seagate drives suck these days?

[high_revs]

so found out 1.5 weeks ago i'm getting smart errors from one of the drives. unfortunately the first error it put out was already in the 47k range. then a day or 2 later, i got smart disk errors on the other drive starting at 7 or 8 but increasing regularly now.

these were brand new drives given by netgear as part of warranty for my readynas duo. the previous drive was only 3 mos old when it went kaput.

now both are going kaput. was it seagate that bought out maxtor? i loved my ultra scsi drive back then (cheetah). never had a problem with maxtor. but of all the seagate drives i've had, all went bad pretty w/in 1 year. even an seagate 150gb drive was warranty replaced with a 200gb or soemthing like that one when it went bad during warranty (and today, it hovers near death as an external drive and i don't even use it much!).

i didn't bother going thru warranty since i was going to upgrade the drives to 1TB soon anyway.

whatever happened to ibm drives? i used to like 'em. i don't see much of them in amazon when i did a search but there's still a website at ibm for them. hitachi seems OK but i only bought one in a 2.5" factor for a laptop.

[Merc1138]

IBM sold their HDD division to Hitachi a long time ago(after the god awful IBM deskstar/deathstar fiasco...), who recently sold off their consumer HDD's to Toshiba while retaining their enterprise drives.

Seagate bought Maxtor a few years back and integrated Maxtor's stuff into Seagate's consumer line(not sure how much of it went where).

[billofrights]

If you get several IT guys in a room one will swear by Maxtor and that Western Digital sucks; another will swear by Seagate and say every Maxtor he had died, etc. People are biased by their experiences. Google released a study a few years ago on their experience. If you aren't familiar with how Google's server farms work- they basically use off the shelf servers and pack them full of consumer level drives (oversimplification for the sake of brevity). Their studies on hundreds of thousands of drives show no manufacturer to be any more or less reliable.

That said, my current boot drive is a Crucial M4 256 gb ssd, with a Seagate 3 Tb data drive. I've used a ton of Western Digital and Seagate, and that's who I go to for non-SSD SATA drives.

The first crop of Hitachi's drives were unremarkable since they were still made with IBM's tech. The later stuff just before they sold to Toshiba was pretty solid. Haven't dealt with any of the newer Toshibas yet.

[high_revs]

true true... it just to happens for me many of my seagates drive have suffered deaths. i think i had a maxtor warranty happen one time but it was the only one. i've had hitachi, ibm, WD, and those have been far reliable.

i might be moving back to a desktop tower again next year just for video/graphics purposes. i'll already have a BD burner on my sony vaio so i'll have to start getting into a habit of archving into bd but i was hoping to wait until prices on 50gb comes down to where the 25gb are.

[taloft]

I've had them all at one time or another. The simple fact is that they all die at some point. Some can croak the first day, some will run for 10+ years. You've just had a real bad streak lately. The odds of that happening are very slim. Drive failures in the first year typically are around 2%. The odds of having multiple drives crap out in such a short time means you should be buying lotto tickets.

Look at the warranty of the drive. Not all drives are created equal, even within the same company. I don't buy drive models that have less than a 5 year warranty.

[Fizz]

Seagate drives have had TERRIBLE reliability since the flooding in Thailand. When Seagate shifted their production their prices doubled and their quality halved. The prices have come down, but the quality is still sub par.

Western Digital is my go to brand; they've maintained consistently low failure rates in my experience. (My experience being working for an OEM computer company and being the guy that specs/builds machines and has do the post sales troubleshooting/support for thousands of machines a year).

[Fizz]

Let me help you out a bit...

I hate Western Digital because they SUCK and they seem to always die. Seagate are good, but I only buy Constellation or enterprise class drives now-a-days.

Dohoho, you proved billofright's point.

[nothinghere2c]

i've had seagates, wd, hitachis, ibms, maxtors, you name it. all have had their share of failures. the only way i've found to prolong the life of my drives is to put them in a case with good cooling and keeping them at around 30c max. i also disable power management features on my drives because turning them off and on again makes me twitch. spin all day every day my lovelies!

[Fizz]

If you get several IT guys in a room one will swear by Maxtor and that Western Digital sucks; another will swear by Seagate and say every Maxtor he had died, etc. People are biased by their experiences. Google released a study a few years ago on their experience. If you aren't familiar with how Google's server farms work- they basically use off the shelf servers and pack them full of consumer level drives (oversimplification for the sake of brevity). Their studies on hundreds of thousands of drives show no manufacturer to be any more or less reliable.

IME/O a lot of it has to do with supply lines.

When I order hard disks, my drives are sent directly from the manufacturer to the distributor across seas/via air on a pallet. The distributor sends me stuff on a pallet to my warehouse on a truck. Not a whole lot of mishandling to go on there.

When I get drives from online vendors that ship a commercial carrier, my DOA's skyrocket and my service lives are shorter.

This quality extends to all brands (the implications of shipping vs freight). Seagate used to be on par with WD IME, but they've been terrible lately.

I actually compiled the stats from our accounting system, in the last 1.5 years I've returned 4 Seagates to every 1 WD. I buy significantly more WD drives than I do Seagates so they're SERIOUSLY overrepresented. FTR, they're trucked from the same vendor for both brands.

[high_revs]

i ended up getting WD RED. i forgot all about enterprise class drives but that may be what i recall having from ibm back in the days.

what died is a seagate barracuda 7200rpm. i figure the rpm is probably not as big a deal since the bottle neck is the network speed, not the drive interface speed or drive rpm speed.

Ever since I learned about enterprise class hard drives I have tried to recco and buy them whenever possible. Although it is true that ANY drive can be bad I find that when you buy the nice handcrafted and hand-pinstriped enterprise class drives that they spend a lil attention to detail on them and thus the drives are usually pretty decent. WD RED (o0o0o0o0 NEW type of drive?) drives are meant for NAS stuff it seems so those would be the WD drive that I would get IF I ever bought another WD drive again. I particularly HATE WD drives because for me they suck, Maxtor, Diamond and Connor were all great drives and I have had the best luck with Seagate but I have not purchased a barracuda for the past 6+ years. Here is a spin for you, just buy more drives, they can't ALL be bad...

i got the drives around this time when manufacturing was impacted due to the flooding.

Seagate drives have had TERRIBLE reliability since the flooding in Thailand. When Seagate shifted their production their prices doubled and their quality halved. The prices have come down, but the quality is still sub par.

Western Digital is my go to brand; they've maintained consistently low failure rates in my experience. (My experience being working for an OEM computer company and being the guy that specs/builds machines and has do the post sales troubleshooting/support for thousands of machines a year).

my status shows 31C. maybe i'll try that and jsut put a fan in front. my only fear is pushing dust into the nas though but i'll have to observe how low i can get it with a small fan in front.

i've had seagates, wd, hitachis, ibms, maxtors, you name it. all have had their share of failures. the only way i've found to prolong the life of my drives is to put them in a case with good cooling and keeping them at around 30c max. i also disable power management features on my drives because turning them off and on again makes me twitch. spin all day every day my lovelies!

[Fizz]

i ended up getting WD RED. i forgot all about enterprise class drives but that may be what i recall having from ibm back in the days.

Was this drive for a NAS?

WD RED drives are really nice ( I have a drawer with 20 1TB reds right now), but they aren't suitable at all for desktop use. They're meant for NAS units. Essentially the red drives disable the error internal error checking functions most desktop drives have; NAS units take care of this internally and if a hard disk tries to do its thing while the NAS wants to do something else... it may fail out of the array in a due to a detection of a false failure.

There are other optimizations as well, but the jist of it is don't use REDs in a for a desktop.

Really, I'm not kidding with you, DO NOT use a RED for a desktop.

[high_revs]

yep.. for a nas. i remember barracuda aren't nas specific but more desktop type drives.

thanks for the insights Fizz!

[billofrights]

Was this drive for a NAS?

WD RED drives are really nice ( I have a drawer with 20 1TB reds right now), but they aren't suitable at all for desktop use. They're meant for NAS units. Essentially the red drives disable the error internal error checking functions most desktop drives have; NAS units take care of this internally and if a hard disk tries to do its thing while the NAS wants to do something else... it may fail out of the array in a due to a detection of a false failure.

There are other optimizations as well, but the jist of it is don't use REDs in a for a desktop.

Really, I'm not kidding with you, DO NOT use a RED for a desktop.

This is perfect. People are trained to think more $ = better, which isn't always true. I once had a guy buy a Supermicro dual Xeon server board for me to build him a PC to play CounterStrike on. He absolutely would not be talked out of it. Whatever, I'll take your money, sure. A high-end sports car and a Peterbilt semi are comparable in price but one is for hauling logs uphill and one is for hauling butt. Always keep in mind your needs when making a purchase

[paul0660]

Only read the title.

Seagate sucked 20 years ago. A pity, since they are (used to be?) local.

[Fizz]

This is perfect. People are trained to think more $ = better, which isn't always true. I once had a guy buy a Supermicro dual Xeon server board for me to build him a PC to play CounterStrike on. He absolutely would not be talked out of it. Whatever, I'll take your money, sure. A high-end sports car and a Peterbilt semi are comparable in price but one is for hauling logs uphill and one is for hauling butt. Always keep in mind your needs when making a purchase

The RED drives are pretty comparable in price to desktop intended counterparts (Blacks and Blues).

I think the appeal is "oooooo, shiny new RED drive. It's intended for Data storage appliances so it must be engineered to be enterprise class!" It isn't quite enterprise, it isn't quite desktop; it's role is an industry in and of itself.