Seagate HD quality problems?

[Deleted member 4644]

I have always been a loyal Seagate buyer. My first HD was a Seagate back in 1993.

I was looking at newegg today and saw this deal 2TB for 129$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148413

WTF. There are 59 reviews saying the drive fails with a click of death, out of about 150 reviews total.

What is going on? Is this models specific, lot specific, or a new Seagate problem?

 

[Zap]

Jumbo capacity HDDs these days don't seem as robust as HDDs of yore as far as problem reports go. Seagate has had some knocks on them in the past two years (but TBH so has WD) for large HDDs. Part of this at Newegg specifically can be that they (Newegg) aren't known for the best shipping/packaging of HDDs so some of the issues are likely HDDs that have been bounced around too much during shipping.

 

[Voo]

Seagates largest problem was the .11 FW disaster, after that it seems the usual stuff - like Zap said bigger HDDs are less robust than the smaller versions, but that's true for every drive.

The problem with HDDs in general is that you have absolutely no way to find out which are more reliable than others. The FW disaster especially moved seagate into the flashlight, so google results are even more useless than otherwise and a lot of bad reviews may just mean that more drives were sold than of other drives and the percentage is roughly the same.

I for myself have several Seagate drives I got extremely cheap after the fw problems (yay) and all of them are fine while one WD green died on me.

All in all I would just get the cheapest drives and buy some more for backups.. HDDs are just to unreliable in any case.

 

[tcsenter]

I just avoid Seagate out of principle since it originally touted its move to 5 year warranties as being a definite 'putting our warranty where our mouth is' measure of its confidence in the quality of its drives, but when it decided to move back to 2 and 3 year warranties, it completely denied it was an indication of the quality of its drives.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I've been a pretty loyal Seagate customer for years too, and have backed away from that based on the FW disaster and some of the same sentiment tcsenter expressed there (a 3 year warranty isn't much different than a 5 year warranty, it's just the back-tracking they've done).

I am, however, running two 7200.12 drives right now: a 500GB and a 1TB. Both drives have run problem free for a long time. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the 7200.12 series.

Having said that, if the F3 drives had been in stock at Newegg when I bought my drives, I would be running F3s right now, not Seagates. That is based purely on the performance numbers, though. The F3s are top of the heap right now.

A final note: I will never buy a 7200.11 drive myself; and WD drives carry too high a price premium for my taste.

 

[Binky]

Users with a bad experience are (more) likely to publish a "review." Users with a good experience are less likely to publish a review stating that the drive is performing as expected.

The latest 2TB drives (by all manufacturers) seem to be getting significantly more bad reviews than smaller drives. I'm sticking with 1TB drives until they work the bugs out.

 

[Voo]

I don't understand the people who are worried about the 3 years warranty - is there any manufacterer out there who gives 5years warranty for their dekstop drives? Afaik they all have 3year warranties, so they're equal in that regard.

Drives with lots platters were always more unreliable than their smaller cousins, with larger and larger platters that just keeps getting worse and worse. So I'd try to stay with 3 platter drives at most - they're also much cheaper $/gb wise than the 2tb drives.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

The WD Black and VR drives are still 5 year.

 

[tcsenter]

I don't understand the people who are worried about the 3 years warranty - is there any manufacterer out there who gives 5years warranty for their dekstop drives?

Yeah, Seagate loudly proclaimed 5 year warranty on its drives a few years ago as a show of its confidence in the quality of its product (its own words). Then last year, quietly backed it down to 2 or 3 year, but when questioned about it, denied that the move similarly reflected the quality of Seagate products. Seems like I'm repeating myself.

 

[Ken90630]

Yeah, Seagate loudly proclaimed 5 year warranty on its drives a few years ago as a show of its confidence in the quality of its product (its own words). Then last year, quietly backed it down to 2 or 3 year, but when questioned about it, denied that the move similarly reflected the quality of Seagate products. Seems like I'm repeating myself.

It's my understanding that Seagate still offers 5-year warranties on their retail boxed HDs. The 3-yr. warranties are on the bare/OEM drives sold by Newegg & similar outlets (ZZF, MWave, et al.).

Example of retail kit 5-yr. warranty (click on the Specifications tab):

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Seagate+...&skuId=8294632

FWIW, this was also confirmed to me on the phone last week by a Seagate pre-sales rep (a nice gal who didn't seem like she was lying).

 

[tcsenter]

Bulk/OEM drives used to have 5 year, except for private/direct OEM accounts (e.g. Compaq, Dell). I don't purchase retail kits.

 

[Emulex]

newegg just buys 20PK and breaks them up. only way to get a real discount on such thin margins

 

[Zap]

one WD green died on me.

Head loading/unloading problem?

I just avoid Seagate out of principle since it originally touted its move to 5 year warranties as being a definite 'putting our warranty where our mouth is' measure of its confidence in the quality of its drives, but when it decided to move back to 2 and 3 year warranties, it completely denied it was an indication of the quality of its drives.

To give Seagate credit, a number of years ago the industry as a whole (maybe lead by WD and Maxtor or something like that) went to a 1 year warranty on HDDs. Seagate did so as well, but then decided to break the mold and offer the 5 year warranty, which spurred the rest of the manufacturers into offering longer than 1 year warranties.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/105491/hard_drive_vendors_shrink_warranties.html
"The three-year warranty on PC disk drives that has been standard for more than a decade is going the way of the dodo bird on October 1. All three top manufacturers are switching to a one-year warranty for most consumer models.

Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate, which share more than 85 percent of the consumer market, call the move a business decision that brings their warranty policies into line with those for the other major components inside a PC."

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20040726171625.html
"Seagate Technology, one of the world’s largest storage companies, Monday announced it had introduced a 5-year warranty, effective immediately, on every Seagate internal PC, notebook and enterprise hard drive shipped through its distribution and retail channels throughout the world.

Virtually all makers of hard disk drives have shrunk the warranty on HDDs intended to personal computers from three years to one since 2002. The majority of hard disks aimed at consumer PCs shipping today come with one year limited warranty"

 

[Russwinters]

Seagate has moved much of the manufacturer to WU facilities, which are located in an easily guessable location.


Quality has suffered GREATLY in the last ~3 years.


Of course Seagate has a huge volume of drives, and this can account for it some, but I see a much greater amount of Seagate drives then others in my Lab (Data recovery)


Head and Spindle problems are very common mechanical problems for the 3.5 inch
As well as Firmware problems.

2.5inch have heads, media, and firmware problems.

 

[Carrsd]

I have just experienced the 5th failure of a Savio ST9300605SS 2.5" 300GB SAS drive out of a pool of 14 identical drives in a Intel blade chassis over the last 12 months. At this rate, I will have replaced all of them at least once before the warranty runs out. That's >100% failure rate!!!

I have replaced the drive cage, backplane and RAID controller in the blade chassis just to be totally certain that this problem was actually the drives and not the hosting hardware.

Seagate's response was "Sorry to hear about this issue you are having with your failed drives. Could you send us the serial numbers and the firmware version of the Failed drives."

No response was forthcoming after that. I would sure like to know what the real-world failure rate is on those drives, but it seems doubtful that they will reveal anything.

Good thing the chassis is fault tolerant.

 

[zir_blazer]

To give Seagate credit, a number of years ago the industry as a whole (maybe lead by WD and Maxtor or something like that) went to a 1 year warranty on HDDs. Seagate did so as well, but then decided to break the mold and offer the 5 year warranty, which spurred the rest of the manufacturers into offering longer than 1 year warranties.

There was one single exception: Samsung. Actually, during the HD crisis two years ago, Western Digital purchased Hitachi HD division and Seagate Samsung one. And at pretty much the same time, both slashed warranties. Duopolio price prixing anyone?


BTW, didn't noticed I am doing a follow up to a necromancer...

 

[corkyg]

Darn! This thread is al;most 3 years old!. Zir_blazer nailed it! The sijnner was carrsd.

 

[tweakboy]

Seagate used to be good until Maxtor and them joined forces... both seagate and maxtor drives are crappy especially externals. Stay away from them.... Grab a WD or Sammy . gl

 

[kmmatney]

Users with a bad experience are (more) likely to publish a "review." Users with a good experience are less likely to publish a review stating that the drive is performing as expected.

The latest 2TB drives (by all manufacturers) seem to be getting significantly more bad reviews than smaller drives. I'm sticking with 1TB drives until they work the bugs out.

The first point is True. I recently purchased a 1.5 TB hard drive that's been running fine, but never put in my review. I'm sure I would have had something bad happened. The drive itself was well packed from NewEgg, with bubble wrap around the drive, and the box filled with packing peanuts. Writing a positive review now...

 

[nickbits]

Idk if newegg is any better now, but their packaging of oem drives was terrible. I quit buying when I got a Doa from them. I believe it was packaged loose in peanuts.