Seagates Suck?

J

jtech

New Member
So ive been a tech for a little over 2 years and in my experience i seem to come across more Seagate drives being corrupted than other brands. Is this just me or is seagate really just a junk brand? I hardly ever see a WD with issues or any other brand for that matter but seagates seem to have short lives.

Anyone else notice this or any other drives that fail constantly?
 
Hitachi and Maxtor tend to be the worst in my experience - Seagate and WD the best.

I would definitely say that Seagate is probably one of the best brands out there.
 
Any hard drive regardless of brand can just fail without notice.

Ive had bad luck with Hard drives,Ive had the following die on me random.

1x WD Black
1xSeagate Barracuda
1x hitatchi Deskstar

Although i do like Seagate,Ive had the 7200Rpm one for around 4+ years now its still going strong.
 
True any drive can go at anytime i just seem to see more seagates than others. BTW is maxtor even around anymore? Ive also had bad experience with hitatchi now that you mention it though. My personal prefrence is a Westren Digital Caviar Blue. There solid drives I really wanna check out some SSD though but there still a bit out of my price range though there coming down.

Anyone else also notice 1tb or higher drives seem to fail faster than smaller drives? (when used as your primary drive)
 
Not using it as my primary drive (and haven't for nearly 3 years), but I've had my WD Green 2TB for nearly 4 years now and not had a problem. I'm also using a WD Green 3TB in my system that is maybe 2 or 3 years old and that is working fine too.

I don't think Maxtor exists anymore, no.
 
Shane said:
Any hard drive regardless of brand can just fail without notice.

Ive had bad luck with Hard drives,Ive had the following die on me random.

1x WD Black
1xSeagate Barracuda
1x hitatchi Deskstar

Although i do like Seagate,Ive had the 7200Rpm one for around 4+ years now its still going strong.
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WD Blacks are the best of the best in my opinion. I have had one in my home PC since (about) 2008 and it has only been turned off... once? when I replaced my CD-ROM drive. The Seagate Barracudas aren't that great in my opinion. I have one of those in the Blue Beast and it won't even let me transfer files to/from it. Lastly, Hitachi DEATHStars are the worst you can get. My home PC and laptop both have the 120GB version and both of the DeskStars had issues with sectors after about a year of use.
 
I only buy western digital drives now. In my years I've had more Seagates go out then Western Digital. Don't buy Hitachi or toshiba.
 
johnb35 said:
I only buy western digital drives now. In my years I've had more Seagates go out then Western Digital. Don't buy Hitachi or toshiba.
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Agreed... I usually get spare drives for my personal pc's but given the choice id take a WD every time. Haven't had to many issues with toshibas HDDs but think i only have 1 in my laptop (also a toshiba again i got it for free so no choice would personally rather have a lenovo but hey cant beat free)
 
Depends on the model really. Seagate had a really good reputation until around their 1.5 TB units that had a horrific failure rate.

I don't get the bad rap for Hitachi units, though. I find they're usually faster and a tad more power efficient at a lesser price point than other drives. I have a few 7K1000 in my server with around 30,000 hours of power on time that seem to be going strongly.

There was a vendor that did a reliability test over a span of a large number of units here:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
 
Seagates and Western Digitals are pretty even, I'd be willing to bet WD is more reliable though. You might see way more Seagate deaths because they're often bundled in desktops. Might need confirmation on that one.
 
Cant remember where I read it. Last year 2013 Seagate had a failure rate of 26% and Western Digital was alittle over 5%. Their sales were pretty much even.
 
PCunicorn said:
A 26 percent failure rate is pretty insane, are you sure the source is legit, and what's it based off of?
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Said I cant remember. Based off of? Returns/RMAs. or could have been a test of a online data storage test.

Edit
It was a online storage and its failure rate over a 3 year time period.
 
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So far I have had 3 WD blues die on me. I had a Seagate external go but I cracked it open and still use the drive. I think it is almost 6 years old now. With the price of spinning disks so low, I just make sure that I have backups and buy whatever is cheap from WD/Samsung/Seagate restore whatever data I need to.
 
Iv been using the same twin western digitals since 2006. Never had an issue with them. They still work just fine.

The brands I ever had any trouble with were IBM (read up "Deathstar") and a Maxtor that crashed randomly and I lost thousands of pictures from my early days in photography that Ill never get back. Luckily, those brands I dont think are even around anymore, and if they are they dont make much anymore probably because of their failure rates. Although I think Maxtor was bought out years and years ago by another company.....dont remember which one.

The only Seagate Iv ever owned came inside my first Xbox :p . Never had an issue with it, but Iv heard nothing but good things about Seagate.

EDIT: Just did a quick search and it looks like Maxtor was bought out by Seagate in 2006 haha. That might explain why their quality went down, if it really did.

Haha, IBM even had a lawsuit against them for the failure of the Deskstar 75GXP (I had 2 of these models in my first PC in 2001). Too bad I never got the $100 they were offering to everyone who had that drive and it failed, which I think they probably all did haha. Mine lasted about a year or 2 I think. One failed before the other and the last one was making a very worrying noise before it went.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/10/23/ibm_hit_with_hard_drive/
 
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My Seagate is totally fine. It's quick and has been in use daily for 3 years with no trouble. There's good and bad eggs in every brand. However from what I've heard WD and Seagate are the best. Samsung was good a few years back but I believe it was absorbed by Seagate.
 
G80FTW said:
The brands I ever had any trouble with were IBM (read up "Deathstar") and a Maxtor that crashed randomly and I lost thousands of pictures from my early days in photography that Ill never get back. Luckily, those brands I dont think are even around anymore, and if they are they dont make much anymore probably because of their failure rates.
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The Deskstar line was purchased by Hitachi in 2003 and they still exist today.
 
spirit said:
The Deskstar line was purchased by Hitachi in 2003 and they still exist today.
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Yea I read that. Not sure why. As far as Im concerned, and even with what I read, the failure rates of my specific model were astounding enough to crumble IBM in the hard drive market almost completely. Mostly because they tried to deny the problem at first. Alot of companies will always try to deny wide spread product failure. HP actually still does the same. Alot of the 2008 or so model laptops from HP are junk and fail due to do some cheap solder they used that melts when it gets hot and causes various components to fail.

To me, when a company KNOWINGLY releases a bad product, its usually enough to bring them down. Theres really no winning involved with knowingly releasing a bad product, which is why I think the companies that are still around have learned from things like this. The average electronics consumer may not be the brightest, but if you release a bad product why would people buy from you again?

Me personally, Ill never buy an IBM or HP product because of it. Not because they released a bad product, every company will have a flop from time to time, but its how they handled it that shows they are bad companies. When my moms HP laptop failed, and the cause was determined to be the solder, its warranty had JUST ran out (how convenient) and HP was obviously no help at that point, wanting to charge $300 to replace the motherboard. Which to me, wouldnt solve the problem if they replace it with another faulty board whats the point? And when I searched up about it, all I found was people having the same exact issue and when I brought that up to them, obviously they know nothing about it.

If you release a bad product, that has a high failure rate across the board, obviously the right thing to do is give people their money back. Or at the very least, acknowledge the problem exist. IBM nor HP even acknowledged the problem even existed. Then to boot HP buys out my favorite phone company (Palm) and runs them straight into the ground. I miss Palm.
 
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