Apple to Replace Faulty Seagate 1TB iMac Hard Drives

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Apple will be replacing faulty Seagate 1TB hard drives in some of its 21.5” and 27” iMacs and has contacted the affected owners by their registration emails. If you registered with a bogus email, you will need to contact Apple for a replacement.

Apple will replace a drive until July 23, 2012, but notes that the program doesn’t extend the standard warranty coverage of your iMac
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Ah the joys of prebuilt computers full of shit components. At least Apple is stepping up unlike most if not all of the PC laptop companies.
 
Apple uses Seagate hard drives? I thought they only used the HIGHEST QUALITY according to their marketing?

HAH! This is as laughable as their "server quality hard drives" they used for their Time Machines.
 
Seagate used to be a good manufacture, but their 1tb+ hard drives are complete shit. They have an extremely high failure rate for some reason. I actually had one for a little while because previously I used them exclusively for new builds. After 2 days it started clicking. This is a known issue and even firmware updates and new batches have failed to resolve the issue. As it stands it is buyer beware if you have any data you want to keep if you get a seagate 1tb.
 
Dirk13 said:
Seagate used to be a good manufacture, but their 1tb+ hard drives are complete shit. They have an extremely high failure rate for some reason. I actually had one for a little while because previously I used them exclusively for new builds. After 2 days it started clicking. This is a known issue and even firmware updates and new batches have failed to resolve the issue. As it stands it is buyer beware if you have any data you want to keep if you get a seagate 1tb.
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Started when they bought out Maxtor....

I was finished with Seagate after their 7200.11 fuck-ups, not strictly because of the problems that series had, but BECAUSE OF HOW SEAGATE DECIDED TO HANDLE IT.
 
Seagate used to be good. They make shit now. I have seen many Seagate drives die only after a short time. Don't even bother with the re-manufactured drives they send back to you.
 
Solidstate89 said:
Apple uses Seagate hard drives? I thought they only used the HIGHEST QUALITY according to their marketing?

HAH! This is as laughable as their "server quality hard drives" they used for their Time Machines.
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You will not laugh when you see their last quarter earnings.
 
Dirk13 said:
Ah the joys of prebuilt computers full of shit components. At least Apple is stepping up unlike most if not all of the PC laptop companies.
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As a HD Mechanic Apple reminds me of Snapontools, charge double sometimes triple the price because they know the tool has a good chance of being replaced at least once.
 
I have a Seagate 250gb drive that came out of an old HP machine from about 5 years ago and it's still going strong.

As much as I dislike Apple I commend them on this type of support.
 
Satyrist said:
Started when they bought out Maxtor....

I was finished with Seagate after their 7200.11 fuck-ups, not strictly because of the problems that series had, but BECAUSE OF HOW SEAGATE DECIDED TO HANDLE IT.
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Yup, I used to buy all Seagate drives, but after having 3 1TB and 1.5TB drives fail I haven't bought one since.

My 1.5TB external went back twice for repair and now its just sitting in a drawer even though I have some 6 yr old 250gb externals that work fine.
 
Waambulance said:
Yeah, since Seagate is a terrible manufacturer.:rolleyes:
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Seagate isn't a terrible manufacturer, but I wouldn't buy one of their drives if you put a gun to my head and/or threatened to sodomize my corpse before and after you pulled the trigger.

I've been in the I.T. field for longer than I care to admit. I remember back in the day before Seagate merged with Connor, Seagate drives were crap in that you couldn't mix them on the same IDE cable with any other manufacturer's drive (although their SCSI drives were top notch and were some of the best out there).

Although they were supposedly ATAPI standard, they deviated enough that at best, you *maybe* could get away with attaching a Connor drive to the IDE cable if the Seagate drive was set to master. After they merged with Connor, their compatibility got better, so you could hook up other mfg's drives (i.e.: Maxtor or WD) to the same IDE chain and you wouldn't experience abysmal transfer rates or drives not being recognized.

In terms of reliability they were "average" compared to WD and Maxtor (at the time). No better or worse really. I do find it ironic that Apple uses Seagate drives though; the infamous Packard Bell systems used to use Seagate and Connor drives exclusively (my favorite was when Packard Bell ran Seagate hard drives off of the IDE controller on the old ISA sound cards to save a few bucks).

As someone else pointed out, it wasn't until Seagate acquired Maxtor that their products went to shit in terms of reliability. To me it's not a huge surprise really. Back on April 1, 2001, Maxtor acquired Quantum Corporation's (makers of the infamous Quantum Fireball drives) drive business. Before that acquisition, Maxtor made some really great drives that were rock solid. After that I started noticing a really high failure rate on systems' that I serviced. After Seagate bought Maxtor.. well.. yeah, their drives turned to crap too.

Call me jaded, but currently the only drives I'll use are Western Digital (and an occasional Hitachi (even though they bought IBM's Deathstar line). That's not to say WD drives don't die. They do and I've replaced a few myself. To put it in perspective for you, for every WD drive I've replaced, I've replaced AT LEAST 10 Seagate/Maxtor drives (and in case you're wondering, I really am not exaggerating that number).

A few years ago Google published a paper detailing drive reliability from the drives in their datacenters. If I can find it I'll post the link here, but the point is, even though they didn't come right out and say it, it was clear they were talking about Maxtor drives. :) I'd love to see them do an updated paper to see if the curse of Quantum has followed Seagate after their acquisition of Maxtor. :)
 
Something I forgot to mention in my post above:

About 16 years ago (say, around 1995) I used to work for an IT contracting firm. Back before HP and Compaq merged, I got asked by my employer to work some overtime replacing hard drives for one of our clients (Fidelity Investments) in their Compaq desktop systems. Three guesses what drives were in those systems...

If you said Seagate and Quantum HDD's, give yourself a gold star. :)

I made some good cash working OT replacing those drives, and thankfully Compaq was footing the bill for everything. But man... that was a shitton of work! We had a whole team doing the replacements, but I had to have replaced/cloned at least 100 drives myself over the course of two weekends and two locations 30 miles apart. :/
 
Uncle said:
As a HD Mechanic Apple reminds me of Snapontools, charge double sometimes triple the price because they know the tool has a good chance of being replaced at least once.
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As far as I know Snapon doesn't have a lifetime warranty? I thought that it just usually turned out that of you had a tool fail they were likely to replace it. Now Craftsman has a lifetime warranty. The difference is that Snapon tools don't break.
 
Satyrist said:
Started when they bought out Maxtor....

I was finished with Seagate after their 7200.11 fuck-ups, not strictly because of the problems that series had, but BECAUSE OF HOW SEAGATE DECIDED TO HANDLE IT.
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Oh I remember my fond memories of watching not 1, not 2, but 3 500GB drives die all within a week of each other after I transferred all of my data to them. Luckily I only lost the last 500GB of data as I had my old drives to fall back on. I decided right then and there WD hell even Hitachi would have to get really crappy before I would ever move back over to Seagate.
 
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