Shout out to Seagate, every drive that my friends and I have bought from them have eventually failed, good to see that they fail in non-consumer use too, not just me! Stick to the Western Digitals.
I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do.
FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work.
Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.
Good riddance.
Turns out there is a publicly available KB article that mentions known bugs with transfer rate negotiation on some of their SATA3 drives. Of course WD won't say which drives. There's even a utility referenced in the article that you can use to disable SATA3 support. But WD won't make it publicly utility.
Meanwhile their support is stuck in a "have you tried power cycling the computer" loop.
If memory serves Western Digital / HGST / SanDisk were among the first to jack up prices after the Thailand disasters. Fuck em.
Meanwhile is the difference in failure rate between Seagate and Western Digital even statistically significant? For most comparisons you're looking at a fraction of a percent.
That being said, I occasionally use these data to break ties or see variations between generations of drives.
Thankfully it was just stressful - we had backups, but drives in our array started failing one by one, with about a weeks interval; unfortunately it took something like 4 days to rebuild the array each time, so we wasted a lot of time shifting writes elsewhere so the last backup we had + writes going elsewhere combined remained recent enough in case a second drive would fail. We got off easy, but the time we spent probably cost us more than having set up a more redundant system in the first time would have.
Also would be nice to have a similar warning to "Your data has not been backed up in [x] days".
I use a Synology drive (using Synology's RAID-like format) for my Time Machine backups, and a Drobo for my less critical stuff.
They have WD drives. I have not liked the Seagates. However, I like the HGST stats.
One of the nice things about both Drobo and Synology, is that I can change the drive type and capacity "on the fly."
I've had friends / relatives experience drive failure a few time in the past, and the look of horror they have when there is very little I can do to help them recover their photos etc. is something that I hate seeing.
And having the OS give a simple warning (that can be dismissed, with a "don't show me this any more" checkbox) would not over complicate things, and may end up saving some people's data.
Really no different than the current warning that Windows has, when you don't have antivirus installed. Or the fasten seatbelt signal that comes on the dashboard of your car when you start it. Or the flashing red light that gets added to some stop sign controlled intersections.
Also it would be nice if there was a standard way that backup software could inform the OS of backup status (this way it would serve as a secondary check in case the backup software's internal reporting fails to notify the user of bad backups). Just a little nice-to-have.
(I'm not advocating for this to be a legal requirement, just a nice feature if any OS vendor wants to add it).
Another thing I hate about the industry today: being hostile to the user and trying to force them to use their computer how you want them to use it.
> I've had friends / relatives experience drive failure a few time in the past, and the look of horror they have when there is very little I can do to help them recover their photos etc. is something that I hate seeing.
Then teach them about proper backups. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand "don't keep all your eggs in one basket". Or if you're going to implement some stupid forced user-hostile scheme at least use something that actually qualifies as a backup.
> And having the OS give a simple warning (that can be dismissed, with a "don't show me this any more" checkbox) would not over complicate things, and may end up saving some people's data.
Here's what will happen: the user will dismiss the dialog without even reading it. We have decades of experience showing us this. Users have learned that "warning" dialogs are meaningless precisely because of crap like this. Oh yeah, and they're super annoying.
> Really no different than the current warning that Windows has, when you don't have antivirus installed.
Exactly my point.
I don't really use Windows but you can do something similar--though in my experience it's not as simple.
I don't really care if I avoid any downtime. So long as I have belt and suspenders backups, I'm pretty comfortable.
If we're talking about "protecting" consumers, I think it might be wiser for all OS vendors to provide a free tier of version-controlled cloud storage.
I think Windows does remind to create backup (but not very loudly and it accepts local backups to another drive which is poor solution).
Unfortunately, almost everything is cheapest possible. For example, I would prefer ECC RAM as standard. It's very cheap for production (one additional chip per RAM stick), but Intel wants to force people wanting reliability to pay for Xeon CPU and most people don't care.
I have 10 year old WD black and green drives still kicking. I still have a gen 1 or 2 intel ssd drive that’s still kicking.
Dragster should be seagate. Weird autocorrect.
If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with seagate.
All drives usually ship with a certain number of bad sectors. An excessively high number of bad sectors can mean there are quality issues with that specific drive. They may be 'binning' those more poorly testing drives for the external USB drives.
I think Seagate is fine if you are willing to overbuild and deal with the refurb process within the warranty period. I'm not, and will not personally buy a Seagate product again unless their reputation improves (similar to what happened with IBM/HGST post-deathstar). It's not worth the time or aggravation, to me.
Seems like WD has similar rates.
I suspect that most of the time after a hard drive failure the drive gets replaced with a higher tier drive (typically from another manufacturer like WD as the person feels burnt by Seagate for having a hdd failure) which may prove more reliable.
That's my wild speculation anyways.
By any metric a thread on an all in all "niche" technical board with almost 5,000 posts and nearly 4,700,000 views should mean that a lot of people experienced the issue:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
- https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
Later Seagate drives don't seem to be worse than the competition, but memories of that infamous drive model still linger.
But another fun story: I had a PSU blow up a couple years ago in a machine with three WDs and three HGST. All WDs were dead after that, the others worked flawlessly. Probably not a large enough sample size for any definite conclusions but at least it put a failure mode on my radar that wasn't there before.
My oldest drive is a 500 GB Western Digital from 2008 that's still operational today. I imagine its end is near, but I've thought about that for a couple of years now.