Seagate Rolls Out 4 TB HDD for Video Storage

[CaedenV]

After i burned 4 Seagate HDDS in under 6 months (heavy use and a few power surges in summer), i switched to Samsung drives. 3 years working now, never had a problem with samsung drives.
Sorry seagate, but your product quality is simply not good enought.

1) power surges will do that. That has nothing to do with Seagate
2) A little over 3 years ago Seagate bought the Sammy HDD division... so you probably still have a Seagate drive with a Samsung sticker on it.

 

[CaedenV]

Whatever happened to those 5TB hard drives you said were going to be coming at the beginning of 2012, Seagate?

The floods of late 2011 really screwed things up which gave a bunch of delays on the release of 4TB platters. 5TB platters (as I recall) were supposed to be released at the end of 2012, but because they have had issues with 1TB platter yields they have been putting them in 1-2TB drives where there is more profit margin rather than wasting them on 5TB drives.

However, my understanding is that yields are finally getting better, so there is a chance to see them by the end of the year.

 

[CaedenV]

When considering the reliability of certain company you have to refer current products. Seagate have had really bad products and allso good products... like Intels hot and bad Pentium 4... Now the best CPU's are made by Intel...
We should wait and see if these new Seagate ones are bad or good. Only time will tell.

Ya, that's always the issue with HDDs. Only time will tell, but by the time that time has gone by it is too late to buy the product. HDDs (and SSDs) are the time bombs of the PC world. They are all going to fail, you just don't know when. It could be 6mo after purchase, or 10 years, and even if you get a drive from a good set you might just get 'lucky' with a bad drive, or bad batch. Just hold your breath, make your purchase, get the extended warranty, and put anything important on a local RAID and back it up externally. Not much else you can do really.

 

[Branden]

Unless you have been working with computers then there is no way for you to make a claim as bold as that you have never seen a WD HDD drive go bad. Personally I can see that happening as I have never had a WD or Seagate go bad (look above) but I work in computer repairs and I have had bad off the self Seagate, WD, Samsung or any other brand and as well ones that die within a year.

i've been building and fixing computers for 15 years, and stand by my observations.
obviously though my observations are restricted to my own computers and those of my family & friends' whose computers i check on, whereas a majority of the computers i've built for strangers i don't see again so i can't confirm every single WD i've put in those have lasted. but i've yet to have a computer i've built come back with a dead hdd, and not coincidentally i've avoided seagate in my builds for 10 years. and of the hdd failures that do come in: they're usually pretty old drives, but the newer dead drives are almost always seagate. (or sandforce based ocz)

i also didn't say WD never goes bad, re-read my comment. i have seen some of my WD drives go bad - just that they're always over 5 years old by then. in fact i believe the oldest working hdd i have is a WD EL36 from 2003 - it's still used in an old pc that really only gets used for retrieving data off floppies & zip disks anymore, probably got over 40,000 POH on it. to the best of my knowledge i don't have any 5+ year old seagate drives still working, but because i've avoided seagate for years i don't exactly have a ton of those around either. (oddly enough, i do have a couple maxtors that still work, and those were notoriously bad)

being a computer guy myself, some of my friends are also in the techie circle and they generally have formed the same opinions of seagate based one their experiences with them - not favourable.

i fully realize different people have different experiences - somewhere out there is someone else who's built a hundred systems all with seagate and not a single failure.
is it not possible that the seagates that get sold here come from a different factory than the ones get to you? or the shipping route seagate drives take to get here gives them more jostling around?