Seagate May Be Dishing Out 3 TB HDD This Year

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All I ever read is that the long term reliability of these bigs drives is not so good. In fact, wasn't there an article on here (or linked from Tom's) that stated that the number of sectors on the disk, and the MTBF (calculated in accesses or something like that) means you can't read the entire disk without encountering an unrecoverable error? I.e. if the drive may encounter one failure every 1 Trillion accesses, well guess what, that drive has 1 trillion bytes on it, so how quickly will it take to reach that failure count?

I'd like to see a reliability article done by Tom's. Put some of these 1TB and 2TB drives into various 24/7 scenarios and see how long they last without failures. These drives are getting bigger, but are they getting more reliable? 3TB is an awful lot of data to lose if you encounter a file system error and have to reformat.
 
A legend told by their own IT tech says that an average of 1/3 of all the corporate laptops in one famous mobile phone company in Europe stores p0rn. Makes one wonder what those guys are doing during their work hours.

Maybe instead saving it all on your own laptop they need a torrent server with couple of these new Seagates 😉
 
All I ever read is that the long term reliability of these bigs drives is not so good.

Not to mention that they are Seagates. You would get better data security scribbling your 0s and 1s in the sand at the beach than you would putting them on a Seagate drive.
 
Only problem with these drives is that you won't be able to use them as boot drives thanks to the BIOS 2-terabyte limitation. Some motherboards will work (such as Intel's) thanks to it's limited use of EFI, but most won't.
 
[citation][nom]mindless728[/nom]@figgus give it a break, they had issues with the .11 series, the .12 are fine. Not to mention this is the enterprise drive so expect better quality from it[/citation]

Yeah, we use the enterprise Seagates at work. We (thankfully) are moving away from them now, because they are junk compared to their competitors. Their .11 series of desktop drives were indeed junk, and I expect BETTER (not worse) from their "enterprise" grade kit.
 
MR_TUEL: Yea I've been carrying around a 2.5" 1TB for many months. Any geek who claims know about storage should be aware of these drives, they're made by WD. At least should any geek writing an article on the subject. Shame.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=722

ps. agree with previous poster, seagate is junk. i wouldnt dare reccomend them for enterprise ANYTHING.
 
I purchased a 2.5 inch 1TB USB 2.0 Western Digital hard drive fro 139.99 at Fry's Electronics.. Sku: 6206810 I took it out of the enclose.. It was a standard 2.5inch sata hard drive.. It worked great for a 2.5 inch drive.
 



Well i can contribute a small amount of information to your query.

I have 16 Seagate 1Tb Barracudas [ST31000340AS] running firmware SD1A (SD15 factory Oo). I unfortunatly bought these drives in the middle of 2008, before i hard heard of the firmware/bricking debacle and how far seagate's reputation was about to slip. But that is nether here nor there.

I have these drives running on two 3ware 9650SE-8lPML raid caids, each array of 8 drives is in raid 6, and the two arrays are mirrored together. Creating a total of 5.5 Binary TB with triple redundancy. So far after about two years only one drive has show signs of data degredation. It has a single non-recoverable error every 3-4 months, causing the raid-6 partition to become semi-degraded and force a rebuild.

This computer has a 99% uptime also. It is on 24/7, and has about 200GB or better transfers in a day. It gets powered off for 30 minutes once a month.

Although anecdotally i have a cousin who had three of the exact same drives go a few months back. So who really knows?
I have my fingers crossed that these drives hold up until WD can crank out some 3TB. Then im going to dump all the seagates and change over.
 
At my business we use a mix of Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi drives mostly. I have seen the rare Samsung but we don't get those in new anymore. Out of our current records that I can vouch for, the last 4 1/2 yrs, we have had less Seagate failures than any other drive. Now if you work in IT professionally you know already that the most common point of failure by a long shot is the HDD. Out of over 18,000 user's we support (in the continental U.S. alone since we're global) over the last 4 1/2 yrs I've personally been at this specific company that amounts to an awful huge amount of statistical data compiled on failures. So I feel confident in saying, whether it's luck of the draw or quality I've see more reliability overall out of them.

At home I used to use WD exclusively. Now I have machines with Samsung, seagate and WD drives currently and I do have to say the only one to fail in the last 2 yrs of my personal collection of PCs is one Seagate drive. If I go back further I could state roughly equal number of WD to seagate failures in my personal PCs.

What does this tell me? Well not a hell of a lot LOL, having been a professional IT person for decades now I see highs and lows of failure rates for all companies and they do seem to come in waves so at the end of the day, go with a name brand, good warranty and have a backup plan (data backup that is). Other than that, I'd go with what gives you the capacity and cost you want/need. This is what I've seen at least in a really vast amount of experience on a home user and enterprise level.

:) yes I purposely didn't pick a favorite in my conclusion to avoid conflict but I would go with the stats gathered on that 18k devices replaced every 3 yrs and failures randomly within those 3 yrs as my guide of buying ! To each their own, sorry so long :)
 
[citation][nom]mr_tuel[/nom]i thought that WD already had a 1TB 2.5"...[/citation]
It's not considered a true "standard" 2.5" drive due to the fact it has a 12.5mm height, and wont fit in most standard laptops. The new drive from seagate is supposed to be 9.5mm I believe.
 
hopefully everyone realizes that they cant just put this into their systems due to the limitations of the traditional BIOS which is 2TB. you have to have a mobo that has EFI support to use this drive.
 
[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]All I ever read is that the long term reliability of these bigs drives is not so good. In fact, wasn't there an article on here (or linked from Tom's) that stated that the number of sectors on the disk, and the MTBF (calculated in accesses or something like that) means you can't read the entire disk without encountering an unrecoverable error? I.e. if the drive may encounter one failure every 1 Trillion accesses, well guess what, that drive has 1 trillion bytes on it, so how quickly will it take to reach that failure count?I'd like to see a reliability article done by Tom's. Put some of these 1TB and 2TB drives into various 24/7 scenarios and see how long they last without failures. These drives are getting bigger, but are they getting more reliable? 3TB is an awful lot of data to lose if you encounter a file system error and have to reformat.[/citation]

I agree. It is the first thing I thought when I saw the headline. If I were in the HDD industry, I would try to sell RAID0 drives stand alone. So basically, sell two HDDs that fit in a 3.5 bay with a light ( and driver optional) that blicks if one HDD fails, or sell portable HDDs that sandwich dual HDD. If one fails, you replace one of them. Or it can be done like car headlights, if one fails, you know you have to move the data to a new drive. Of course we can get Raid0 with existing tech, but I think make it more user-friendly. everybody stores their family albums and home videos on these drives now and there is not industry-wide option to provide redundancy in a simple package.
 


i think you mean raid-1, in raid-0 if you lose a disk, you lose everything
 
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