I'm done with Seagate.

Well, I managed to get Seagate to escalate things, and they are collecting the old drive and replacing it, though I've been told I'll get the same thing back "because it's the same model number". Why are they exchanging it then?

They are basically refusing to acknowledge the information I sent them, even though quite a bit of it was originally sourced from their own support forums! They keep insisting the drive has two platters, even though it doesn't match the other 2 TB drive I have, and exhibits all the known characteristics of the 3 platter version.

It seems that despite their "Power Of One" marketing of the 1TB per platter technology, Seagate puts more platters in a drive to use up the platters that don't meet the quality for 1TB per platter, leaving the customer with a slower, hotter, noisier drive.

By using the same model numbers, Seagate can insist it's "the same product" when it clearly isn't.
 
Back in the pre-flood days... the hard drives they were kicking out were ok.

Since the new factories... they are abysmal... whereas WD and Hitachi appear to have recovered back to their old standard pretty well.

Out of 6 3TB Seagates, 3 of them failed in the 12-18 month window and the 4th failed in the 18-24 month window... they only came with a 1 year warranty... should've guessed I suppose but bought on previous good experience.

Actually, now thinking about it, I think a good proportion of at least the older Seagate 1TB external enclosures even came with Samsung drives rather than seagate, lol. I think 50% of them are still going strong after about 7 years.

I still have two drives working, but I'm keeping them in low-usage / backup scenarios.

Now I only buy WD (although I have been tempted by Hitachi as their failure rates are good and warranties up to 5 years for their mid-range drives).

I replaced the 3TB Seagates with 3TB WD Red and they are all still working well after 2 years. They are sitting in my home server now and still strong with quite a few of them getting daily use.

I've since upgraded my 2x Synology NASes with 8x 4TB WD Reds... but they've only had about 6 months of use so far.
 
try and pickup some used Samsung f4 2tb drives,i have about 6 or 7 and all been flawless

never had a failed drive ever,but they are all samsungs
 
After my drives of choice became to small (Samsung F4 2TB) all still faultless years on might I add.

I replaced them with 4TB Seagate Nas drives about a year ago and (touch wood) all eight have been rock solid and powered 24x7. I can confirm backblaze and say at least mine have been good. It would be nice to think they are getting reliability sorted because there 3TB and under drives seem pants. Here hoping the Seagate 8TB is reliable, it's a lot of data to lose !
 
I've got 8 Seagate drives, 4x 2TBs, 2x 3TBs and 2x 5TBs and they're all fine.

I've also got 10 Samsung Drives, 2x 2TB, 4x 1TB, 2x 500GB, 2x 250GB, most of them have been fine, though 1 failed and 1 is a bit iffy.

I've also got 3 Hitatchi drives. 2x 750GB, and 1x 1TB, 1 failed and the other 2 are a bit iffy.

I've found that the older lower capacity drives are less reliable. The newer higher capacity drives have been quite good.
 
I've got 17 Hitachi/HGST 4TB HDDs. I used to have 18 but 1 failed (the only HDD I've had that's ever failed).

I've also got 4 Western Digital 4TB HDDs, 6 Samsung 3TB HDDs, 6 Samsung 2TB HDDs, 2 Seagate 2TB HDDs, 2 Western Digital 2TB HDDs and 8 Samsung 1TB HDDs. No problems with any of them.

I've also owned numerous smaller Samsung and Western Digital HDDs in the past and a lot of these are still going in donated systems (the very old or small capacity ones have been discarded).
 
In 25 years I've only had 1 HDD fail, this was a 20MB (yes MB) Seagate unit on a 80286. I did have a Samsung Green that was DOA that I put down to damage in transit. I'm only 30 mins from OCUK and I always collect HDD's now!

Working in IT I've had countless Maxtor, Samsung, Western Digital over the years. I've built my own computers for a long time, and always had either a low speed fan, or air ventilation passing over the HDD's. My own theory is reducing heat buildup keeps HDD's more reliable.

I've had 3 SSD's fail, in my book HDD's are still far more reliable then SSD's.

For anything that matters I use WD Black, or WD Raid drives, they are honestly built better then the WD Green and Blue drives.

Hitachi drives look very good according to those stats.
 
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never really rated hitachi replaced a couple of failed deskstar drives for friends
but that review does look interesting mybee it's time to give em some consideration
 
Don't forget Toshiba, their 3.5" drive are Hitachi/IBM IP based, which WD had to sell off when they purchased Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
 
WD also were quite dodgy with their WD1003FZEX (1Tb Caviar Black) where they basically rebranded WD10EZEX (1Tb Caviar Blue) drives and stuck a Caviar Black label on them resulting in worse access times. I unfortunately ended up with one the rebranded ones (though the seller I bought it from partially refunded me).

It should have been this:
ehMZFLx.png


Instead I got this:
gzKMVG4l.jpg.png


Hmm, something looks familiar here...
CfwStk3.jpg
 
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JasonM said:
In 25 years I've only had 1 HDD fail, this was a 20MB (yes MB) Seagate unit on a 80286. I did have a Samsung Green that was DOA that I put down to damage in transit. I'm only 30 mins from OCUK and I always collect HDD's now!

Working in IT I've had countless Maxtor, Samsung, Western Digital over the years. I've built my own computers for a long time, and always had either a low speed fan, or air ventilation passing over the HDD's. My own theory is reducing heat buildup keeps HDD's more reliable.

I've had 3 SSD's fail, in my book HDD's are still far more reliable then SSD's.

For anything that matters I use WD Black, or WD Raid drives, they are honestly built better then the WD Green and Blue drives.

Hitachi drives look very good according to those stats.
Click to expand...

Older SSDs or more recent ones?

In the days of the OCZ Vertex (1, 2 and LE) and before... reliability was a severe issue for SSDs... I had quite a few die on me back in those days, thankfully all while still under warranty and I didn't lose anything major because they were small capacity boot drives.

They're still not all that big of a capacity really... I have 2x Intel 740 480GB drives in raid-0 for my main OS/games/apps drive and a second 256GB Samsung 830 for extra bits.

But all data I want to keep for a long time is stored on spinning platters... after previous raid crashes and hard drive failures, I have a few backups of the important stuff while other stuff is running on decent raid-5 arrays.

I mention this as I would suppose an SSD failure is less crucial than a spinning platter drive failure... at this time.

Lately though and for the past good few years, SSD reliability has gone up quite drastically... decent SSDs are even given a 10 year warranty now.

So you may want to re-consider that position of your with the newer drives available :)

Unless, of course, your experience is with the newer drives?

I still have a couple of Vertexes... it was a 100GB Vertex Limited Edition that last failed on me... that's used in my wife's "messing around" laptop... so if that one ever does fail, it's no big deal... and it's also in a low-write-usage scenario. A 50GB Vertex 2 is sitting in my HTPC and is still going strong after years... although again, it's a low-usage scenario.

SSD crashes tend to happen under write... so if you have older SSDs then it's best to use them in scenarios where they are as close to read-only as possible.

I remember having a few maxtors.

FYI... I have also always had decent ventilation, but that has not helped me much. However yes you're right, someone without decent ventilation who lets the HDD temps rise will see a failure rate sooner than someone who keeps them cool.

At the moment mine are all in the basement and seem to sit around 10-20*C while idle and in use... I'm hoping that will keep them operating for a good while.
 
I think they're pretty transparent about their methodology. This isn't a scientific study, this is what they have found to be the most/least reliable drives. In the YouTube clip they complain about sample size but backblaze publish the sample size and confidence intervals, I don't see the problem.

In the context of us consumers you should definitely take the results with a pinch of salt though, they're running drives in a server environment, not a home desktop. No home user is going to abuse the hard drive add much as they do. I generally think of their results as a worst case scenario. Certainly I wouldn't expect to see Seagate drives failing at 40% per year for home users!
 
crinkleshoes said:
Older SSDs or more recent ones?
Click to expand...

I've had/have the following SSD's
Kingston Value 64GB - performed slow then failed.
Kingston Value 94GB - died without warning.
Kingston Value 90GB - still in use no issues
Crucial M4 64GB - died without warning.
3 x Samsung 830 256GB - All working, expect 1 lost all data but worked fine after format.
1 x Samsung 830 128GB - still in use no issues
1 x Samsung 840 PRO 256GB - still in use no issue.
1 x Crucial MX 100 512GB - still in use no issue.

The above SSD's are from the period 2008 to present. 4 have given issues, so that's 40% issue rate from the 10 above.

Re HDD's, 1989 to present day only 1 HDD has failed, lost count of number but lets say it's been 1.25 HDD's a year, this gives over 30 HDD's and an issue rate of about 3%.

So from my own personal experience SSD's are over 10 times less reliable over HDD's.
 
I've had 2 Seagates fail, I managed to fix one with a replacement PCB luckily. But it's enough to say I wont ever buy another. I love Samsung drives, the F1 drives were amazing for their time.

I now own 5 SSD's, OCZ Vertex 2, OCZ Agility 3 60GB + 120GB, Cricual M4 256GB and a Samsung EVO 250GB.

All are in perfect health and never given me an issue.
 
In the 90s Seagate were the drives to have. WD seem to be the ones to have now.

I owned 2 deathstars, so including RMAs that was 4 dead drives :D

Had a 4TB WD red die after a couple of weeks - got changed for a recertified :( although that's still going 6months later.

SSD wise I've got a right mix of multiple brands and touch wood none have issues. Oldest is 3 years old, newest about 4 months.
 
WD are the best by far. Haven't had many failures over the years, though when I have their RMA process is top notch.

Seagate are terrible by comparison.
 
I have a number of WD/Seagate/Hitachi drives running, I like all three.


CaNsA said:
I thought everyone knew about this...

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
Click to expand...

eggbert said:
Holy lost data batman !

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

Look about two thirds through, I had no idea the 3TB was that bad :eek:
Click to expand...

Meaningless graph is meaningless, backblaze are an online backup company that maximize profits by using desktop HDD's in ridiculously abusive enviroments and running them to death.

All that chart shows is that Seagate desktop drives don't stand up as well as the others when it comes to being mistreated in ways no enterprise user would, nevermind the target audience.

Storage_Pod.jpg
 
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