Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by mkirklions | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

mkirklions

Anyone have an opinion about Seagate? I had one of their HDD and it died on me within a year.

Not sure if this was a 'one-off' or other people had issues with their quality.

Similar issue with samsung on SSD.

View on HN

Check the BackBlaze reports: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

A few Seagate models were problematic. See the 2nd table here (did you have one of those?) https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/

I switched to HGST a few years back, after seeing the color graph on this page: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-201...

I've had a drive from every major manufacturer fail at some point. Brands don't matter, backups do. Buy hard drives in pairs and put an item on your calendar to pop the other one in once a month, sync it, and put it back in a fire-resistant safe.

> Buy hard drives in pairs and put an item on your calendar to pop the other one in once a month, sync it, and put it back in a fire-resistant safe.

Alternatively, buy one hard drive and keep a copy in Amazon Glacier Deep Archive for $1/TB-month.

And then wait weeks and pay real money to pull it all back if you have 8TB :)

Yeah it's something like $700 to retrieve 8 TB

Meanwhile for highly redundant tape cartridges, you can store that amount for maybe $100-200, but the device to read it back is about 10x more expensive used unless I am just struggling the find the real deals :/

AWS Lighsail can transfer 1 TB from S3 for $5. And no fear of losing a second drive while you perform a network synchronization.

I have Seagate drives spinning for more than 5 years now with no data loss.

Some drives fail. It's a fact of life. Always buy more than one (from different manufacturers, if possible), remember RAID-1 is your friend and do your backups as if your life depended on them. Because, in this age, it does.

In 2013, I ordered 6 x Seagate Barracuda drives (3 TB). By 2017, 5 of the 6 had failed. There was a famed "bad batch" that I think my drives were a part of, but I will never buy Seagate again.

I think Backblaze has the best public hard drive statistics available.

I've had 5 Seagates die on me, 4 of them all within 11 weeks of each other, all different models and capacities, 1 of them was a 2.5" laptop drive, 1 of them failed after being in use for 30 minutes. I told myself I'd never buy Seagate again, but when I had a drive failure in another laptop a few years ago... yep, it was that 5th Seagate; I didn't realise I had it.

I've had one Samsung HD502HJ failure -- my 3 other HD502HJs are still going. I haven't had any other drive failures. I have more than 30 drives, and some of them are more than 8 years old.

Seagate is well known for quality issues. I usually have no more than one Seagate in a RAID and plan for it to fail first.

My understanding is the IronWolf drives are really good.

IronWolf is AFAIK the only non-helium non-SMR 8TB drive.

IMO what's important isn't getting good drives, but avoiding simultaneous drive failure. I usually do this by building RAIDs out of a mix of brands and manufacture dates.

I have had bad experiences in the past, maybe not on the scale of [1], but quite close. The newer drives are better (adjusted for age).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHcHA5riKbc

I've used them exclusively for the past 10 years in my web servers and I couldn't be happier. I've had the occasional drive fail on me here and there, of course, but some of those 10-year-old drives are still humming along nicely.

>Not sure if this was a 'one-off' or other people had issues with their quality.

My last two HD failures were Seagate. On one of the PC building forums I occasionally frequent, they've had a sticky for years telling people not to buy Seagate.

Same here. One is theoretically still good but a fragging firmware bug prevents it from being enumerated properly. Never again Seagate with your crap reliability.

I’ve owned three or four Seagate drives (at least two of which were enterprise-class), and they all failed. My many HGST disks, with one exception, were all still alive and well when I retired them. I’ve never had a WD disk fail.

Backblaze reports always have Seagate with significantly higher failure rates. I suspect they just RMA them all since failures don't actually affect them too badly.

I sold my Seagate stock a while back, so I have no horse in this race, but I needed to point out that _outside the notoriously bad 3tb line that one year_, Seagate’s reliability has been on par or better than Western Digital’s in every single Backblaze report I have ever read. I challenge you to prove to me that the Backblaze data says Seagate is worse than WD outside of that line.

I've bought a few enterprise models a couple of years ago and they're stellar (Constellation line-up). Apart from the fact that they're quite loud.

Same but the one I got from the RMA has been running for 5-6 years without any issues.

I have had my seagate 3tb drive running since I think 2012

Reply on news.ycombinator.com