Seagate Now Shipping World's Slimmest And Fastest 2TB Mobile HDD

[HardOCP News]

Seagate Technology, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced it is shipping the world’s first 2TB, 7mm hard disk drive (HDD)— the Seagate® Mobile HDD. This ultra-high capacity mobile hard drive is the lightest, fastest and most power efficient 7mm drive in the industry, enabling a richer and more rewarding experience for users without compromising demand for laptops that are slim, light, and powerful. Weighing just 3.17 oz., the diminutive Mobile HDD is 25 percent lighter than the previous generation of mobile hard drives. A smaller 7mm drive frees up valuable space in a mobile device to accommodate additional designed-in features, such as bigger batteries, more memory and better air circulation.

 

[Seventyfive]

I'm never buying another seagate. I had one fail personally, 2 have failed at my job, and my other friend had one fail. Screw these guys.

 

[Stereodude]

I'm never buying another seagate. I had one fail personally, 2 have failed at my job, and my other friend had one fail. Screw these guys.

I'm pretty sure you can't use data for 3.5" drives to conclude that their 2.5" drives are crap.

 

[Great Tiger]

I don't see the point of making these. Why not just focus on making solid state drives bigger and better.

 

[OregonLAN]

I don't see the point of making these. Why not just focus on making solid state drives bigger and better.

I agree. At some point, it will cost less to manufacture a plastic/tin SSD drive with no moving part than manufacturing an aluminum encased/machined HDD with motors and spinning platter. Someone suggested the SSD industry is sandbagging to increase profits. Unless the yields are shitty, I would have to agree.

BTW, other than being 7mm thin, what's the difference between this and the slim 2TB that comes in their Backup Plus Slim enclosures?

 

[Seventyfive]

I'm pretty sure you can't use data for 3.5" drives to conclude that their 2.5" drives are crap.

Sure I can. It's an input people can use to gauge the reputation of a manufacturer. I wanted to try to put up a nonpartisan data survey but if you like anecdotal evidence you can just search the internet for evidence on how terrible seagate drives are. They are the worst. I don't know a single IT manager that willingly uses seagate drives. If someone here runs an IT department and prefers seagate drives, I'd love for them to speak up about their experience but I've never met one, EVER.

If you want to disregard their failure rates on the 3.5" drives, you're absolutely welcome to take the risk. That's the beauty of capitalism.

 

[Seventyfive]

I agree. At some point, it will cost less to manufacture a plastic/tin SSD drive with no moving part than manufacturing an aluminum encased/machined HDD with motors and spinning platter. Someone suggested the SSD industry is sandbagging to increase profits. Unless the yields are shitty, I would have to agree.

BTW, other than being 7mm thin, what's the difference between this and the slim 2TB that comes in their Backup Plus Slim enclosures?

It's not a conspiracy. Right now only Samsung has 3D NAND's, Toshiba 3D NAND will be out later this year and I think Intel/Micron 3D NAND will be out 17 unless updates have changed. We have already seen the price of SSD's come down significantly but we won't see very large sized SSD's with further price drops until all 3 major flash suppliers can start pumping out their own 3D flash modules.

 

[OregonLAN]

Sure I can. It's an input people can use to gauge the reputation of a manufacturer. I wanted to try to put up a nonpartisan data survey but if you like anecdotal evidence you can just search the internet for evidence on how terrible seagate drives are. They are the worst. I don't know a single IT manager that willingly uses seagate drives. If someone here runs an IT department and prefers seagate drives, I'd love for them to speak up about their experience but I've never met one, EVER.

If you want to disregard their failure rates on the 3.5" drives, you're absolutely welcome to take the risk. That's the beauty of capitalism.

BTW, Seagate is doing much better in 2015. Although HGST is still the leader...

 

[nutzo]

Sure I can. It's an input people can use to gauge the reputation of a manufacturer. I wanted to try to put up a nonpartisan data survey but if you like anecdotal evidence you can just search the internet for evidence on how terrible seagate drives are. They are the worst. I don't know a single IT manager that willingly uses seagate drives. If someone here runs an IT department and prefers seagate drives, I'd love for them to speak up about their experience but I've never met one, EVER.

I really hate that almost all the Dell Servers I've bought over the past few years came with Seagate drives.
Once they fail, or I need something bigger, I replace them with HGST or WD drives, even though Dell flags them as a "problem" since they are not Dell drives.

Dell's love of Seagate drives has made me decide to upgraded some of my older servers (add memory and larger drives), rather than buy newer servers with junk Seagate drives.

 

[Stereodude]

Sure I can. It's an input people can use to gauge the reputation of a manufacturer. I wanted to try to put up a nonpartisan data survey but if you like anecdotal evidence you can just search the internet for evidence on how terrible seagate drives are. They are the worst. I don't know a single IT manager that willingly uses seagate drives. If someone here runs an IT department and prefers seagate drives, I'd love for them to speak up about their experience but I've never met one, EVER.

If you want to disregard their failure rates on the 3.5" drives, you're absolutely welcome to take the risk. That's the beauty of capitalism.

That's like refusing to buy a new F-150 pickup truck because the last generation Ford Focus was unreliable. If we were talking about 3.5" drives the data might have some merit.

 

[nutzo]

At some point, it will cost less to manufacture a plastic/tin SSD drive with no moving part than manufacturing an aluminum encased/machined HDD with motors and spinning platter. Someone suggested the SSD industry is sandbagging to increase profits. Unless the yields are shitty, I would have to agree.

For the smaller drives, it's almost true. You can pick up 120GB SSD's for $40, and smaller SSD's for even less.
Smallest mechanical drives that most places sell are 500GB, and they also start around $40.

With current pricing, for any system that needs 250Gb or less, I don't see any reason not to go with an SSD.
I started upgrading older laptops at the office with 250GB SSD's once they dropped below $100 (closer to $80 now).
Cheap way to get a few more years out of the laptops.

As for larger, it's a tougher call. 1TB SSD's are still 3-4 times more expensive than a mechanical laptop drive.

 

[MHzTweaker]

Sign me up....

I'm a Seagate HATER as well.

250gb, 500gb, 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB drives are ALL Garbage. I have thrown many of these in the trash.

The only Seagate drive that has proven reliable has been a few 4TB Seagate 5900RPM storage drives I shucked from external expansion cases and installed in a 4U rack servers for home media storage.

14 months ago I started using a neat piece of software called HDSentinel. I found out that most of my Seagate drives had bad and/or weak sectors. I started buying HGST drives from that moment on. I've thrown at least a dozen personal Seagate drives in the trash. (11 at one time) There is really no need to RMA anything to Seagate. They will mail back a equally defective drive. Since I stopped buying Seagate drives I have not had a single drive failure. I used to have at least 1 drive fail every month. I have not had a HGST drive failure (or DOA) yet.

BTW, I operate a computer services and repair business. All drives eventually fail. I replace all makes and model. All hard drives could be made better but at what cost? 8 years ago I was cutting corners and buying based on price. I had to re-purchase every single one of those cheap Seagate drives. Anything I saved initially was destroyed by lost time, drive replacement costs and data loss.

I joined the current 3TB drive class action lawsuit against Seagate and provided what documentation I could find. I doubt I will see a nickel of the $2000+ I personally lost dealing with Seagate, the lawyers will get their cut first I'm sure.

And no, it's not just about 1 particular drive. Seagate has many years of horrible products across many generations of tech. It took a lot for me to get to this point. The final straw was throwing away almost a dozen of their drives at once.

I'm done with them.

 

[Seventyfive]

That's like refusing to buy a new F-150 pickup truck because the last generation Ford Focus was unreliable. If we were talking about 3.5" drives the data might have some merit.

If you have no other information about the reliability of the new F150, I think looking at Ford's prior reliability across its entire product line is an entirely valid way of trying to predict future reliability.

 

[AK0tA]

Sad, I have old old seagates still running on a folding/storage machine but will not trust the new generations.

 

[Stereodude]

If you have no other information about the reliability of the new F150, I think looking at Ford's prior reliability across its entire product line is an entirely valid way of trying to predict future reliability.

Except you don't have reliability data for the entire product line. You have it for only a few models, and the data clearly shows they are outliers.

Further, I find it somewhat ironic that people use the BackBlaze data as the incontrovertible evidence to not buy Seagate drives, yet BackBlaze is still buying Seagate drives. If their data is all the proof you need to not buy Seagate drives, why are they still buying Seagate drives?

 

[MHzTweaker]

Except you don't have reliability data for the entire product line. You have it for only a few models, and the data clearly shows they are outliers.

Further, I find it somewhat ironic that people use the BackBlaze data as the incontrovertible evidence to not buy Seagate drives, yet BackBlaze is still buying Seagate drives. If their data is all the proof you need to not buy Seagate drives, why are they still buying Seagate drives?

I have been "burned" on 6 of the last 7 models of Seagate drives. That is good enough for me to not buy them anymore. The question for me becomes, why would I reward a company with unethical business practices by buying more of their products? Seagate acts as if nothing has happened and admits nothing. It takes a class action lawsuit to get their attention. What is it about this that people do not get? Would you have someone over to your house for dinner that robbed you half a dozen times? Ford and other auto makers have recalls to own up to their mistakes and make an effort to correct mistakes. I have never seen or heard of a Seagate recall. I will vote with my dollars and share my experience concerning Seagate products with anyone I come in contact with. What another person does with this information is their business.

 

[yee245]

BTW, other than being 7mm thin, what's the difference between this and the slim 2TB that comes in their Backup Plus Slim enclosures?

I think that's exactly what they're touting, that this is the first 2TB at 7mm. I think the drive typically in those 2TB slim drives they offer are the 9.5mm Samsung M9T.

I think in the past 3 or 4 years at my office, we've had 4 drives fail. I think it was 2 Seagates and 2 WDs. One of the media drives started disappearing intermittently, and this is part of the error scan I got... I'm not sure how it managed to get this bad, but fortunately all ~1TB on that drive was already backed up to Crashplan. At least some of the files were still sometimes readable directly from the drive. If I recall, one of the WDs just decided one day to not function.

 

[Lunas]

Bigger issue is these guys are the only game in town for a drive 9.5mm or less and most modern laptops will not take anything thicker...

 

[cyclone3d]

I won't buy seagate drives either.

The failure rate of both 3.5 and 2.5 drives is just insanely high from my experience as well.

I really wish Dell would stop using Seagate as all it does is encourage them to keep making drives that are total crap.

Ever had both drives in a RAID-1 array fail at the same time? I have, and they were both Seagate 1TB drives that I purchased brand new about 1 year prior.

And then, when I went to install updates on another computer that had a couple Seagate drives of the same model and was purchased at the same time.. and was also in a RAID-1 array, I found that one of them had failed as well.

The things drop like flies even in low usage servers as well, and laptops, and regular desktops.

In order for me to trust any Seagate product again, they would have to send me (for free), a good storage solution with multiple drives. If none of the drives died or developed problems within 2-3 years then I might reconsider buying Seagate drives.

Until then, they are on my blacklist.

 

[heatshiver]

I actually like Seagate, although I also enjoy Samsung or WD. Won't touch a Toshiba anymore though...