In all my years having dozens of computers over that time I have had only 1 hard drive ever go bad on me. It was a WD Black 600 GB that came with my current PC I bought 3 years ago. It was in raid configuration and I had just finished installing Windows 7 when it went down. It was just bad luck that it failed right away and the company I bought the PC from quickly sent a replacement. So that hard drive had worked for maybe 30 min. and died. Then again it was probably good luck to have it fail before I had everything installed along with all my files.
i have to admit that i was one of the biggest fans of Seagate until the 120GB drives, then the company took a turn for the worst and the drives simply failed at an alarming rate, i purchased 6 500GB drives, they all failed within 2 weeks, unrecognized by the bios e click of death. i bought them from computer shop, they were very well sealed, i needed them to backup my games, pictures etc. replaced with 5 WD drives and 1 Samsung, the drives worked reliably and they still do today, 0 errors. then i decided to give Seagate a try years later and purchased a 2TB drive, lo and behold 3 days later the drive was dead, recognized by the bios but no boot, only clicks, the shop confirmed the drive was faulty, i replaced it with a WD green (i love those, i don't raid anyway) applied WDIdle3 so they don't have to park every few seconds and everything has been well. i came to the conclusion that Seagate is the worst HDD maker which is sad because when work they work well and they're fast, when they don't they're nothing but trouble. those who own a working Seagate drive or 10 drives i consider them lucky, i would certainly love to see seagate improve the reliability of the drives. some will tell you WD Green are slow and unreliable, slow? not exactly, unreliable? only if you're unlucky or Raid them, also applying WDIdle3 to the drives will prolong its life, the constant parking will simply shorten its life even if you're using the drive only for backups, most are made to take 300.000 counts (but they'll work up to 1.000.000) however once you reach 300.000 you should always keep a backup, reducing the parking will speed up the drive a little and reduce the risk. Hitachi? i agree they're very reliable, gone are the days of IBM/Hitachi Deathstar Samsung is great too, i own a few drives they're awesome. so i do agree with the article at least from personal experience, Hitachi/Wd/Samsung good, Seagate = worst. that won't stop me from giving seagate HDDs a try every now and then just for fairness sake.
people who had drives from 2006 etc.. what's power on hours? bit pointless stating you've had drive this many years an still works etc, if it's been turned off 60% of the time
When I am not in school I usually have my computer turned on about 12hrs or so each day. Some times more and some times less depending on what I am doing on it. Also if I am working it is even less.
Failure rates and bad press can be attributed to the fact that THEY SELL THE MOST UNITS!!!! This seriosuly baffles me how people can find this hard to understand. A product that sells by the bucket load WILL have higher failure rates than other companies similar products as there are more of them in circulation. Seagate are a good make, their drives are good quality and make up for probably the most HDD's sold out of all the companies. Its like people who thought OCZ SSD's were rubbish... erm probably because they sold A LOT of them and people seem to view their bad experiences more so than their good ones. Hence the bad reputation online. Personally I wouldn't touch an Hitatchi drive if you gave it me for free, but then again that is probably because I too have been influenced by the bass press they get from customers stating their bad experiences with them.
What does selling the most units have to do with failure rate based on a percentage? That company has petabytes of data stored across thousands of drives. Out of the drives they've purchased, seagate has the highest percent of failure compared to the total number of drives they bought. They aren't comparing the direct number of failures. And they are taking a subset of what seagate actually produces.
yeah, but the more you sell, the more likely you are to sell faulty units. I know this is a totally anal extreme, but say WD only ever sold 2 hard drives and they both worked forever. they get 100%. then another company sells 200 drives and 1 of them is a fud. making it look worse than WD. Sorry I had to put it to you in such Layman's terms. it's the same in real life. The more you do in life, the more you're going to make mistakes. if you just sit at home and do nothing, you'll never f*ck up.
got a couple seagate rma replacements, 1 2tb barracuda and a 2tb external, was thinking about selling them, maybe not on this forum though with this thread. lol
