I hate Seagate

[ZippyDan]

I used to love Seagate. I guess this was during the 20GB to 300GB days. They were the only manufacturer that offered a 5 year warranty (when the other companies were offering only 1 to 3 years), and their drives were reliable and fast.

Sometime in 2009, I bought a 1TB Seagate drive out of loyalty to the brand. In 2010 I bought two Western Digital 1TB drives (a Green and a Black) because they were on sale.

Since that time, this has been my experience:

Western Digital 1 TB Green: 15,000 hours, no failures, no sector errors (tested with HDTune)
Western Digital 1 TB Black: 9,000 hours, no failures, no sector errors

Seagate 1 TB:

Original Failed: April 27, 2009, RMA'd for replacement
Replacement Failed: July 18, 2011, RMA'd for replacement
Replacement Failed: May 3, 2012, RMA'd for replacement
Replacement Failed: Today February 24, 2014 <-- warranty EXPIRED

Suffice to say, I'm pissed. I understand that Seagate has no obligation to service this unit now, but I say they DO have an obligation to not provide a product that is complete shit. I am an IT person, so I have had many other drive failures, from many different manufacturers (WD, Maxtor, Hitachi, etc), but the typical lifetime of a drive, IF IT IS GOING TO FAIL is usually something like either

1 failure during the warranty, replace drive and then maybe another failure outside warranty

or

1 failure outside of warranty

The probability of having 4 failures in a row in the span of 5 years is beyond mere chance. I feel like Seagate has been replacing my failed drives with drives that they knew were subpar, just to fulfill my warranty until I was no longer a liability. Is there some known defect in their manufacturing processes for this run?

The real kicker is that I don't use this computer much. I travel a lot for work, and I have three laptops that do most of my day-to-day work. I failed to keep exact usage statistics on the first 3 failures, but I would estimate that they only had about 6 months worth of hours for their entire lifetime (which was only one or two years).

My current drive is failing with 4,500 hours of use.

Even with a 25% chance of failure (http://arstechnica.com/information-...ty-to-the-test-shows-not-all-disks-are-equal/), it seems I should only have a 0.4% chance of all four drives failing in a row!

 

[Charlie98]

I've got 3 Seagate desktop drives 2x 2TBs and a 1TB... never been happier. The single WD Red I got had bad sectors out of the box, WD RMA'd it with a refurb.

I bought a new Samsung 840Pro SSD... it failed in less than a year. Samsung RMA'd it with... a refurb.

Everyone kicks out a lemon or two... you pays your money, you takes your chances.

 

[ZippyDan]

I have also had DOA drives, from EVERY manufacturer. That's not the point.

I've had drives fail, from EVERY manufacturer, from time to time. That's not the point.

I don't care if I get a refurb as an RMA. That's not the point.

I only care if IT WORKS.

My point is they have sent me FOUR faulty drives IN A ROW.

That is shit.

 

[rsutoratosu]

I can show you my wd rma, one drive per week for a month.. every company has almost equal amount of rma..

 

[Blastman]

The timeframe for the purchase of your Seagate drive puts it in the era of the 7200.11 drives. Those were definitely a problematic series. When I built my current computer in early 2010 (sig), if the 7200.12 versions of Seagate were not available, I would not have bought a Seagate drive. I specifically made sure to avoid the 7200.11 drives.

 

[bradley]

Even with a 25% chance of failure (http://arstechnica.com/information-...ty-to-the-test-shows-not-all-disks-are-equal/), it seems I should only have a 0.4% chance of all four drives failing in a row!

Seriously. That is some scary last few years of data from Seagate.

 

[Elixer]

This isn't at all uncommon.
I have had back-2-back-2-back-2-back failures as well.
Heck, all of the 'certified repaired' drives I have gotten back have ALL failed.
I got a stack of them.
These range from .10, .11, and .12s.

 

[silicon]

i think in Seagates case they moved production to another country and this may have affected the reliability of the drives. I have Seagate with almost 40,000 hours and still going strong but it was made in, i think, Singapore. So likely the place of manufacture is a big factor.

 

[Charlie98]

I don't care if I get a refurb as an RMA. That's not the point.

I do. I paid good money for a premium drive and it fails in less than a year (on a 5 year warranty in the case of my Samsung SSD) and I get a shit refurb?

 

[code65536]

I think it's been well-established by now that the 7200.11 generation was crap. 7200.12 generation was almost as bad (though I seem to have been extremely lucky that all three of the 7200.12 drives that I've deployed are still alive). This is well-reflected in the Backblaze figures in the Ars article. But judging from anecdotal evidence (and from the frequency of 1-star reviews on Amazon and Newegg), Seagate seems to have cleaned up their act with their 1-TB-platter generation.

There are ups and downs. People today still mention the "Death Star" drives in forums even though the Backblaze data paints a rather rosy picture for modern-day Hitachi drives.

Brand name means nothing (esp. now that we're down to just Seagate, WD, and Toshiba). One generation from one brand might be trash, but another generation might be golden, same with all the manufacturers. The proportions of 1-star reviews at places like Newegg or Amazon are, in my experience, much more useful than statements like, "I've always had good experiences with Seagate", "I've had Seagate failures; WD forever!", or "I've had WD failures; Seagate forever!"

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I remember that Xmas season when NewEgg put a Seagate 1TB drive on a really good sale. The reviews were mediocre, but nothing to indicate a big concern compared to other drives. I bought four of them.

First one DOA and NewEgg replaced it. Then the news story broke and the discovery of bad firmware was the culprit. NewEgg pulled the item and pretended to have never sold the item in the first place, which forced customers like me to RMA to mfg.

Three months later drive #2 failed followed by drive #3 failing within the first year. The forth drive failed within 18 months. I had to go through the motions with Seagate to replace the three drives. I stopped buying Seagate drives and doing business with NewEgg.

Then last October-November I bought a 1TB external USB3 Seagate for my Hackintosh. It worked initially, but 2-3 months into its use for Time Machine it stopped working. I couldn't reformat it GPT (GUID) in OS X and could only create a monolithic FAT partition.

I removed it from the Hackintosh and connected to a W7 PC and couldn't convert or create an NTFS partition through Disk Mgmt. Using diskpart I was able to write zeros and then initialize in DIsk mgmt, create and NTFS partition, but test writing failed and the disk disappeared from the operating system.

Unlike Western Digital, Seagate doesn't provide s/w for their external drives to restore them to factory condition. I couldn't copy more than 3 files (of any size) to it in OS X, LM or W7 before it failed. Tested on all ten USB3 ports on three different computers.

I gave up, returned it to Costco for a full refund--vowing to never buy Seagate again. I was bit twice by that company. They can go phuck themselves.

 

[Ketchup]

In my experience, with both myself and the Company my employer is contracted with, hard drives don't last like they used to.

I have an old IBM Pentium 2 machine in my office running 24x7 on an old 2 GB hard drive. Last year the Company was installing new controllers, only to have techs come back and replace brand new hard drives left and right.

I don't know what the deal is.

 

[smitbret]

I think it's been well-established by now that the 7200.11 generation was crap. 7200.12 generation was almost as bad (though I seem to have been extremely lucky that all three of the 7200.12 drives that I've deployed are still alive). This is well-reflected in the Backblaze figures in the Ars article. But judging from anecdotal evidence (and from the frequency of 1-star reviews on Amazon and Newegg), Seagate seems to have cleaned up their act with their 1-TB-platter generation.

There are ups and downs. People today still mention the "Death Star" drives in forums even though the Backblaze data paints a rather rosy picture for modern-day Hitachi drives.

Brand name means nothing (esp. now that we're down to just Seagate, WD, and Toshiba). One generation from one brand might be trash, but another generation might be golden, same with all the manufacturers. The proportions of 1-star reviews at places like Newegg or Amazon are, in my experience, much more useful than statements like, "I've always had good experiences with Seagate", "I've had Seagate failures; WD forever!", or "I've had WD failures; Seagate forever!"

This. Everybody puts out some garbage now and then. If you happen to be on the receiving end then it can leave a bad taste in your mouth for a long time. I've had good luck with every drive I've ever bought, Samsung, Maxtor, Seagate, WD..... My parents still have a Deathstar in their old desktop PC that has been running fine for years.

Right now, I favor the current lineup of Seagates simply because of speed, heat and noise. There is nothing faster right now and they run 1 degree warmer than the WD Greens sitting next to them in my server. They are quieter, too. Been more than a year with 3 of the 2TBs in there and never had a lick of problems.

Had I bought WD, I would believe I would be saying the same thing.

 

[C1]

That matches my experience as well as what was stated this last weekend on the computer radio talk show hosted by DATEL Systems, Inc ( http://datelsys.com/ ). Mainly, that every company can have (or has had from time to time) manufacturing runs or releases of HDDs which may have had issues. (DATEL especially should know as they are a major repair facility here in town.) In their opinion, right now Hitachi seems to have the edge (if there is any to be had).

 

[Old Hippie]

That matches my experience as well as what was stated this last weekend on the computer radio talk show hosted by DATEL Systems, Inc ( http://datelsys.com/ ). Mainly, that every company can have (or has had from time to time) manufacturing runs or releases of HDDs which may have had issues. (DATEL especially should know as they are a major repair facility here in town.)

But of course.

I had 3 Intel 80GB SSDs (series 2) that had to be RMA'd.

It was frustrating but I'd didn't go around crying about and would have purchased more larger drives but they were falling behind in the performance and purchased Crucial C-300 units.

 

[GMasonDragonDad]

How did you buy them? Online? all at one time?

I have heard that some shipping facilities are harder on packages than others. I have gotten fearful about fragile items. My last two "spinning rust" drives were from brick and mortar retailers just so they would not be dropped 6 feet as reported by some people.

 

[Torn Mind]

HDDs themselves are basically glass. And the controller board being screwed up or an imprecision within the HDD could very well wreck the drive. Now, if your failure is of the bad sector variety, either it is bad luck or there is something fundamentally wrong somewhere, whether in the drives themselves or in shipping/handling.

MTBF is a misunderstood metric and really not too useful without knowing the sample size of HDDs and the tested time period. Without knowing the total time of service of all drives in the sample and the number of failures, one is not able to obtain the critical probability of failure within a certain time frame, quantified by P(t)=exp(-t/MTBF), where t is the time the unit has operated and MTBF is the MTBF hours.

Automation Direct, a dealer in the industrial sector, has a useful document explaining how to use and interpret MTBF, and this is the source for my second paragraph.

http://ftp.automationdirect.com/pub/Product Reliability and MTBF.pdf

My say on all of this is that every consumer drive going to be more prone to failure than enterprise level drives. Consumer drives often don't even have MTBF specs published while enterprise do.

It is also important to consider subsets. It seems that Blackblaze's sample has Seagate drives doing poorly compared to what is expected from P(t), especially the 7200.11s and the 3 TB drives. The 4TB drives is not too far from the expected failure rates if we assume 700000 hrs MTBF and their published years of service.

What is clear though, is that it seems the Hitachi consumer drives can handle enterprise workloads admirably, or at least the ones Blackblaze obtained can. The absorption of Hitachi's 3.5 inch drive division into Toshiba might eliminate the presence of these drives or their capital is passed on to their new owners and the drives will remain. No one knows what will happen.

 

[master_shake_]

i had a seagate drive die on me recently, so i opened it up

its a st2dm0001 drive so its supposed to be 2 1tb platters...

mine was 3 platters...

LIES i tells ya!

 

[ascalice]

I rarely buy from other HDD companies. I only buy from Western Digital. I buy my solid-state drives from Samsung though.

 

[smitbret]

i had a seagate drive die on me recently, so i opened it up

its a st2dm0001 drive so its supposed to be 2 1tb platters...

mine was 3 platters...

LIES i tells ya!

They came in 2 varieties for awhile until the smaller platters were out of production. You could tell which platters the drive had by the size of the notch in the upper right hand corner of the drive. If it covered almost an entire 90 degree arc then it was a 2x1TB and if it came up short it was a 3 platter.

 

[tweakboy]

I used to love Seagate. I guess this was during the 20GB to 300GB days. They were the only manufacturer that offered a 5 year warranty (when the other companies were offering only 1 to 3 years), and their drives were reliable and fast.

Sometime in 2009, I bought a 1TB Seagate drive out of loyalty to the brand. In 2010 I bought two Western Digital 1TB drives (a Green and a Black) because they were on sale.

Since that time, this has been my experience:

Western Digital 1 TB Green: 15,000 hours, no failures, no sector errors (tested with HDTune)
Western Digital 1 TB Black: 9,000 hours, no failures, no sector errors

Seagate 1 TB:

Original Failed: April 27, 2009, RMA'd for replacement
Replacement Failed: July 18, 2011, RMA'd for replacement
Replacement Failed: May 3, 2012, RMA'd for replacement
Replacement Failed: Today February 24, 2014 <-- warranty EXPIRED

Suffice to say, I'm pissed. I understand that Seagate has no obligation to service this unit now, but I say they DO have an obligation to not provide a product that is complete shit. I am an IT person, so I have had many other drive failures, from many different manufacturers (WD, Maxtor, Hitachi, etc), but the typical lifetime of a drive, IF IT IS GOING TO FAIL is usually something like either

1 failure during the warranty, replace drive and then maybe another failure outside warranty

or

1 failure outside of warranty

The probability of having 4 failures in a row in the span of 5 years is beyond mere chance. I feel like Seagate has been replacing my failed drives with drives that they knew were subpar, just to fulfill my warranty until I was no longer a liability. Is there some known defect in their manufacturing processes for this run?

The real kicker is that I don't use this computer much. I travel a lot for work, and I have three laptops that do most of my day-to-day work. I failed to keep exact usage statistics on the first 3 failures, but I would estimate that they only had about 6 months worth of hours for their entire lifetime (which was only one or two years).

My current drive is failing with 4,500 hours of use.

Even with a 25% chance of failure (http://arstechnica.com/information-...ty-to-the-test-shows-not-all-disks-are-equal/), it seems I should only have a 0.4% chance of all four drives failing in a row!

Seagate used to be good until they hopped in bed with Maxtor. As we all know maxtor is the worst drive you can get, ext or int.. gl

 

[tweakboy]

Only WD and Samsung for me! thx

 

[Puffnstuff]

Yeah the 7200.11 had a high failure rate until Seagate released an updated firmware to address the issue. As soon as they released it I went to flashing my drives. The last drive I rma'd was a wd black and they sent me a brand new drive so I can't complain.

 

[ZippyDan]

I do. I paid good money for a premium drive and it fails in less than a year (on a 5 year warranty in the case of my Samsung SSD) and I get a shit refurb?

"Refurb" doesn't necessarily mean anything. Sometimes a "refurb" is a brand new return. Sometimes "refurb" means taking a nonfunctioning part and replacing any broken parts with brand news parts. Sometimes a "refurb" means taking something that a customer says is not working and reselling it without even looking at it.

You have no idea what "refurb" means. I have some "refurb" drives that are still going strong after 8 years.

You quoted my OP out of context

I don't care if I get a refurb as an RMA. That's not the point.

I only care if IT WORKS.

Why do you care if it is labeled "refurb"? What exactly makes you call it a "shit refurb"? The only thing that should matter is if it works.

 

[tweakboy]

Thats how most companies do.