Seagate 1.5 tb safe now?

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pizza

Limp Gawd
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Sep 1, 2008
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I desperately need to upgrade my Hard Drive. I want to rip the last of my dvds and get rid of them but I only have 30gb left. I use an SSD for my OS and apps and a 400gb hard drive for storage. I'm looking to upgrade to a 1tb or 1.5tb. The only available 1tb drive on newegg with great ratings is $130. The WD1001FALS. For the same price I can get the 1.5tb ST31500341AS. I heard there was a lot of problems with those drives though. Have these issues been ironed out? If I do get a problem drive can I just update the firmware and fix it? If I'm going to pay the same price I would prefer to have that extra 500gb.
 
At current, I'm telling people these exact words with regards to Seagate drives:
Under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever purchase Seagate.

Crapshoot would be a massive improvement. IBM just issued a RETAIN on all Seagate SATAs where the firmware will nuke itself after a power cycle, completely randomly. There is no firmware fix yet. This is after two critical firmware updates on their enterprise drives. The flash fix for the 1TB/1.5TB drives has been reported to be extremely buggy by a number of people I know. Three of them lost all data due to the bugs in the firmware update utility; it crashed mid-way through write cycles, rendering the drive unrecoverable. Quality has definitely become a null pointer at Seagate.
 
Wow, I didn't know they where having so many issues. Maybe I'm just lucky...my Media Center PC has one of Seagates 1.5TB drives in it (Using about 1TB in MKV files) without issue so far. I have been running it only about 3 weeks though.
 
strend said:
Wow, I didn't know they where having so many issues. Maybe I'm just lucky...my Media Center PC has one of Seagates 1.5TB drives in it (Using about 1TB in MKV files) without issue so far. I have been running it only about 3 weeks though.
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Yeah I would check to see if your firmware is one of the versions with known issues. Just because it hasn't had problems doesn't mean it won't suddenly lock up after a restart. That's how this issue happens. Everyone thinks their drive is safe because it worked for ### amount of months, then they restart one day to find their hard drive is not detected by BIOS. FYI, mine worked for six months before it did that.

If you have one of the bad firmware versions, you're going to have to risk updating your firmware ASAP.

To recap: If you have a Seagate drive and you run into a problem it is already too late to fix it with firmware as you will have no way of accessing the drive. The firmware "fix" has to be applied BEFORE your hard drive locks up, otherwise you have to send it in to Seagate.
 
I'd say that the Seagate 1.5TB drives in the retail channel right now are fine. Most I've heard of people purchasing since the firmware updates were released have been the newer C series firmwares, which are all post fix. I'm comfortable buying 1.5TB Seagates right now.
 
Neurofreeze said:
Yeah I would check to see if your firmware is one of the versions with known issues. Just because it hasn't had problems doesn't mean it won't suddenly lock up after a restart. That's how this issue happens. Everyone thinks their drive is safe because it worked for ### amount of months, then they restart one day to find their hard drive is not detected by BIOS. FYI, mine worked for six months before it did that.
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You just quoted the problem affecting 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB drives to a T. Meaning that yes, this is the same bug in Enterprise drives. And that no, nobody under any circumstances whatsoever should even consider ANY model of Seagate no matter what. Obviously, this bug is in a piece of common code and per IBM, there is no fix for it to date.
 
I have one, its fine. Got it from the egg a few weeks back, was a good price.

Even with Seagate's screwup on a limited run of the 1.5Tbs, which was fixed with a firmware upgrade, this doesn't shake my confidence in them. Many will disagree with me, but thats just my preference.

My 1.5 hasnt had a problem since day one.
 
AreEss said:
http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/supp...display?lndocid=MIGR-5079399&brandind=5000028

All the drives affected are OEM'd "Enterprise" Seagates. We dropped 14 out of 60 when we did a planned outage on a DS4700. If that's the quality we get from Enterprise (which will be our third critical firmware update for these drives,) do you honestly think "consumer" drives will be better?
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Wow, thanks for pointing out this known Seagate time bomb...I placed an order this morning and luckily I decided to go WD at the last minute without having read this, but the choice would have been much easier had I read this first.
 
xenotype said:
Even with Seagate's screwup on a limited run of the 1.5Tbs, which was fixed with a firmware upgrade.
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You haven't read the rest of the thread, nor the IBM link posted. If several different enterprise class drives were affected, and the consumer level 250, 500, 750, 1TB and 1.5TB drives, then the problem is obviously bigger than you're implying.
 
I had a 1TB drive brick on me exactly the way Neurofreeze mentioned. No data was lost, just sorta locked. I had to mail the drive back to Seagate who fixed it rather quickly, and when it was returned, the data was all intact.

I guess I'm a gambling man, but I just ordered and received two of the 1.5GB models, but I back up often enough that if something happens, I'll be mostly ok. My backup externals are all Western Digital, and they're stored at work several miles away in a fireproof file cabinet.

I'll post here if I have any issues with the two that I just picked up. So far all I have done was install and copy data to them. Otherwise I haven't done much as I've only just received them.

I had to download and run Seagate's 126MB DiscWizard software before I could use the drives. The program helped me format/partition and I think it can clone for more complete backup too. Had I been on dial-up I would have been screwed though considering the huge download size.
 
Three out of six of my original 1.5tb drives have failed while in use, not on reboot, in the 18 weeks I've owned them. I've never had a drive failure before these.
 
I bought mine in December from Dell and it's been fine since day 1.
It's been running 24/7 since I installed it.
 
I really don't ever recommend using Seagate anyway. Each one I've had (two) have died. I have the best luck with WD.

Seagate's latest issues were just another reason for me not to use them.
 
I ended up ordering the WD1001FALS from Zipzoomfly for $113 total.
 
pizza said:
I'm considering getting this:

http://www.goharddrive.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=G01-0118&Click=46325


I read this is supposedly a Western Digital 1/5gb hard drive. Are these "white label" drives a good buy?
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Who knows what corners were cut if these were made for "OEM" resellers, though usually third-party external drives just stick regular hard drives within, they have been known to use "inferior", slower drives for their enclosures.

Whatever it takes to increase net income, I guess. :rolleyes:
 
White label drives are usually remanufactured/refurbished drives. Which means, they're RMA'd drives that the manufacturers decided to turn back into cash.

If you think that removing all your savings and setting fire to them is a good idea, then you definitely should get a "white label" drive.
 
pizza said:
I'm considering getting this:

http://www.goharddrive.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=G01-0118&Click=46325


I read this is supposedly a Western Digital 1/5gb hard drive. Are these "white label" drives a good buy?
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There isn't a single decent price on that website.

You can find similar drives, brand new, for less elsewhere. Hit up a few hot deal forums and you'll see what i mean. For example, Dell recently had a Seagate 1.5tb external for $113 shipped ( i'm not recommending it, just posting an example).
 
What disturbs me about that white label deal, well at least one of the things, is that that supposed 1.5TB drive does look like a Western Digital drive. The problem with that being that WD hasn't released a 1.5TB drive yet...
 
my two cents: so far my 1.5TB drives are working fine. flashed to latest bios, been copying my main array to it for the past day or so.
 
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