Seagate drive failure (what a surprise /s)

Every manufacturer has bad runs, check warranty length and balance value on entire value of drive. Also note if you only use 1 drive for important stuff your not doing it right.

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every Seagate product i've owned has been shite, so i guess we're just both bad luck. or they're shite. i'm going with shite.

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HGST is owned by WD now

Surprisingly HGST still has better reliability than WD for whatever reason, even post acquisition.

Toshiba has HGST's former desktop 3.5" stuff and they are doing fairly well too.

Then why did you mention the brand?

more information is always good

Yeah, information. Sure. ... Well, to late now.
Anyway, good luck with the drive.

As far as I'm aware of, Seagate had a couple of really bad series/batches. It kinda scarred their brand permanently. But that doesn't mean they are now better or worse than any other brand. Judging HDD brands by past data for making a shopping decision today is an unsolvable problem. All you can do is reduce the risk by not going with the cheaper option and looking at the warranty. Also, external drives don't count - they're on a level of their own.

There's a reason why there's 100 different articles / forum topics named "Seagate HDDs are shite" or something along those lines, while there's barely any "Hitachi HDDs are shite". So I understand where this is coming from. Personally, I don't even look at Seagate because they knowingly put bad drives on the market and, as far as I know, didn't pull them when word got out. This isn't some sort of personal crusade - because boycotting in an oligopoly makes no sense. It's just that the market is infected with them and the uninformed shoppers are being used as a dumpster for these bad series. So if I have to recommend something to people who aren't in the loop, I don't mention the good ones (there aren't any), I just say "anything but Seagate". It's not a guarantee, just a reduction of risk while keeping the conversation/advice short.

All I know is: even if prices were the same, I'd go with HGST, but since prices are not the same (probably for the same reason warranties aren't the same) then I'd take what I can afford.

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You could try the old trick of putting the drive in the freezer for about 40 mins (in an anti-static bag).

This works because the change in temperature can sometimes bring components back into tolerance and mechanical items back into alignment, particularly drives with fluid bearings.

I've had remarkable success with this technique over the years, most recently with a Hitachi drive which wasn't detected by the BIOS.

Oh god please no... The Backblaze bullshit again.

Backblaze statistic DO NOT APPLY IN A HOME ENVIRONMENT. God. When do people learn that 45 drives crammed in a box in a server rack is not the same as your 2 idle drives at home.

Also if you look at the drive models you'll realize that a lot of the Seagate drives are desktop drives, whereas their HGST and WD drives are mostly Server-grade stuff. There's a reason there are multiple series of drives.

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The failure rate in home environments was also much larger than that of the other drives. That's why Seagate reduced the warranty from 3 years to 1 year.

Also I love how people keep saying that the Backblaze methodology was flawed. Well, all the other drives were also running out of spec and those didn't fail en masse. So no matter how you spin it, Seagate's 3TB drives are nowhere near as good as the competition.

Oh, guess who else had massive problems with the 3TB seagates?


Timestamped to 46:57, topic really starts at 46:30
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I find most drives I have brought have exceeded the warranty period. Often by a LOT! WD and Seagate offered 2 years guarantee when they released drives of that sizes, and though I didn't stress them, I have 5 healthy Seagate and 4 WD drives.
I did not hammer them, and they are long out of warranty, so I am basically on borrowed time with both sets.
I like WD more, but the drives I purchased were caviars, so not designed for sustained load anyway.
But regardless of manufacturer, they have a warranty period, after that, it's all basically a bonus.

So because backblaze puts more stress then the home user they are not a valid data point?

sooo ruled out the everything but some obscure software problem i dont know about or hardware failure. the spindle sounds like it is working and the drive spins and make all the expected noises and no click of death or whiring up the crashing then spinning up again. it sounds like it's working which makes me think either the controller or the laser reader is the problem, or possibly somehow the seals broke and dust got into the drive.

anybody want to talk about the issues and not seagate as a company? i'll try not to if you dont. halp,

Can you hear the read/write-head moving? It could be the motor moving that thing, or the controller as mentioned. It's hard to troublshoot this stuff...

Desktop drives are designed for the desktop, when they fail in a datacenter that's a problem of the usecase, that's all I'm saying.

So wouldn't surviving a crazy use case be more impressive an give you better stats on how they survive in that situation. Not saying its equal use but its like worst case usage at home.

going to buy a new drive and switch controllers and if that doesnt work then switch the disk over tot he new one following this

dont have a clean room and cant afford it =/ or data recovery services. any tips?

If you drive a bunch of limousines through a forest it doesn't matter wich one gets stuck.
You are using them wrong.

no its more like driving them on a rally track and seeing what brands can make it thought. Making those brands the more reliable and well built ones.

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