In 2013 I purchased 6 x 3TB Baracuda drives. It was unknown to me at that time that they had a 40% failure rate, as quoted on some review/test sites. I've experienced something different. 5 of the 6 drives have failed in less than a year. The last one, I'm sure, must be living on borrowed time.
The drives always seem to suffer a similar fate - LBA 0 - or Size 0 - The drive is not recognized by the BIOS and/or hangs on boot up, rather than mechanical failure that often occurs with WD drives. Typically there is a warning before the drives fail - such as extended boot times or the drop ready whilst the system is operational. My last drive seemed the have a massive stroke, dying almost instantly, resulting in a loss of around 1.5TB of data.
Data recovery centers seem to exploit the fact that we treasure our data, and feel guilty about not having done regular backups by charging exorbitant rates to recover the data. The work required for a LBA-0 failure (firmware corruption), is almost trivial, yet I was quoted as much as $2,600 AUD to get back that data. Indeed, you can buy the hardware for reocvering drives for $1000, so you could recover that cost in one event. Perhaps I should come out of retirement and get into disk recovery
4 of the 5 drives were covered by Warranty, which used to be 3 years, but Seagate have acknowledged that their manufacturing standards and quality of parts have declined (purely a business decision for the sake of profit), and have dropped that to 2 years. The 4TB drives likewise have dropped from 5 years to 3 years in recognition of the decline in reliability. You can still buy a 4TB with 5 years if you are lucky, because the warranty is based on the date of manufacture.
How anyone can call 3 years "Peace of mind" baffles me.
I have IDE drives from 2002 here still running. I have some 500GB drives from 2009 still running. Only drives from the key quality drop points which "magically" appear to be every other year (from observation), seem to have short life spans.
But, I must be fair. I contacted Seagate about the 5th drive which was out of Warranty, and they bent over backwards to help me out. Extended the warranty and offered to cover shipping costs. Now that's something you don't see everyday, and IMHO, a credit to their commitment to customers.
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