I will never buy Seagate Hard Drive again

[R3v01v3r]

In the past say 3 years I have been through more of these drives then I have even experienced in the 11 years I have been building and play around with PC, I really don't know if this company has just downgraded there materials or using cheaper parts, but I tell you what I will never buy another one of their drives again, Some have been the lower graded models like that Barracudas and some have been a little higher end Firecudas with a better reputation. “Personally I didn't really see any difference in the two models performance wise or life span”.
Recently I opened one of my dying drives just to see what was actually happening and found the reading arm heads had welded itself to the platter, so out of curiosity I decided to go back to the other drives I also had issues with in the past and open them as well I haven't had time to destroy them properly by cutting up the platters etc. but funny enough I also found the same issue on all of these drives after a couple of months of use. About a year ago I thought it may have been a power supply issues so I changed my PSU but nothing change the issues I was facing with their drives. I ran Asus diagnostics tool to check on CPU, ports, peripherals but everything was fine. I honestly think they have just become a low grade hard drive altogether. I guess it would be fair to say this started around the time SSD’s started to roll –out I guess.
So now I have just totally given up on the concept of mechanical hard drives altogether and 100% rather spend the extra cash to buy SSD now.
This is just my personal exp with this particular company brand.
Has anyone else had issues with these types of drivers or with other brands too?

 

[ssddx]

i used to have a pair of wd blacks. i had them and 2 rma's die in under half a year. the shortest one lived was under a week.

my 1tb drives have all been rock solid for years.

i've used seagates and have had them going for years

my own thoughts are to avoid larger than 1tb drives if i dont raid them. while not all drives might be unreliable it left a bad taste in my mouth. of course it has certainly been a few years since all that..

 

[R3v01v3r]

i used to have a pair of wd blacks. i had them and 2 rma's die in under half a year. the shortest one lived was under a week.

my 1tb drives have all been rock solid for years.

i've used seagates and have had them going for years

my own thoughts are to avoid larger than 1tb drives if i dont raid them. while not all drives might be unreliable it left a bad taste in my mouth. of course it has certainly been a few years since all that..

I know the feeling about losing drives especially when you have significant data on them and cant send them back on warranty worried if they are going to use reccva or other programs out there to recover the data on them so it's a catch, catch situation really.

Maybe the computer store where I was buying the HDD were trying to refurbish the drives and just couldn't get it right causing it to have issue.

I honestly wouldn't put it past some places or stores especially some of the ones we have here in Australia.
Pretty dodgy some of them.

 

[ssddx]

i ran raid 1 with the drives and it helped. for awhile there i was paranoid but given how the 1.5/2tb drives were not reliable for me i was questionable. i've never had a 1tb seagate or wd drive fail on me in the short term though.

recovering data from a failed drive is a very expensive process. it is far better to rely on backup copies instead of recovery. get into the habit of placing files in multiple backup locations.

 

[R3v01v3r]

i ran raid 1 with the drives and it helped. for awhile there i was paranoid but given how the 1.5/2tb drives were not reliable for me i was questionable. i've never had a 1tb seagate or wd drive fail on me in the short term though.

recovering data from a failed drive is a very expensive process. it is far better to rely on backup copies instead of recovery. get into the habit of placing files in multiple backup locations.

Of cause back-up are essential and never on the same PC is even better. I normally have a WD SSD Portable of all that kind of stuff which is stored in our safe along with all the other important life documents like birth certificates etc.
I guess I have just had a bad run on Hard Drives by the sounds of things.

But now we have the options of SSD's I don't think I will be turning back to a mechanical hard drive no more, to much stress and for a few extra dollars you get 5 years warranty on your drive compared to the 2 years on mechanical.

But however I think your right the only way to help prevent this would be to RAID on 0-1

 

[ssddx]

wd black has 5 years. i think the blues are 2 or 3 year.

to be honest though.. the need to ship the drives back under your cost to them really counters the warranty as it can easily cost $15-20 in shipping (drives are heavy) and when on really good sales are $40-50 new.

i use a samsung 830 pro 512 ssd in my main and a 840 256 in the laptop. i very do much prefer the ssds given the speed and how they have no mechanical parts although they can of course still fail. this is why i only buy samsung (intels are good too)

raid 0 is NOT backup. that is data striping. it is faster, yes but if one drive fails you're screwed.

raid 1 is mirroring so is a 1:1 backup. raid 10 (1+0) or raid 5 are a backup option.

 

[USAFRet]

And I just had a Seagate delivered...
4TB IronWolf, to go into the NAS box.

The 4 in there are all old Seagate and WD 3TB, and what I had laying around.
To be replaced over the next month by 4 x dedicated NAS drives, RAID 5.
2 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB, 2 x WD Red 4TB. Just to spread the possible fail potential around.

The only spinning drive I've had fail this decade was a 3TB WD Green. 1 week past the Amazon 30 day easy return, but WD just sent a new one.

 

[R3v01v3r]

wd black has 5 years. i think the blues are 2 or 3 year.

to be honest though.. the need to ship the drives back under your cost to them really counters the warranty as it can easily cost $15-20 in shipping (drives are heavy) and when on really good sales are $40-50 new.

i use a samsung 830 pro 512 ssd in my main and a 840 256 in the laptop. i very do much prefer the ssds given the speed and how they have no mechanical parts although they can of course still fail. this is why i only buy samsung (intels are good too)

raid 0 is NOT backup. that is data striping. it is faster, yes but if one drive fails you're screwed.

raid 1 is mirroring so is a 1:1 backup. raid 10 (1+0) or raid 5 are a backup option.

I get ya, I tend to have no information what so ever on my primary hard drive just programs stand alone, and have a storage drive for Pictures and Documents a third drive to store games, I actually dropped back from myself from the 2 TB back to 1 TB they seem a little more noise then the 2 TB but at-lease you know your drives are reading and less out of pocket expense if one dies.
Myself I haven't messed around with Raiding due to what you mentioned about once one goes your pretty much up from a whole set of drive which becomes petty expensive to say the lease so I just try and keep a nice fast Primary disk and gaming drive. Only problem I have my 1TB now don't hold all my games so i am contently swapping and changing that drive depending on which game I am playing on Steam.

Onto another question does your PC automatically defrag the SSD, I have read a few rumors that it actually has no effect on them and you really don't need too run it.
I only buy the Samsung SSD 850 PRO models myself for my primary.

 

[ssddx]

if you consider some forms of raid to be equivalent to doing a proper system backup.. its really not much different than doing such in an automated way.

raid 1 is two drives with the same information. the benefit is that if one dies on you your information is not lost and when you replace th drive it will rewrite the information onto the new drive creating a backup again. in order to fail both drives would need to fail at the same time (or the second failing before you replaced the first) which is not likely as long as you get right on replacement. this is why i used it.

i believe defrag is considered bad for ssds due to the excessive write/rewrite options on the drive given how the memory chips have set lifespans.

 

[Mike3k24]

Wow that really sucks. I've had my Seagate 2tb for 4-5 years now

 

[elbert]

Ive never had a hard drive fail on me but I tend to replace by boot drive every 2 years. Just start using a SSD boot drive but my 2TB seagate got 3 years ago has a data error its unable to set aside. I used chkdsk /r and replaced with the SSD but I'm a bit worries about using it as a data disk.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Here's the latest hard data for Seagate "consumer drives" used in a "consumer environment".

Seagate 0,72% (contre 0,69%)
Toshiba 0,80% (contre 1,15%)
Western 1,04% (contre 1,03%)
HGST 1,13% (contre 0,60%)

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/954-6/disques-durs.html

That 1st number represents how many drives were RMA'd on the last 6 months... the one in parenthesis the 6 months before that. Averaging the two numbers, that puts them about 0.705% and they have maintained close to that rate going and that lead going back about 4 years.

As for SSDSs, prices are dropping but still out of the realm for satisfactory cost per TB for most folks. We have had more SSD failures than HD failures over the years but those failures were bought just after 120 GB drives became a realistic option. With today's hardier designs, we haven't had one fail that was purchased in the last 5 years

Our standard build consists usually of a 250/256 Samsung Pro SSD, and one of more 2 TB SSHD. We haven't installed a HD in about 7 years other than for testing purposes. Using our test box ... we recorded the following data:

Boot Time SSD: 15.6 seconds
Boot Time SSD: 16.5 seconds
Hard Drive: 21.2 seconds

Other speed advantages are of course dependent on the application. In gaming for example, we see that the Seagate SSD is 54% faster than the WD Black

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2013/-17-PCMark-7-Gaming,2915.html

Seagate SSHD = 9.76 MB/s
WD Black = 6.34

The advantages of SSHDs will also much depend on how you use them. I will speak to our SOHO uses:

During the day, my box (as well as others on the office, serves as a workstation preparing CAD Drawings, creating Operation and Maintenance Manuals and turning them into PDFs, writing engineering reports, many with significant graphical content, drafting technical specifications. Here, as you might imagine, we tend to start a project ... frequently uses the files of 2 or 3 projects over the course of a period from 2 weeks to 3 months. Because the SSHD keeps those "frequently used files" on the SSD portion of the SSHD, we benefit from the speed bump. It's also nice that we don't have to manually move stuff back and forth between slower and faster storage as it does this all by itself.

After hours, on the gaming side, users here have pretty much the same usage patterns as above. They tend to "serial game" .... playing Far Cry 3 for example for a few weeks and then moving on to say Far Cry 4. The benefit that THG measured serves well with this usage pattern. If you the type that in the course of a week might be loading 16 games with no particular "favorite", you will not see this advantage.

As for "not seeing the difference" ... that's perfectly normal. Peeps buy a SSD and are inclined to say it's much faster because they read a article and saw the benchmarks. But the fact is, it doesn't have any real impact on your day. I had an employee once ask for an SSD in order to "improve his productivity". I smiled because even today that case can not be made but used this as an engineering object lesson and asked him to make a case to justify the investment. So he picked a number (one many times the real advantage) and multiplied it by 220 work days at his salary rate and he came up with a dollar number that was about a third of the price of an SSD after 3 years.

But "boot time" was the major part of that, and the days that he was preparing this analysis, I observed his morning routine. Arrive, take off jacket, turn on PC, walk around say Hi to everyone, make coffee and arrive at desk anywhere from 5 to 1o minutes later. Then he'd listen to phone messages and go thru the pile in his inbox. So the faster boot time provided no advantage. When he took out something from his inbox that required editing, he'd open the program/ file and start reading the markups and maybe a minute or 2 later would start making edits ... again, the PC was ready long before the human was ready to use it. Pick any industry you want and outside animation workstations, rendering machines, video editing an the like, faster storage system have no impact because the weakest link in the chain is the human.

One of the greatest enemies of HDs is heat and this is generally not a problem in enthusiast boxes or gaming boxes as users tend to address this adequately to keep their GFX and CPU cool/. But I have seen many HD failures in "store bought" Dell / HP like boxes. If ya can keep temps in the mid 30s, you should not have problems in this respect. IBM released a report in the mid 90s showing that a 10C increase cut expected life in half.

As for the SSHD life expectancy.... it fared a bit better than drives with similar 5 year warrantees but the difference isn't statistically relevant. We have had no failures as yet in the 7 years since we started using. Tho after 4 - 5 years of use they get relegated to external storage (backup) drives where they get baxke dup to every day for a week then spend a week off site in rotation.

0,45% WD Black WD2003FZEX
0,43% Seagate Desktop SSHD ST2000DX001

As for RAID, I built this box with the two Samsung Pros in RAID 0 ... saw no performance improvement, the Samsung utilities did not work and Samsung does not support RAID so I broke the array and performance improved very slightly.

The two SSHDs were set up as RAID 1 .... again, after a few months I broke the array as one of the drives would disappear (solved simply by a reboot). I get the same function using free "Set it and forget it" backup software which keeps the 2nd drive as a mirror of the 1st.

 

[R3v01v3r]

Wow that really sucks. I've had my Seagate 2tb for 4-5 years now

Yeah I think it just comes down to luck I guess, but like I mentioned above there are a few dodgy PC part sellers in Australia and I have a funny feeling they have been trying to refurbish old drives and reselling them. I'm pretty sure you can buy the anti-static packaging they come in and sealing machine.

"Made me a very un-happy customer".

 

[seagate_surfer]

Here's the latest hard data for Seagate "consumer drives" used in a "consumer environment".

Hi JackNaylorPE,

we would like to thank you for an excellent post!

Although we are aware that some users might like one brand better than another, objectively all major hard drive manufacturers are working hard to optimize performance as well as reliability with each new generation of drives. It is correct that each physical drive will fail at some point - however, if the right drive type is used in each scenario, modern hard drives usually last much longer than their minimum life time expectancy. We can say with certainty that our engineering team is working diligently to make sure that the drives that we put out are of the highest quality found in any market.