Should I trust a Seagate Certified Repaired drive?

mcravenufo

mcravenufo

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I had a Seagate drive fail and sent it in to Seagate on warranty. They returned it but the drive they sent back to me reads Certified Repaired drive. Should I trust it with my important data?
 
No. It's a hit or miss. At my job, we send back alot of Seagate drives and all of the ones get sent back are certified repaired. I had some die on me within a few months, others make noise after being used for so long. I'm not sure if the old warranty will carry over with the certified drive or not.
 
Ok, thanks. I need to find a non important use for this drive then.
 
Personally I've had 3 Seagate recertified drives and I've had to send back 2 of them already. I don't buy SG anymore for that reason.
 
I'm been using a repaired drive in my parents computer for a while now and its been working fine for over a year. It's a 200GB drive if that matters. 7200.9 I think.
 
If its certified repaired, and has the other label with the blue/green border, then I'd consider it to be a fine drive. If the drive failed for mechanical reasons, they've likely replaced most/all of the mechanicals and possibly the platters (Thus, used drive board, used aluminum case, possibly used drive motor). If the drive failed due to firmware issues, then its likely that they have reflashed firmware on it and reformatted it.

I don't have enough drives for any meaningful statistics, and I doubt anyone here does, but a local shop was doing quite a few builds using ES.2's (OEM bare drives, newegg shipping). Several of them later failed for one reason or another. I got a couple of the repaired replacements, and haven't had any problems with them yet. They aren't THAT old yet though.

Maybe I've had better luck because I'm using ES.2's instead of consumer grade drives? Maybe I've just been lucky. Maybe you've just been unlucky. None of us have enough drives where we can really say that much about overall failure rates with statistical certainty.
 
mcravenufo said:
I had a Seagate drive fail and sent it in to Seagate on warranty. They returned it but the drive they sent back to me reads Certified Repaired drive. Should I trust it with my important data?
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We have one in our RAID 6 array in the office. It hasn't been any more or less reliable than the new drives. As with all drives, consider it a potential source of failure and have backups.
 
vladthebad said:
I don't have enough drives for any meaningful statistics, and I doubt anyone here does, but a local shop was doing quite a few builds using ES.2's (OEM bare drives, newegg shipping). Several of them later failed for one reason or another. I got a couple of the repaired replacements, and haven't had any problems with them yet. They aren't THAT old yet though.
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One reason or another... LOL.
 
I don't trust Seagate drives even when they are new nowadays (Thanks .11 drives data lost debacle) so "Re-certified drives" I trust even less.
 
450 said:
I'm been using a repaired drive in my parents computer for a while now and its been working fine for over a year. It's a 200GB drive if that matters. 7200.9 I think.
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The drive I have is a 200GB drive as well. It seemed slow and noisy and along with the Certified Repaired logo on it, I don't trust it so I am going to use it for non essential storage. I do have backups by the way.
 
I have one of their 750GB certified repaired drives off woot.com and it has been running 24/7 for the past 1.5ish years no problem.
 
I have had 0 failures to date on any drive I have RMAd. And I am talking about at work where I have 100s of drives runing 24/7/365. Of these I send back 1 to 5% each year.

Should I trust it with my important data?
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You should trust NO single drive with your important data. Any hard drive can die at any time regardless of who made the drive, its MTBF or how well you have protected it... If your data is valuable do proper backups on some other media.
 
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I'm running a Seagate factory repaired drive that I got back from an RMA right now. It's been going strong for over two years now. I run some Seatools tests occasionally to keep an eye on it, but it looks like its mechanical components will probably outlast its overall storage capacity.
 
They aren't THAT old yet though.
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Drive age does not guaranty that a drive will not die. Yes it does have a higher chance of failure if it is less than 6 months (infant mortality) old or over 3 years than the chance of failure between 6 months and 3 years but there are many other factors that can cause a drive to fail. Some of them are totally out of your control and have nothing to do with quality of manufacturing.
 
Lizardking009, I'm not going to blame their deaths entirely on newegg shipping, although it MAY have been a factor. At least one of the originals suffered from firmware bug.

Frankly, it doesn't really matter what killed the originals though, since with advanced RMA, you get back someone elses old drive as a recertified drive.

And yeah. NEVER EVER EVER trust your data to just one drive.
You don't have to go crazy and run a RAID1, backed up to RAID5, backed to another drive.... but at least have a backup. And NO... a USB hard drive doesn't count as a backup. That counts as "yet more data loss waiting to happen"

(USB hard drive enclosures are junk. Doesn't matter if its WD, seagate, or built by the pope himself... they suck.)
 
USB hard drive enclosures are junk. Doesn't matter if its WD, seagate, or built by the pope himself... they suck
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The enclosures are may fail and generally are of low quality but the drive inside the enclosure will be a normal sata drive so if the enclosure dies remove the drive and put it in your desktop.
 
drescherjm said:
The enclosures are may fail and generally are of low quality but the drive inside the enclosure will be a normal sata drive so if the enclosure dies remove the drive and put it in your desktop.
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I'm fairly sure that is an issue since you usually need to return the drives in the original enclosures, opening voids warranties.

Also, I actually bought two 7200.11 drives that were RMA'd from firmware issues in early-2009 from someone that was scared of the recertified label. $30 each (1TB and 1.5TB) so I bought them just to see if they would die. Both have been running 24x7, except for a few hours of downtime for hardware installations, for the last year. I'm not a huge fan, but I have tons of redundancy/ hotspare drives, backups so I'm not overly worried at this point.
 
I wouldn't trust any Seagate 3,5" 7200 rpm drive after .11 and .12 series.

Altrough their 2,5" drives seem to be top quality.
 
I'm fairly sure that is an issue since you usually need to return the drives in the original enclosures, opening voids warranties.
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Worrying about the warranty would depend on if you believe the $20 to $30 US enclosure is worth loosing your data assuming you think the enclosure is the problem. If it were me I would open the enclosure.
 
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