Thread: Screw Seagate!!!

So this is the third time I have had a Seagate drive fail on me in one year. Luckily I have 1.2TB of storage left on my home server, so losing a 500GB drive is not the end of the world, but when I lose 30% of my available storage because the drive is defective, it pisses me off. I am sure some of you may be happy with Seagate, but my personal experiences with them lately have left a bad taste in my mouth...

I have already had to send this drive back once, and I had a 320GB drive that was about 2.5 years old die out on me last month. They are both Barracuda 720rpm drives, which seem to perform well, but their quality is for shit. I am NOT putting this pile of shit back in my server. It is still under warranty, so I when I get it back, it will immediately be put on eBay.

I have 6 Western Digital drives in operation in my house (3 on server, 3 on clients) and I haven't had a single issue with them except for some performance issues with the "Green" drives, which I have since found the fix for.

Man, you're scaring me...lol. I have a 500GB Seagate HDD.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148288

Hasn't failed yet...*crosses fingers* My last drive was a WD.

Glad you were able to get that off your chest, heavy. Now go to bed.

It's funny how people have different experiences with different brand drives. I've got at least half a dozen Seagates in various systems in my house with no issues. I've had no failures (knock on wood) with Seagate. The bane of my HD existence is Western Digital. I've probably had half a dozen WDs fail over the last 4 or 5 years.

I haven't had any seagates DIE on me, though we've seen roughly a 10% failure on them at work. Not coincidentally though we've also seen a 10% failure rate on western digitals as well. If you get raid class drives they are far less likely to die, though you will also pay a premium for them. But for the most part, you an expect a 10% failure rate across the board regardless of manufacturer. So you might go years without seeing a failure because you were just lucky... or you could be unlucky and get to be in the 1 out of 10 more than once.

There are some things to watch out for though... For instance, keep an eye on tech boards for red flags. Western Digital greens at one point last year were reporting abnormally high failure rates because they would disconnect due to the power saving mode. If you had them in a raid array they would just randomly drop out of the array. That could be disastrous. Seagate externals randomly do this currently (though I'm certain it's a specific model and firmware version). I have two that will just "go away". If I bring them up in explorer they will be there... A directory structure can be seen. Hell, you can even see files in some directories. But if you try to access them it will fail. Nothing short of removing power and spinning them up again will bring them back online.

Until we can move entirely away from mechanical drives, you will see failures. Nature of the beast.

My current drive of choice is the Samsung Spinpoint F3. Fastest drive on the market that isn't named *Raptor. I recommend them to anyone who can't afford a SSD as their OS drive. $60 for a 500 gig is awesome.

in my many years of computer work, Seagate has always been a good brand for me.
I have had good luck with Western Digital as well.

On my bad list, only Maxtor is still in business. But I used to really hate Quantum and IBM.

My Seagate experiences have not been good. I have had one die at home and more at work. I personally have never had any issues with WD at home or work. Strange how that works.

Originally Posted by Gumby

in my many years of computer work, Seagate has always been a good brand for me.
I have had good luck with Western Digital as well.

On my bad list, only Maxtor is still in business. But I used to really hate Quantum and IBM.

Maxtor is owned by Seagate now... Quantum was also bought by Seagate. IBM sold their HD business to Hitachi. They're still around, sorta, just absorbed by or sold to another company.

Originally Posted by Gumby

in my many years of computer work, Seagate has always been a good brand for me.
I have had good luck with Western Digital as well.

On my bad list, only Maxtor is still in business. But I used to really hate Quantum and IBM.

Ahhhhh memories. Quantum Bigfoot drives. 5 1/4" monsters... Good drives when they actually worked.