It's offical, seagate hard drives are garbage

[DeathAxe 10]

Did all the drives get equal use?

 

Read it and find out.

[karl101 10]

I use a Vertex 3 in my rig as well, issue with it though is I can't run it on my Intel ports constantly BSOD - put on my Marvell ports and works perfectly.

 

I think mine is a few years old now, so will keep an eye on it..

 

I got a Kingston Hyperx 3K in my server which looks to be performing well.

 

For my data drives in server, they all WD as others have said Seagate haven't been that brilliant

 

You have a scheduled backup? At least once a week? This makes even more sense if you have anything that requires some mad licensing requirement, like anything paid for from Adobe.

 

Backup or Death! (does it look I'm going on about backups?)

 

I also have a couple of OCZ Vertex 4 drives in another machine, its a dual boot Win 7 Home Premium, and Fedora Linux. The Home Premium does not do backups over a network. But image for Windows can fix that: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm

 

The problems only really begin when restoring a drive image, having a boot CD/DVD/USB, making sure the SSD is set to AHCI not IDE or RAID in the BIOS, finding that the Win7 Restore DVD says it has connected to the network, but hasn't and needs the drivers...

 

A nightmare.. That costs money!

 

Back in 2009 I got hit by the Seagate barracuda 'flaw' http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/18/barracuda_firmware_upgrade_and_recovery/ I didn't know that hard disks had a serial port, but got an RS232 to TTL converter and fixed it http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/. I buy Western Digital mechanical disks nowadays, but those two Seagate's are still being used, just not anywhere important.

 

K.

 

PS: I have a problem with the original report. From a comment in the article, drives used: Seagate: 12,765, Western Digital: 2,838, Toshiba: 58. This looks like a statistical abuse to me. Clearly more Seagate's will fail because there are more of them compared to Western Digital, and Toshiba look more reliable because hardly any are being used. This is not a like-for-like comparison.

[tinfoilhat 11]

People have always favoured a brand of hard drive based on the failures.

 

Imo Maxtor are the worst. They just kept failing and failing on me.

Maxtor and Seagate merged, but until then Seagate used to be great and fofered things like 3-5 year standard warrnties. I'd still take seagate over maxtor.

 

The best are WD and Samsung.

 

All hdd fail eventually.

 

I've had dodgy Seagates in the past, in fact where I worked had a whole batch of knackered seagates so I've never had one since. I've got maxtor at the moment and had them for a while, I think one failed but I've not had many problems. But I'm probably only failure away from changing my mind like most people!

[Obelix 11]

Read it and find out.

 

It makes the point that some drives simply cannot cope with their environment - like the WD green drives which are so unreliable they simply cannot use them.

 

Ultimately Backblaze are not looking after the drives in a sensible manner, and I'm not surprised that certain drives have immense problems - this isn't really a useful study that you can extrapolate to anywhere other than their storage pods due to the uniqueness of their environment.

[walkerx 10]

You have a scheduled backup? At least once a week? This makes even more sense if you have anything that requires some mad licensing requirement, like anything paid for from Adobe.

 

Backup or Death! (does it look I'm going on about backups?)

 

I also have a couple of OCZ Vertex 4 drives in another machine, its a dual boot Win 7 Home Premium, and Fedora Linux. The Home Premium does not do backups over a network. But image for Windows can fix that: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm

 

The problems only really begin when restoring a drive image, having a boot CD/DVD/USB, making sure the SSD is set to AHCI not IDE or RAID in the BIOS, finding that the Win7 Restore DVD says it has connected to the network, but hasn't and needs the drivers...

 

A nightmare.. That costs money!

 

Back in 2009 I got hit by the Seagate barracuda 'flaw' http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/18/barracuda_firmware_upgrade_and_recovery/ I didn't know that hard disks had a serial port, but got an RS232 to TTL converter and fixed it http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/. I buy Western Digital mechanical disks nowadays, but those two Seagate's are still being used, just not anywhere important.

 

K.

 

PS: I have a problem with the original report. From a comment in the article, drives used: Seagate: 12,765, Western Digital: 2,838, Toshiba: 58. This looks like a statistical abuse to me. Clearly more Seagate's will fail because there are more of them compared to Western Digital, and Toshiba look more reliable because hardly any are being used. This is not a like-for-like comparison.

 

Backed up nightly via network to my Windows Server 2012 Essentials - but I only have a few main apps on my PC (Office, Burning Software, Steam) so not big issue for me to rebuild PC as don't take long,

 

I've had dodgy Seagates in the past, in fact where I worked had a whole batch of knackered seagates so I've never had one since. I've got maxtor at the moment and had them for a while, I think one failed but I've not had many problems. But I'm probably only failure away from changing my mind like most people!

 

I've had a few seagates fail, maxtor weren't too bad but got replacements quickly from them. I'm now using WD which seem to be more reliable (for me anyway).

[anywebsite 10]

Every Seagate I've had has failed, small sample size, but still. Not had a problem with Hitachi, Toshiba or Samsung.

[walkerx 10]

A lot of these survey's I'm not bothered with, I use the drives I don't have issues with - I had more issues with seagate drives than maxtor, I've had one with WD (but I think that was probably caused by the problems I had with the psu on my c-200) - If I have issues with a brand I won't buy for a long time from them

[Danny1107 10]

Still problem free with Seagate. Had to RMA a WD at the start of the year after it failed, wasn't even 3 months old, luckily had a back up of everything that was on there.

 

For the record I never said Seagate are non problematic, I said I personally have never had issue with Seagate drives, but have had many problems with WD. I guess I'm just one of the lucky ones, but I'll stick to Seagate as so far (Touch wood) I've never had any issues with them failing.

[melthebell 862]

Samsung drives are now owned by Seagate! I had a 300 Gb drive which I purchased on the basis (at the time) that allegedly all the TV recording devices were using Seagates - has a 5 year warranty - it died after 3 years - problem with replacement is that I would have to pay postage to Holland and then the replacement would not be a brand new drive but a reconditioned one! Currently using a mix of drives but normally would buy Samsung - provided it is not built to Seagate specs!

was just gonna say, ive just purchased a 3tb samsung external and on the back of the manual it states seagate

[walkerx 10]

Still problem free with Seagate. Had to RMA a WD at the start of the year after it failed, wasn't even 3 months old, luckily had a back up of everything that was on there.

 

For the record I never said Seagate are non problematic, I said I personally have never had issue with Seagate drives, but have had many problems with WD. I guess I'm just one of the lucky ones, but I'll stick to Seagate as so far (Touch wood) I've never had any issues with them failing.

 

That's it, it's down to the experience of individual users, just because one may have a problem, another may not..

[anywebsite 10]

was just gonna say, ive just purchased a 3tb samsung external and on the back of the manual it states seagate

 

I think they're still using samsung designs.

 

I forgot about the seagate/samsung in my ps3, that still works perfectly. I've got an 80GB IDE Seagate in my PS2 that still works great too & a 20GB Seagate sat spare that still works.

 

All manufacturers have periods of making bad drives, maybe Seagate will improve since they bought Samsung.

[swarfendor437 14]

I bought a PC mag some time ago covering Hard Drive special issue with pullout mag on how to restore etc - many (especially ones with armatures) can be bad at point of manufacture as walkerx has pointed out. I have still got 2 Quantum Fireballs (20 Gb) lying around but know they still work!