4TB Seagate internal green $140 through 4/22

Woot, massive storage capacity in a high failure rate mfg!

I'm running 2 3tb seagates right now for about 1 year, no issues yet. My only drive to ever fail was a hitachi which had bad sectors out of the box (unfortunatly I didn't use the drive till a 6 months later so I couldn't return it, but hitachi replaced it).


I bought one as I need more storage.
 
Interesting, I didn't realize Hitachi had become so reliable (after the whole Deathstar debacle).

Helps to know the history. "Deathstar" hasn't been a thing since before Hitachi bought out IBM.

But why let that get in the way of regurgitating "Deathstar" for the next 13 years like mindless sheep
 
Interesting, I didn't realize Hitachi had become so reliable (after the whole Deathstar debacle).

Funnily enough I still have a completely functional 400GB "Deathstar" drive but it bears the legend "non-essential data only" on the label in sharpie because I had replaced so many Hitachi drives during that time-frame. It runs hotter than hell.

According to that article the 4tb is just as reliable as wd so yes fud.

That may be, but if there is any basis to my assessment of a correlation between platter count and failure rates (I don't know if there actually is any solid data on that, it's just my experience) it would make me hesitant to purchase. Considering those 6TB drives from WD have 7x platters (the new fancy helium-filled ones) and the Seagate is estimated to be 6x 1TB platters, I'd say that's an awful lot of potential failure points for both manufacturer's drives. Time will tell, of course :)
 
Funnily enough I still have a completely functional 400GB "Deathstar" drive but it bears the legend "non-essential data only" on the label in sharpie because I had replaced so many Hitachi drives during that time-frame. It runs hotter than hell.
That's not a Deathstar. They didn't make a 400GB 75GXP. The Deskstar line has been around for ages. I had a 75GB drive, that thing was a beast! the 2MB Cache over the standard 512KB seemed like a a HUGE benefit. But like most, mine eventually failed :/
 
That's not a Deathstar. They didn't make a 400GB 75GXP. The Deskstar line has been around for ages. I had a 75GB drive, that thing was a beast! the 2MB Cache over the standard 512KB seemed like a a HUGE benefit. But like most, mine eventually failed :/

Just going off the drive's name is all :) It's a Deskstar K7400 400GB. Shortly after it came out I had several pissed off customers in my shop with that same drive so it's just been surprising to me that it has kept kicking for so long. It's an RMA unit that I got in return for one of the bad ones, too!
 
According to that article the 4tb is just as reliable as wd so yes fud.

With average age of 0.3 years for the 4tb drives. Seagate 3tb after 1.4 years with a 9.8% failure rate and 1.5tb after 3.8 years is at 25.4% failure rate. "The non-LP 7200 RPM drives have been consistently unreliable. Their failure rate is high, especially as they’re getting older." That is from the original article.
 
Meh, as long as the warranty is good who cares? All hard drives fail, period, so you have to plan for it. Implement proper RAID and when a disk fails under warranty you simply have it swapped out. Big deal.
 
So when these drives fail, does it usually happen immediately or will the user see clear signs of degradation?
 
So when these drives fail, does it usually happen immediately or will the user see clear signs of degradation?

There are a few studies that say its unpredictable in the general case. However for the 75 or so drives I have RMA'd here at work nearly all of them showed signs of failure in the SMART data (not overall pass /fail but raw data) days to weeks before the drive failed. I do realize my sample is way too small to be statistically significant. Perhaps I have been on a lucky streak..
 
Last edited:
Meh, as long as the warranty is good who cares? All hard drives fail, period, so you have to plan for it. Implement proper RAID and when a disk fails under warranty you simply have it swapped out. Big deal.

As long as your time is worth less than the extra money it takes to possibly mitigate the issue to begin with, sure.
 
Meh, as long as the warranty is good who cares? All hard drives fail, period, so you have to plan for it. Implement proper RAID and when a disk fails under warranty you simply have it swapped out. Big deal.

Warranties are no good anymore unless you spend twice the price for server class drives.
 
Warranties are no good anymore unless you spend twice the price for server class drives.

Sure, they're not as good these days on consumer drives, but the big takeaway point is to have some sort of backup plan or redundancy if you value your data. People like to quote failure rates and are scared of filling these big drives up because of the possibility of losing all of that data. Well, this is a computer tech forum. Everyone should ask themselves "Would it bother me to lose the data that I'm storing on this drive?" If the answer is yes, and that drive is the only existing copy of that data, then you're a fool on borrowed time waiting on an accident to happen. Anyone here with common sense isn't afraid of buying a 4-6TB drive because either the data is expendable or they have some type of backup/redundancy in place to safeguard against it.

what does that mean?

Probably referring to the overall industry shift from 3-5 year warranties on consumer drives to mostly 1-3 year warranties. Enterprise drives still get the long warranties but they are big $$$.
 
I dont have any working seagate drives left anymore after 4 of them failed within the last 2 years. Most of them were only a year old and only used as backups. The new HDDs I have are all Toshiba and no problems so far. This would be a great deal had seagate not given me so many shitty drives.
 
until the array packs up on you and you lose all the data on all the drives;)

this is why I love unRAID

Slow Unraid is still limited to one parity disk (RAID5), yes? SnapRAID can do up to 6 parity disks per raidset.
 
Last edited:
I dont have any working seagate drives left anymore after 4 of them failed within the last 2 years. Most of them were only a year old and only used as backups. The new HDDs I have are all Toshiba and no problems so far. This would be a great deal had seagate not given me so many shitty drives.

Ironic to me. I just had a brand new Toshiba drive die after 3 months of light use. Ive never lost a hard drive like this in 15+ years. All of my seagates are still operational. But thats just my experience.
 
RAID-1 and cloud storage for me.

I Just got 2 3TB greens after 4 years of use from 2 1TB greens. One of the new 3TB drives was DOA, or at least did not live through initialization.

Put a new one in, rebuilt array, all set.
 
RAID-1 and cloud storage for me.

I Just got 2 3TB greens after 4 years of use from 2 1TB greens. One of the new 3TB drives was DOA, or at least did not live through initialization.

Put a new one in, rebuilt array, all set.

I've been using 6x Seagate 3TB drives for a year and a half now in a software (MDADM on Debian Stable) RAID-10 configuration, and it has worked wonders for me. Not a single drive has had any issues thus far, although I have performed a practice rebuild for safety. My problem now is my case is full, my 8.2TB formatted is almost full, and I don't really feel like getting a SATA port multiplier case for another 6 drive raid array, despite me designing my build a year and a half ago ago to support one :)
 
My main reason for using SnapRaid is that I can add more storage or an extra parity drive on the fly.
 
Normally I wouldn't buy into a myth like this, it could all be just the randomness of statistics...but out of the ~10 hard drives I've had over the years, only 2 have gone bad. Both were the only Seagates I've ever had (An 80GB seagate barracuda back when that was standard size, lasted a year...and currently I'm getting bad unrecoverable sectors on a 1TB Seagate, lasted a few years)

None of the rest have gone bad yet or show any warning signs (WD's and a few hitachi's) Knock on wood!
 
it could all be just the randomness of statistics...but out of the ~10 hard drives I've had over the years, only 2 have gone bad. Both were the only Seagates

This sample size is statistically meaningless. You can draw statistically meaning full conclusions when you have thousands of hard drives not a few. Even my 200 is a very small sample size.
 
Back
Top