Are Seagate drives better these days?

I'm bitter due to having to replace about 5 failing Seagate drives over the past year. The drives werw probably purchased several years ago, if not more. I'm curious if they're better quality these days than I'm years past. Thanks.

Short answer - not really.

For the last 7 years I've had 12 some odd drives drives all being Seagate's except 3 ranging from 250gig to 3TB with only one failing which was a was a 2TB WD black drive which I believe was caused by a bad connector and not the drive.
I would say if you've had a multiple drives fail in a short period of time you may want to look at the power that feeds the drives more so than the drives themselves.

Enterprise are pretty robust but the consumer models get corners cut, hence the low warranty of only two years.
One look @ newegg or Amazon and you can see the sky high 1 star reviews.

rpeters83 said:

I'm bitter due to having to replace about 5 failing Seagate drives over the past year. The drives werw probably purchased several years ago, if not more. I'm curious if they're better quality these days than I'm years past. Thanks.

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Seagates a marketing company so it really depends at what time the drives were manufactured and when you bought them. When they try something new the drives are really good but I think their profit margins are low. So the best time to buy them are just after they come out. They have the usual new release bugs but the quality is far better. Once they have started to sell them the people accept them, they go in there and start to put in inferior parts. These parts will fail in short order. They last just enough to get past the warranty period. I remember this from the maxtor days when a few months past the warranty period the drives will crash and burn. In those days drives were going up in capacity so fast it did not matter. 2-3 years you replaced the drives anyway. But they were also very fast compared to the others. With them buying out so many companies, these days it seems they take the worst of all of them and package them into a single piece. It is like the good old days of the 80/90's when they sold drives for half the price of the others but you had to sit there and massage the drives to get them working. Anyone remember having to turn the platter to get them running?

I looked at prices and not many options these days. The prices are similar between all of them. HGST and Toshiba still use much higher quality parts than seagate and WDC. But for how long? They seem to have failures as well but they dont depends on their marketing departments to sell the drives. No more samsung either.. Which was another reliable drive. I think HGST is still based in the mountain view ibm research center. IBM drives always cost more than anyone else but they had a solid rep for quality. Mainly as a result of price is no object for US companies in the old days. Really tough to buy seagate drives because you have no idea what you will get. Dont depend on reviews. What you get might not be what you expected.. I dont trust them enough to buy their drives online.

I've had good luck with their SSHD hybrid drive line.
Their SAS Enterprise drives are reliable as fuck.

I wouldn't trust their other consumer lines for even a dedicated delete bin though.

I'd recommend staying away from the 3tb and 5tb consumer drives.

AlienTech said:

Seagates a marketing company so it really depends at what time the drives were manufactured and when you bought them.

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So is Western Digital. Especially Western Digital. What with all the color coded drive labels and invented product lines- the whole "NAS" product positioning for example is pure marketing convention, with gimped firmware to limit their usage scenarios.

Anyhoo, stick with HGST/Toshiba - they're solid no matter who you ask or whose failure rate data you look at. I'm ofcourse assuming home/personal media pricepoints; the enterprise space is a bit different. Personal anecdotes shared on forums about "I once had X drive brand die, but Y drive is still going strong and therefore X sucks" are statistically meaningless and amount to little more than wailing babies in a restaurant - things to keep quiet but of no real value.

Trimlock said:

I'd recommend staying away from the 3tb and 5tb consumer drives.

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Toshiba 5TB is fine. Seagate 5TB is not since its secretly SMR. Not sure what your point is about 3TB's though, unless you're talking about Seagate specifically and making assumptions based on Backblaze data that's already been debunked many times over as unscientific FUD.

deaedius said:

I would say if you've had a multiple drives fail in a short period of time you may want to look at the power that feeds the drives more so than the drives themselves.

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Good point, but these were from several unrelated machines.

DPI said:

Toshiba 5TB is fine. Seagate 5TB is not since its secretly SMR. Not sure what your point is about 3TB's though, unless you're talking about Seagate specifically and making assumptions based on Backblaze data that's already been debunked many times over as unscientific FUD.

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How do I post a screen cap on here? I could show the difference between 2 seagate drives, both made in their chinese plant, one secretly using SMR while the other is the best balanced hard drive I have ever used.. Although the serial numbers show all the info on the drive with only small changes between them, I got fooled by the firmware as no one actually posts what firmware the drive has on the sell pages.. Later I confirmed that info with another tech dept. The only differences between my 2tb and 3tb and others 2tb and 3td drives were the firmware. It was such a disappointment because the raid storage array speeds dropped to 25% of normal when adding the special drives. So now we cant even depend on model number or even cross indexing the serial numbers and if they were made in the same factory, we have to watch out for firmware used as well. I dont buy drives without checking model numbers and some other indicators but no one will tell you its firmware and many are reluctant to even tell you its serial number.

both seagate and toshiba had trouble with 3TB drives.. but we have no idea which drives had trouble.. Just like the 5 or more models of 2TB drives.. one of which is the best drive ever and the others usable and one model the worst. You have no choice here. Its like a crap shoot, I dont want to take such chances cause I lose.. I got 2 great drives and 6 lemons.

We have them in our Equallogics, but Dell has been replacing them when they fail with HGST, so yes, they still suck.

Running 8x 4TB SSHDs for just over a year, going good so far. Upgraded after a 1.5TB consumer drive in my array took a dump after a SMART recorded 3.5 years of uptime. I feel I got my money's worth.

WangChung said:

Running 8x 4TB SSHDs for just over a year, going good so far. Upgraded after a 1.5TB consumer drive in my array took a dump after a SMART recorded 3.5 years of uptime. I feel I got my money's worth.

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I wish you had a 100+ times as many drives so we could talk statistics. Sadly very few have enough drives to provide anything more than anecdotal experience.

My company's 100 computer Lenovo fleet seems to be filled with mostly Seagates. While they're better than the ones I remember from the 90's, we seem to have 2-3 give out each year. No clue if that's typical or not, but it seems high to me.

Domingo said:

My company's 100 computer Lenovo fleet seems to be filled with mostly Seagates. While they're better than the ones I remember from the 90's, we seem to have 2-3 give out each year. No clue if that's typical or not, but it seems high to me.

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I would expect this. 2% - 3% AFR is not that bad. Certainly inside what Google and others reported (long ago - Google was 2007 - see page 4 of this http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf )

Seagate still sucks as they pretty much always have.

If your drives were several years old, they might have been 7200.11 series. It has a known bug that will brick the drive after some numbers of hours or spins up/down, can't remember right know. It is recoverable, or better you update the firmware before it goes bad.

I've had dozens and not one failed, although the 1,5TB ones all sport some reallocated sectors after more than 50000hrs.

Aesma said:

If your drives were several years old, they might have been 7200.11 series. It has a known bug that will brick the drive after some numbers of hours or spins up/down, can't remember right know. It is recoverable, or better you update the firmware before it goes bad.

I've had dozens and not one failed, although the 1,5TB ones all sport some reallocated sectors after more than 50000hrs.

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Again, which 1.5TB drive? You have tell us the specific model and firmware and if possible other details like RPM and number of platters. I have a 1.5TB drive using 5 platters and they were really fast for the time running at 7200rpms and really heavy as well.. The problem was the temperature.. Which exceeded 60C for daily use.. I had to stick a CPU heat sink onto it because copying 100GB would take the drive to 70C. I used it for 3 years before it died and the refurbished one they sent got reallocated sectors before 100 hours were up, and it gets hot as well and now I use it for backup storage only. I got the 1TB drive of the same model and that ran at 40C and never went above 45C and no need for extra fan or heat sink and ran just as fast. Updating the firmware sort of made it a brick.. Got a reallocated sector but seems the drive could not map it out from the MBR sector. seatools has a long format function which also reallocates and removes bad sectors etc etc.. But it was not able t fix the drive. So 2 identical drives except capacity of same make and model worked very differently. I would think the 1.5TB drives would have trouble keeping cool even in NAS box. Also number of ON hours is not as important as number of hours of use. I would be really amazed if any drive can get 50K hours of usage.

drescherjm said:

I wish you had a 100+ times as many drives so we could talk statistics. Sadly very few have enough drives to provide anything more than anecdotal experience.

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If I had 100+ drives, I wouldn't be buying consumer drives. From OPs post it wasn't exactly clear but it seemed it's a consumer/prosumer application.

Yes, I'm not going to run a data center on consumer drives. That's dumb no matter what manufacturer you go with.

If I had 100+ drives, I wouldn't be buying consumer drives. From OPs post it wasn't exactly clear but it seemed it's a consumer/prosumer application.

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My point is unless you have 100s to 1000s of drives your experience is pretty meaningless at determining the reliability a drive model or models. With such a small sample you could have good luck and have no failures or you could have had bad luck and have 75% of your drives die within the first 6 months even though for the entire population of millions of drives sold only 1% to 2% failed in the first year.

Why did the drives fail? I'd really like to know because I can't find any specifics.

larrymoencurly said:

Why did the drives fail? I'd really like to know because I can't find any specifics.

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How would they know? Why does anything fail?

Personally I noticed these..

IBM drive started developing errors when I added a WDC drive as a slave.. It was working for about a month without problems. In a few days the IBM drive had too many errors to be usable.. Reason?

WDC 2.5 drive would not start up.. Tried a few things and it started up after a few hours.. After doing this many times I decided to put it on top of the stove to warm it up faster.. Drive did not start up , reason? well stoves are good at cooking eggs..

Many 3.5 drives wont spin up after sitting around. Reason for failure would usually be me removing the top cover plate and trying to spin it to get it started.. But they will all show read errors once dust gets inside..

Many drives would fail during power up, drives are used as backup and connecting for use would either not spin up at all and show up as dead or spin up but not show up as a drive.. Reason might be static or power connector problems. Hot plugging drives not designed for it or using special hot plug caddies will kill drives as well.

Reasons for failure while the drive is working is mostly because of a product defect, motor going bad, head hit the surface due to vibrations or something and it will always cause massive read errors after that. Temperature can cause all these failures. The MTBF is taken with the drive at 25C that drops exponentially every 10C higher.. Unless you like really cold, there is no way to keep drives at 25C, more like they run at 40C and if you really try you can get it to 35C.. But remember, these MTBF runs into like 100 years of use so 50 years or 20 years dont make much difference.. If it will run for 5 years at 50C, I will take it. Above that causes problems.

Seems most failures occur when installing drives. For one reason or another.. It pays to be really careful. Check all connectors and take it very slow. It has caused more failures than anything else. I am not quite sure why new drives develop errors and have to be replaced.. It has to be something like some flake inside the drive hits the head or something. Any return means no profit for the company for not only the bad drive but the trouble of exchanging it. Have to sell 10 other drives to make up for it. So I am not sure why some companies dont do better QA to prevent infant mortality.

Just a few things I went through..

WD Black's have always stood the test of time for me. Never bought one above 1TB (all 500GB & 1TB) They have ALL served me well. Now that SSD are cheaper, I don't think I'll be using standard HD's anymore other then for storage of music.

Well it seems the seagate 3TB drives have a dust problem that gets into the drive via the connector used for the ciruit board. But the 3TB only stands out due to the high failure rates, seagates have a higher failure rates than anyone else.

Some russians opened up their drives to show us the effect.. But others said they found dust inside their drives as well.. Not as bad as the russians but it should have been CLEAN..

http://habrahabr.ru//post/251941/

oh dear seems like a major design flaw if accurate, maybe time to ditch all the Seagate 3tb hd's I've got.

AlienTech said:

Well it seems the seagate 3TB drives have a dust problem that gets into the drive via the connector used for the ciruit board. But the 3TB only stands out due to the high failure rates, seagates have a higher failure rates than anyone else.

Some russians opened up their drives to show us the effect.. But others said they found dust inside their drives as well.. Not as bad as the russians but it should have been CLEAN..

http://habrahabr.ru//post/251941/

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Makes me want to open a few out of warranty drives to see if this is true.

That particular drive was made in china but maybe they used parts from Thailand and the parts were contaminated. There also looks to be water damage. You can not create such a scenario easily to fake it.

The question to be asking is, would Seagate use a contaminated batch and try to sell it? The dropping of warranty periods, hostility to users who question them, being hard nosed about warranty claims, the total silence on specs among other factors dont give me much confidence in the company to not screw the user...

https://translate.google.com.au/tra.../habrahabr.ru/post/251941/&edit-text=&act=url

Oh well...

So it appears that Western Digital made "savage rename" on blues, and sold them as black.

This HDD, sold as a CAVIAR BLACK, has the "CAVIAR BLUE" specifications (Weight, aspect) instead of CAVIAR BLACK



- The weight of a real CAVIAR BLACK WD1003FZEX is 0.69KG (http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771434.pdf)



- The weight of MY CAVIAR BLACK WD1003FZEX and also CAVIAR BLUE is 0.45Kg (http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771436.pdf)

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http://community.wd.com/t5/Desktop-...-BLACK-poor-access-time-explained/td-p/658549

Intresting to see the same names in WDC forums that I used to talk to on the seagate forums.

What about transcend ? Are those SSD good ? I don't know why,but I want to give them a second chance

drescherjm said:

My point is unless you have 100s to 1000s of drives your experience is pretty meaningless at determining the reliability a drive model or models. With such a small sample you could have good luck and have no failures or you could have had bad luck and have 75% of your drives die within the first 6 months even though for the entire population of millions of drives sold only 1% to 2% failed in the first year.

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/THREAD

Why do you want to close the thread because someone made an irrelevant comment. I am talking about the quote you are using as evidence that you know "MORE".

When we have a handful of people who experience things in a wide geographical area, that statistics is valid premise for the whole. So you do not need 1000's to come to a conclusion, just like how you can calculate how many people died in war in a country by only interviewing the survivors in a handful of cities and extrapolating them to the entire region as whole. The conclusions are scientific and valid and many rely on them to base their decisions. The people involved here are from a vast number of countries hence represent the population of planet earth. If only 1% of the consumers experienced problems and those problems were due to negligence, then it can be the will of god or it stands a good reason that negligence is the cause. And allowing 1% of their products to be sold with such low QA begs the question if they have such low level of quality control or that they buy stuff so cheap that quality is not even part of their criteria.