Seagate reliability fears

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KaiserPhantasma

KaiserPhantasma

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Nov 16, 2013
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Are this warranted or does it still depend on luck and the store you bought them from?


however while surfing the net I found this little article and I am inclined to believe it is true unless someone can state otherwise with solid backing (by that I mean evidence not "I've been using seagate for xx years and nothing failed)...

http://news.yahoo.com/seagate-faced-class-action-lawsuit-193453745.html

I asked the question because I myself have the 3TB seagate barracuda and now I fear for its life since my "important" files are in it...
 
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Personally, I have only used seagate barracudas (3x200GB, 2x250GB, 2x500GB, 2x2TB) in last 15 years, not single dead one ever. I still trust them but I generally avoid latest new tech toys like that 3TB drive was so... dunno.

On other hand, I avoid Maxtor, got one HDD in 2001, it was dead on arrival, got it replaced, it broke within hour, got it replaced, it broke in two days... Sure, it has been a while but.. we all have our own beliefs. I Like Seagate and don't trust Maxtor, other's mileage and experiences may be different.


Edit:

Also, As said news say, so far there is SINGLE plaintiff who got bad product and happened to get broken replacements. Only difference between him and me (and maxtor) is he raised a bigger fuss about it.
The reliability report he bases claims on is also somewhat dubious, using disks in custom cassis held up by sata ports and rubber bands.

Yes, I agree that there likely were some quality problems along the line but I am quite sure that said problems have since been also fixed.

Edit2:
There is also better news about it on toms:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/seagate-hdd-failure-lawsuit-3tb,news-52310.html
 
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Hi there KaiserPhantasma,

I can't really comment on this article but the thing is that, mechanical drives just fail. In many cases, they fail even without a warning. It could last for 10 years or it could fail in a week, no matter the brand, the capacity or the place you got it from.
You should always keep the data that you can't afford to loose stored on at least two places.

You can test the drives from time to time with one of these: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility
The SMART report should at least show when the drive's health status starts to deteriorate.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD :)
 
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The WD Rep is telling you "mechanical things will fail" You are going to get into an accident at some point. People buy insurance for accidents, for HD is backup and run some S.M.A.R.T. monitor, sometimes it fails slowly, REGARDLESS WHAT BRAND u end up with, there are no unobtanium HDDs.
 
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never knew it was an actual WD rep... thought it was just a initials of sorts...

anyways I guess even with today's technology we still can't "make certain" the reliability of HDDs
 
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I had thought the same and concluded, packing them ever tighter, lax quality control (plenty of DOA stories from all brands), pushing them out like commodities as they are, and let face if, if they make it so reliable that you never have to replace it, how is the company gonna survive not selling the next great thing? ^)

This is not to supplant your back ups, but go by what warranty they are are giving you:

Green (standard desktop) - 2 year
Red (NAS 24x7 uptime) - 3 year (currently most bang for the buck)
Black (Enterprise) - 5 years
 
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The Backblaze data, which showed high Seagate failure rates, was questionable from the start. Even Backblaze said it was of dubious reliability. If you look at the 2015 data, the Seagate drives were better than western digital.

One thing I think we can take from the Backblaze data is HGST/hitachi are very reliable drives. But you do pay for it.
 
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This is purely anecdotal of course, but I have TWO 2TB Desktop Seagate die on me, right at the 30 months mark, purchased 2 weeks apart and sourced from different factories. All of a sudden, health deteriorates, at least gave me enough time to pull the data out. 20 years of playing with this stuff, a dozen drives, 1 IBM died on me a while back, but otherwise pretty reliable until this.
 
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while yes in the end its still business it is the data can't be sometimes saved not the harddrive that I am concerned
thats why most of us if not all want the "unobtainium" harddrives that won't die till the owner dies since I had a external WD die on me before luckily we still can save 98-99% of the data it contained (was a 1TB external harddrive)

but I can't help but be concerned with the news that I posted since someone is ACTUALLY suing seagate... never read or heard someone suing WD or hitachi...
 
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Not true, every decade, SOMEBODY is suing a storage vendor, Google, you should find them. Read the entire article? That lawyer is an ambulance chaser involved in other consumer class actions.
 
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I did but really can't shake the "negative" light being shown upon seagate with this case to the point its popping up on yahoo tech news

 
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Yes, the backblaze report is somewhat skewed and questionable but for one main reason: They use "consumer" grade drives in massive storage pods in racks. Those drives aren't designed for that type of environment with that kind of vibration and what not. So its not "completely" fair. They also used far more Seagate drives than other vendors back then so the numbers aren't quite proportional.

Now, that being said, it doesn't change the fact that the failure percentages were SO much higher for the Seagates than the other manufacturers. At the end of the day, I still think Seagate made a cheap and not terribly reliable drive. I also believe part of what causes it is they prioritized performance over designed reliability. You'll notice a direct correlation between the two across lines. The HGST drives and drives like the WD RE have slower read/write performance than Seagates, even in the enterprise drive market. If mechanical stuff isn't moving as fast, there's certainly a higher chance for long term reliability. When you get in to Seagate's enterprise drives you still see higher performance but much longer warranties and better internal hardware design to provide higher reliability in heavy workload environments.

If you look at newegg's reviews on the Seagate 1TB drives for instance, you see a TON of reviews because they're cheap. You'll see there that there are also a LOT of failed drives. The issue here is also that many of these drives are shipped as "bare" drives in some whack bubble-wrap type pocket in a small cardboard box. I'm convinced many of these drives die in transit or are at least hurt on their way to you. You can see direct evidence of this by comparing the reviews of a "bare" drive and the version of that same drive that's part of a "retail kit." Even with the Seagates you'll see the reviews are far more positive on the "retail" version, which comes in a Seagate marked box with nice foam padding inside. Same with the Toshiba drives actually.

Personally, I've been running 4 x 1TB Seagate 7200s in a RAID-5 for a couple years and have had no problems. Do I think they'll last forever? Nope! I also back the array up to a single 4TB drive to further protect the data. I build a lot of workstations for businesses and actually I use Toshiba drives in RAID arrays because I honestly don't trust Seagates for that environment and the Toshibas are actually about as fast as the Seagates, while drives like HGSTs are 15% slower. Out of the last 6 workstations deployed, I used Seagates in one and Toshibas in all the others (3-4 drive arrays). One of the Seagate drives failed in 4 months and none of the Toshibas have had a blip. I will say Seagate's replacement process is great and fast at least...

So, as with most everything in this space, you get what you pay for. WD has a huge name and as such lots of people swear by them. They're alright, and are pretty reliable, but most models are slow. Even the blacks are slow in comparison to drives from Seagate & Toshiba that are much cheaper. Based on the small percentages in average failure rates between these drives and fact that failures are so hit or miss as it is, I don't spend the extra money.

BACK UP YOUR DATA PEOPLE
 
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Don't forget, marco55 , that Backblaze wasn't just using racks, they were using CUSTOM racks that they they threw together themselves. In some cases, with rubber bands. It's not difficult to picture a scenario where a bunch of the Seagate drives ends up in an especially crappy rack.
 
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Right on Falcon. They're also I think 3 revisions up now on their storage pods since the original report came out, and the new pods have much better vibration dampening capabilities and other improvements to help the life of the drives they put in, and they still use all consumer-grade drives. This is likely also attributing heavily to the vastly improved failure rates they saw in 2015.
 
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