Seagate barracuda 3Tb life expectancy is 2 years - Don't buy it.

[Cristi Oancea]

Seagate barracuda 3Tb life expectancy is 2 years; confirmed by www.seagate.com customer service. All the tools and applications developed by Seagate are made to detect or recover data. So, they know the junk they have and they make money upon data recovery.

This is how it went: purchased the hard drive, downloaded their software to set the partitions, then, after about 2 years, my Windows 7 64bit crashed trying to gather info from one of the partitions. Contacted their support and even if their hard drive still in warranty, they will not helped me. They told me to contact their "data recovery" division to help me. Well, I have called them 1-800-Seagate and they told me to send the hard drive to their lab and the charge will be 550 Pounts (aprox. 700USD). This is not admissible to have a hardware that will last 2 years....

If any of the Seagate team members reads this, please don't try to deny. I have promised you that I will make the world know your type of business you're doing.

 

[Reyaz123]

Seagate hard drives in general have the highest failure rates out there. I stick with my WD drives and they have never failed me

Many people who post their new PC builds on here tend to go with Seagate as it is cheaper. This is fine but they should expect it to fail at any time
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089464/three-year-27-000-drive-study-reveals-the-most-reliable-hard-drive-makers.html

 

[migronesien]

Im running a Seagate Barracuda 500gb for almost 4 years and a 3tb for a bit over 2 years and recently bought another 3tb and never had any problems.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

All the major manufacturers make tools to test drives. AFAIK Seagate is the only one with an in-house data recovery team - but the others at least have preferred partners, and Seagate data recovery will recover from any brand of drive.

Seagate's 'desktop' drives (they no longer use the term barracuda) have a 2-year warranty. This is different from a 2-year life expectancy; the warranty length is usually determined by how many drives they expect to fail in that time frame - I wouldn't expect more than 1-5% to fail within the warranty period.

They're also rated for 8/5 operation rather than 24/7, which is if anything the shadiest thing about them.

No manufacturer will EVER pay for your data recovery. Not Seagate, not WD, not Toshiba. Their warranties all expressly exclude responsibility for your data because it's your responsibility to maintain a complete and up to date backup, and has been for decades and decades.

 

[Reyaz123]

@ migronesien

I had a seagate barracuda 500gb on my older PC and it started failing in the 6th year. Had to replace mine

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Seagate hard drives in general have the highest failure rates out there. I stick with my WD drives and they have never failed me

Many people who post their new PC builds on here tend to go with Seagate as it is cheaper. This is fine but they should expect it to fail at any time
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089464/three-year-27-000-drive-study-reveals-the-most-reliable-hard-drive-makers.html

The backblaze study is pretty fatally flawed... they're running 8/5 rated consumer drives 24/7 in a datacentre. What do you expect to happen?

EDIT: Wasn't expecting to get a BA...

I've got two of the same drives the OP is complaining. Can't be bothered pulling them out and checking the date code, but they're probably 2-ish years and fine. Spent the first year and a half running 24/7. I've also got a couple of the bad run of 7200.11 drives, one of which did fail. No issues with about ten of their laptop drives.

These small sample sizes are worthless for statistics (and have serious selection bias), and large studies don't use the drives in their intended environment. I don't think there's reliable evidence either way.

 

[Reyaz123]

It's an example. Not bashing anyone here

But this isn't the only study that was done on the barracuda series that show it has more problems than other drives

If you have a link that proves barracuda outperforms other branded hard drives, send me a link. I'd actually like to know more about it if it's true

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Maybe - I haven't seen the others.

It's also generally a cheaper drive, and performs better than the competition. Given that you should have a good backup anyway, I'd probably be perfectly willing to take the risk, especially as a backup or bulk media drive that's only spun up on demand.

 

[Paul NZ]

I've had this 1 TB seagate since July 2010 5 yrs yesterday. It's been fine. Never had any probs with it.

The main prob with SG hdd's is, most of them have buggy firmware.

 

[Reyaz123]

Good point, although many people don't backup their data when they should so I normally assume they wouldn't which is why to be safe they need a different type of hard drive imo.
And agreed Paul.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Not most. One or two production runs, and I'm sure you can find other manufacturers with similar issues.

See the WD Green head unload issues.

 

[Reyaz123]

Oh, and also I mean Seagate in general. It could just be me, but most of the time whenever a client I have reports a failing external drive, 80% of the time I hear Seagate in the same sentence.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Seagate external drives are cheap, especially outside of north america. So they sell lots.

They also don't have (I believe) the irritating encryption system WD has, which means you can't pull the drive from the caddy and read it.

 

[mikey100tv]

I've been running Seagate drives for years. Never had a problem with them. In recent years, I've also been using their 'Expansion' portable & desktop drives.....which are simply Barracudas inside a customised case with an adapter card for the USB 3.0 interface.

For the price, they're pretty good value for money. I run mine on 'Puppy' Linux, with the ext3 file-system, and only for external storage anyway.There's nothing system-critical on there.....but I backup regularly, anyway.....to a pair of WDs.

Interestingly, I was having a browse on YouTube the other day (not a place I spend much time in), and was amazed at the number of YouTubers who have made demo videos showing how to strip these 'Expansions' down, and yank the drive for use as a main internal drive.....


Mike.