Seagate drive failure (what a surprise /s)

so once upon a time i had several seagate drives. the last one just failed. it is/was an external harddrive 2tb barracuda which i have since shucked and tested in two separate systems. i was expecting this so i bought a 3tb drive and told my family "hey this is going to die" and moved all my files off of it. they didn't.
when booting the system takes a extra 30~ seconds or so to boot with the drive connected on both systems. however the built in linux disk utility, ddrescue, fdisk, testdisk, and glxinfo can not see the drive. it does heat up and spin and does not make the click of death or any other failure sounds. i have tried multiple motherboard sata ports, sata cables, and power cables, and ofc the original usb connector in several ports. anybody have any ideas sort of buying a donor and transplanting(not worth it imo)?

oh yea and it doesnt show up in the uefi

DontBuySeagate

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I've had WD, HGST and Samsung drives back in the day fail too sooooo... don't by hard drives I guess?

Point is, this can happen with anything mechanical, things fail, that's why there is SMART. Everytime these hate threads towards a manufacturer when one drive fails (despite it being perfectly normal, especially for external drives)... And also you already knew the drive was dying, and you moved your data off of it. If others didn't that's frankly not your problem.

If it doesn't show up even in UEFI my guess is that the controller died (or it doesn't handshake when it recognizes that the rest is dead to not compromise the system).

How old was the drive?

Getting a donor is kinda tricky, you basically need the same model or else the controller can't work with it.

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why? anything more specific? i have an old seagate 1tb that died the click of death lying around with a perfectly good controller.

also why do you think it is the controller? from what i have read, a dead controller = no power getting to the gpu and it is clearly getting power and spinning.

Each model has a different controller that is tailored towards that model (sector count, first sector position, amount of platters, RPM, etc.). Of course you can get lucky with a different controller but it's rather rare. Also getting the platters out and into a new drive is not exactly your grandfathers work. All platter need to be aligned correctly or your data is garbage. Not saying you couldn't do it, but if it's worth it.. eh... especially since you're basically killing another drive.

And then you don't even know if it IS the controller or maybe one of the readers died, and you wouldn't know if the controller is even compatible.. so, yeah, tricky :stuck_out_tongue:

As I said, when you already told the others to move their data off and even provided another drive, that's not your problem anymore. Sounds like a dick, but they had their chance.

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i know how to switch hard drive platters. i wouldnt have to open the enclosure to switch the controller. what is your reasoning for thinking it is the controller and not corruption in mbr or the laser flat out dying.

yeah, just taking off the PCB would be an option too I guess, my bad :smiley: It's just a guess really. Since it's not even showing up in the UEFI my guess is that it's either not talking to the SATA Controller in general (because dead), or it recognized that the drive is dead for whatever reason and won't handshake. There's no way I could say for sure :stuck_out_tongue:

I have had more problems with Western Digital than any other person on the planet. All they do is explode on me. I don't get 6 months out of the fucking things.

Seagate, however, never die. I have IDE drives from 98 still spinning in 24/7 machines that I put back into use 4 or 5 years ago. No problems whatsoever.

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never had a wd die on me and i have old ide drives lying around and around 10-20 pounds of old ide and newer sata dead seagates

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Why Dont Buy Segate? It was predictable when it was going to die, isnt that a good thing not bad. Also no drive will last forever I have gotten DOA WD Red drives so its not like any brand is immune to issues.

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On a sidenote: This is exactly what I'm talking about.

Everyone gets different experiences with those things... Unless you have hundreds of drives spinning there's no way to say which is better... and don't refer to the Backblaze statistics, those are nowhere near of what you'd get at home for a single drive.

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it was predictable because all the other seagates died. smart said is was perfectly fine.

@mihawk90 https://forum.level1techs.com/t/seagate-hard-drives-good-or-bad/92573
im not going to have this discussion again when we still have the original and i need to take apart some drives.

Did you order them all at the same time from one vendor? I mean that is not good practice, usually you want to vary the vendor so you can get different batches. What were you using to look at smart data?

Probably the built in windows utility.

Doesn't all hard drives, regardless of their brands die eventually? My 500 GB Seagate external hard drive died on me a month ago. It was annoying but i wasn't mad I used it for more than 5 years. Manage to backup everything before it died. So all good.

BTW How old was the drive?

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over 2 years under 3 and yes eventually. see other thread.

That's hmmm shorter than what I expected. Well at least the warranty should still be covered. 3 years for Seagate. I think.

seagate changed the 5 year warranty to 1 year on the barracuda series because they knew that they were shit.

What? Thats news to me. I knew they changed 5 years to 3 years so they changed it again? 1 year warranty? Is that even possible why would anyone even buy a harddrive with 1 year warranty that is such a dead giveaway.

i have never purchased a seagate myself but as the family IT guy i get to deal with them dying, and got a few as presents over the years. i guess they thought it was a good brand? or just looked at the price tag and didnt think. idk.

I love how 1 persons bad exp = entire brand is garbage. Gotta love that logic.

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