My First Rant! Seagate failures!

MobyDick

MobyDick

MobyDick

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RMA'd a 1tb seagate that failed due to bad sectors,got that sorted, new drive arrived just over a week ago.

While RMA'in it,I bought a 500gb to install windows and use as my main hd. Was waiting to buy a new case and graphics card before I installed the RMA's drive as a back up. Well today the new 500gb was acting up, ran the bootable seatools program and now this one has bad sectors!!

Trying to salvage some stuff off of it,not much because haven't been using it long, but it won't even boot into windows!

Just tried using Clonezilla to try clone it to the new 1tb one but it won't even finish that (Don't know if it would even work but thought i'd try it anyway).


Now I'm going to have to RMA that one aswell (When running Seatools it said take down this RMA code but didn't show one like last time? I'll try it again).

Think I'll buy a new WD 500 as my main hd,and just use these two as backups. Don't know how much use it will be backing up to dodgy hard drives though.

So then i'll have:
500gb WD - main
1tb Seagate -one I got back from RMA
500gb Seagate - when i RMA this one
2 x 750 Samsungs - both in external cases and used to store films, tv shows etc.

So i'm thinking, clone the 500gb WD to the 500gb Seagate every week or so?

Then do I backup the two 750gb's to the 1tb (minus some unimportant stuff) or use the 1tb and use the two 750gb's for a backup??

I've a pain in me hoop with fresh installs and installing everything all over again :(

At least after this time I should have a good backup plan...hopefully.

/end rant :mad::o
(Hope everything makes sense aswell)
 
They all can fail. Even SSDs can brick (fingers crossed it's not often - I've installed around 10 of them). To make matters worse not all HD manufacturers build theirs from the ground up. I remember reading an article a few years back which mentioned some of them buy parts in.
 
If you do a search for "Seagate reallocated sectors", you will find their drives have been suffering a problem that may not have discovered by many people using the drives (how many bother reading SMART data?).

I have come across a few 7200.12 drives with reallocated sectors counts after a few weeks running, but they don't fail SMART until they develop a few thousand of them.

I think there are just a few dodgy drives slipping through their quality control. I wrote about my experience here: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18200114

Of course, there are many people who are happy with their drives, so yeah perhaps we just lucked out. Seagate's official figure for failure rate for the 7200.12's is 0.3%. However, there must be something up with a drive which has had about 6 or more firmware releases so far which they put on their webpage for people to update to. Since when have you ever heard of a hard drive requiring that many firmware upgrades?

Where did you send your drive to for RMA? A UK address I hope, I need to send mine in! :)
 
Last edited:
spirits247 said:
Where did you send your drive to for RMA? A UK address I hope, I need to send mine in! :)
Click to expand...

Yeah,Coventry. But then the send it off to Holland or something i think.

Managed to get it into an external enclosure and plug it into my laptop via usb. Did the error checking in windows (Right click in my computer --> properties --> tools) and that did it's thing and i think it fixed it.
Didn't read the whole log but something about reallocating bad sectors etc. Put it back in PC and i'm using it now, not a bother on it :confused:

Think i'll clone it in the morning!!
 
I've been unlucky with Seagate drives also, I have a stack of 3 of them which have died and I cannot RMA them either... :(

I've found Samsung drives to be far more reliable.. (touch wood!)
 
Wouldn't touch Seagate desktop drives these days.
I've seen so many fail. Many of these were supposed to be fixed with a firmware update but from what I've experienced, the firmware did nothing...
7200.10, 7200.11 & 7200.12 have all had higher failure rates (in our office) compared to other non-Seagate drives.

Their server drives though... :) No issues on that front! :D
 
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