obvious the HDD isn't faulty

Can any builders or resellers comment on this?

Edit: I'm also updating the Renesas USB 3.0 driver to 2.1.28.1. Hopefully between the two updates and my constant use of gpt fdisk I won't have this thing get corrupted again.

Edit 2: Those beta drivers screwed up Win7... all the transition effects became ultra slow after installing and rebooting. Uninstalling fixed the issue

UPDATE: New drive still asked to reformat (coincidentally after passing 2TB again). The backup GPT tables gdisk made are useless too :/

 

Interesting little discovery today, I reformatted the 3tb wd green as an MBR drive with two partitions (2tb and 700gb) and after writing 1.75tb of dummy data to it then reattaching the drive the 700gb partition was gone. So there is definitely a problem with recognizing drives over 2tb.

jaybee, which enclosure are you using for the drive? I'm going to return my current Rosewill RX35-AT-SU3 and I'm thinking of trying the Mediasonic K32-SU3

 

oh crap, thats some really weird behaviour....lemme get back to u on that, im on the move right now!

 

Nah don't worry about it. I went with the Mediasonic K32-SU3, which has 3TB printed right on the box unlike my Rosewill.

BTW today I wrote 2.5TB of dummy data to the WD Green while connected internally to my PC and had no corruption after several reboots. When using the USB case with my laptop at least one of the GPT tables would corrupt almost immediately and by the time I reached 2TB it was all over.

So it's definitely a chipset problem with either the enclosure or the P151, after the new case arrives I'll know if I should contact Malibal directly.

 

annoying that u would have to try ur way through several different cases in order to get it working. keep us updated on what malibal would have to say to that...

Sent from my GT-I9001 using Tapatalk 2

 

so i cracked the 2TB threshold and theres no issues or problems so far, lucky me i guess