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Seagate 3TB Barracudas - Decent or Avoid?

M

mda

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 23, 2011
Messages
2,212
Hey all,

Thinking of picking up a Seagate ST3000DM001 drive just for file storage, as the pair of WD Blue 1TB EZEX drives are already reaching capacity (why can't WDC come out with the larger capacity drives?).

I've read around that these drives are a bit failure prone, not sure if like the 7200.12s but more that usual. (there are a handful of other posts but I thought I'd just link the one from this forum).

My question is - are these drives really un/reliable? I know it may be a tad difficult to qualify/quantify so I guess I'm probably looking for just about any input I can get.

As to alternatives, the WD Blacks up to 4TB (for a big premium) and the EZRX WD Greens up to 4TB are available, though the Black's warranty is basically non-existent in our country for some reason (distributor issue).

Thanks :D
 
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I have some of these and they work fine. I have not experienced any more failures that with other manufactures.

However, your warranty does suck. There is no point for you to spend extra on a drive with 3 or 5 year warranty if it is not honoured. Look for the external drives as they usually sell for a bit cheaper than the internal OEM drives. The Seagate external drives can be easily ripped out of the casing and use as an internal drive.
 
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Yeah. Funny thing with the distributors on ALL HDDs locally. The stores tell me that the distributors begin 'counting' the warranty duration when they sell the drives to the stores and not when the stores sell the drives to the consumer. So to make returns easier on their end, the stores just give the consumer a 1 year warranty regardless of the manufacturer warranty.

So far, I've only had 3 drives go bad on me - an old Seagate 7200 that died due to power surge, a 7200.10 and a 7200.11 (both 250GB).

The 640GB WDC Black and the 2 Blues are my first WDC internal drives, all within the last 5 years - so can't say much about long term reliability yet.
 
The 640GB WDC Black and the 2 Blues are my first WDC internal drives, all within the last 5 years - so can't say much about long term reliability yet.
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Statistically unless you have tens of thousands of drives you can not say much about reliability at all and even if you could say something about 640GB Black or 250 GB Blue drives what good would that do you today. I mean should it be a good predictor of reliability of current generation Black or Blue drives that are designed with different motors, different heads, different platters ...
 
That is BS. Check with the manufacture's site. I know Seagate provide similar warranty for most countries. What does it say when you enter the drive information and your country?
 
drescherjm said:
Statistically unless you have tens of thousands of drives you can not say much about reliability at all and even if you could say something about 640GB Black or 250 GB Blue drives what good would that do you today. I mean should it be a good predictor of reliability of current generation Black or Blue drives that are designed with different motors, different heads, different platters ...
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Well that is true. And not like I can gauge the reliability of current gen drives by the reliability of the previous ones either.

Current prices for drives -
Seagate Barracuda 3TB - $136
Seagate Barracuda 4TB - $179 (but this is the 5900RPM one AFAIK)
WD Black WD2002FAEX - $155
WD Black WD4001FAEX - $284
WD Green EZRX 3TB - $125
WD Green EZRX 4TB - $179
WD Red EFRX 3TB - $145
WD Red EFRX 4TB - $207

ezno_matrix said:
That is BS. Check with the manufacture's site. I know Seagate provide similar warranty for most countries. What does it say when you enter the drive information and your country?
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Realistically you'd probably get a valid warranty when checking the manufacturer's site (my 640GB WDC Black checked out for the proper 5 years) - though I have not tried with any other drives. However, based on local forum feedback/user experiences, I'd probably have to mail the drives abroad to the processing center at my own cost as the distributors here suck ***. Weird thing is that I've heard that story from more than 1 store in different locations already re: HDDs.

I will go on to check before buying though. This is just a late night post without real verification from the actual distributors yet. May make a few calls tomorrow to really check this out.
 
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mda said:
I will go on to check before buying though. This is just a late night post without real verification from the actual distributors yet. May make a few calls tomorrow to really check this out.
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Prices are similar to what I pay locally.

Do any local shops have their own warranty service? Normally such things are a rippoff (and may still be in this case), but I paid $15 for 2 year "direct replacement" with the HDD I purchased this week. So if it fails in the next two years, I just bring it to my local shop for a new one and skip the hassle of RMA/shipping HDDs and waiting for replacements. This could be well worth it if you have to ship abroad for replacement.

I had a 6month old WD Green fail on me 2 years ago, and the shop I bought it at, had an awesome 1 year direct replacement for free, but sadly they are no longer in business. But after experiencing how nice it is to have local direct replacement, I am willing to pay a bit more to have it.

So far I have never done a manufacturer RMA on a HD. My failures have been the above at 6 months with direct replacement at local shop, 3 days old direct replacement at another local shop(nearly everyone offers 15 day direct replacement), and out of warranty/lost paperwork for the rest.
 
I have a gut load of the ST3000DM001 and ST2000DM001's floating around and they work well for my needs. They are not always fans of some HW RAID cards but that's not an issue here for the OP.

They do have a few more documented failures but that is thanks to being so popular and being out there.

I regularly speak with all my Disties and ask what the trends are and the Seagates fair no worse than any other brand.


The best side effect, they are fast drives.
 
Snowdog said:
Prices are similar to what I pay locally.

Do any local shops have their own warranty service? Normally such things are a rippoff (and may still be in this case), but I paid $15 for 2 year "direct replacement" with the HDD I purchased this week. So if it fails in the next two years, I just bring it to my local shop for a new one and skip the hassle of RMA/shipping HDDs and waiting for replacements. This could be well worth it if you have to ship abroad for replacement.

I had a 6month old WD Green fail on me 2 years ago, and the shop I bought it at, had an awesome 1 year direct replacement for free, but sadly they are no longer in business. But after experiencing how nice it is to have local direct replacement, I am willing to pay a bit more to have it.

So far I have never done a manufacturer RMA on a HD. My failures have been the above at 6 months with direct replacement at local shop, 3 days old direct replacement at another local shop(nearly everyone offers 15 day direct replacement), and out of warranty/lost paperwork for the rest.
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Any direct placement offered by local shops that cost more than the price of shipping a drive is a complete rip off. Even worst if the direct replacement is not the same duration as the drive warranty. I have returned countless drives to Seagate and WD and their RMA process has been very painless. And if you are in North America, you get advance replacement, where they send you the replacement drive first. And with no receipt, they will honour the warranty base sale date if reported by the retailer (newegg does this) or the manufactured date.
 
$15 is comparable to the cost shipping. I have RMAd Video cards and IMO there is no such thing as painless RMA. Time wasted getting RMA approval, time wasted packing/shipping damn thing, then you have to hope the lone HDD will survive shipping by idiots to your door.

I would pay double to just walk into a shop and swap for a new HDD.
 
ClutchAutomatic said:
I have 2 of these and 1 of the 4tb versions, never had a problem with them.
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OTOH, I had 1 Seagate 3TB drive and it failed on day 3 of ownership.

If you look on some place that aggregates customer data like newegg, the complaint rate seems fairly consistent between most of the big drives. This doesn't tell you what the actual failure rate is like, but it is some indication that is probably similar on both Seagate and WD.
 
Really? It doesn't say per year and nothing else in that section is per year. What would a specification of 2400 power-on hours / year mean anyways?
 
GeneO said:
Really? It doesn't say per year and nothing else in that section is per year. What would a specification of 2400 power-on hours / year mean anyways?
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They do not want you running desktop drives 24/7/365. This change to the specifications came a few years back.
 
That is a 27% duty cycle. That seems pretty low. I have 5 year old blacks @ 23,000 power-on hours of lght home usage. That is 4600 POH/yr.
 
drescherjm said:
They do not want you running desktop drives 24/7/365. This change to the specifications came a few years back.
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About the same time HDD reliability took a nose dive. :D

So you are supposed to buy expensive drives if you want to use your computer more than 6 hours/day?

Do they void you warranty if you use it more than 2400/year?
 
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Very interesting info. I checked the specs as well of the drives being sold here -

Seems we have the older gen WD Blacks here too (FAEX4001), while the WD spec page has the 4003 already.

That said, the price difference between drives seem to be effectively limiting my choices to either the WD Red, WD Green or the Seagate 3TB.
 
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Do they void you warranty if you use it more than 2400/year?
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No. Or at least from work I have returned drives to Seagate and WDC that were used 24/7/365 with no issue at all.
 
I can apparently get the WD Reds as well for about the same price as the WD Greens and Seagate Barracudas.

For an all purpose drive except game drive (Steam/Games will be on my EZEX WD Blues) where I'd like more reliability but where speed is a nice to have - which should I get? Or should I just go for the Seagate for the faster drives anyway since we have no idea on reliability anyway?
 
mda said:
I can apparently get the WD Reds as well for about the same price as the WD Greens and Seagate Barracudas.
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I don't think any public evidence exists that any of them is any more reliable than the rest. Which has the longest warranty?
 
Called up the shops - they offer 1 year in-store warranty for all drives.

And the BS is true. The guy over the phone explained to me - there is a manufacturer warranty (for our country, a 2 year warranty for Seagates, WD Reds and WD Greens, 3 years for WD Blacks), but it begins when the local distributor buys the stock from Seagate. To help "protect" the local stores from buying old stock without warranties, the local distributor then offers a 1 year distributor's warranty to the shops that begin when the shops buy the stock from the distributor. Then the stores themselves offer a 1 year in-store warranty for the end-user.

Theoretically, if I buy the drive on the exact same day that the local distributor buys them, I'll get the full manufacturer warranty. I'm guessing that if I register the drive with proof of purchase online, I'll probably get the full warranty as well - but subject to acceptance by the distributor. If they will not receive my broken item, I will likely have to mail the drive abroad.

Snowdog said:
I don't think any public evidence exists that any of them is any more reliable than the rest. Which has the longest warranty?
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If this is the case, and in light of the great warranties offered - I may as well lean towards the faster Seagate drive...
 
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The drive warranties are BS. Why? The replacement drives are almost always re-furbished, and re-furbs have a high failure rate. At least from my own experience.
 
techbob said:
The drive warranties are BS. Why? The replacement drives are almost always re-furbished, and re-furbs have a high failure rate. At least from my own experience.
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Glad I haven't have had to warranty a drive yet then... That being said, it seems we get screwed doubly over - bad warranties to begin with and you get crap replacement drives.

DPI said:
Avoid so there are more for me.
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I doubt me getting one will affect your part of the world unless you're the guy who bought 50+ R9 290s and have the same amount to spend on HDDs. :p
 
techbob said:
The drive warranties are BS. Why? The replacement drives are almost always re-furbished, and re-furbs have a high failure rate. At least from my own experience.
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Refurb drives aren't so bad. In my case, all my refurbs have outlasted their warranty and still going. Seagate is now replacing 1.5TB drives with 2TB, so that's a bonus.
 
I've got 10 of these at home and another 30 or so going at work here, no failures so far. Some have fairly high remapped sector counts, but they're holding steady and not growing.
 
Thanks all for the feedback. Picked up a Barracuda 3TB drive today.

Hope this one lasts me a while.
 
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