Using a Seagate hard drive? Might want to replace it.

[sureLoss]

Class action lawsuits are being filed against Seagate over the high rate of failure on their hard drives. The suit specifically claims the 3tb sized drives.

http://www.techspot.com/news/63672-s...tive-hard.html

per the article there is hard data that supports lawsuit's claim: Cloud company BackBlaze published failure rate of close to 50 thousand hard drives they used in the past 3 years. It looks like the 1.5tb also have a high failure rate.

[DoubleF]

Wow. I didn't know this was going on. I told people to stay away from 1TB plus Seagates when they first came out (to be fair, WD had some lemons in the Green series over 1TB too at the time and I think Hitachi had the deathstars), but haven't really had an opinion of them in a while. Ever since they bought out Maxtor the design went to hell.

[FlameOn]

Yea, we used this chart at work to determine make a purchasing decision awhile back. I've had way more Seagate failures than WD for sure as well... all my .11 and .12 series drives are all dead when my WD from the same era are still going strong. This is only like 8 drives each. Now I don't even bother anymore with Seagates.

[psyang]

Interesting that the high-failure rates at 3TB are Seagate's desktop drives (ST3000DM001) but the WD are their Red (NAS-grade) drives. Doesn't explain the low failure rates on the Seagate desktop 4TB drives, though.

Wonder why they don't use NAS or Enterprise grade drives throughout, unless it is related to the drive shortages due to storms in SE Asia a few years back?

[PsYcNeT]

Color me shocked this is a thing. I thought it's been well known for years that Seagate HDDs were to be avoided like the plague if you wanted to retain your data.

There's a reason WD drives cost more.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sea...ling,6844.html

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/16/s...-at-an-alarmi/

Articles from 2009.

[CaptainYooh]

I had problems with all four Seagate drives that I owned. Switched to La Cie.

[Bill Bumface]

Anyone without a decent backup strategy should be having heart palpitations looking at that chart. 1 in 20 chance your drive dies this year.

[Fuzz]

Ya, I've had so many go on me. The last few years I've stuck with WD. Though I am amazed at how long some of my Seagates have survived. I've got a few of those 1TB drives that have got to be 8 years old now, still spinning non-stop, except for re-boots.(yes, the data is backed up and archived elsewhere, this is a read only repository on a RAID array).

[To Be Quite Honest]

I've avoided Seagate for about 5 years until I finally bought the 4TB one last summer based of an article stating they are vastly improved. It's already having Sector issues and "clicking". I ran Seagates Seatools 3 times and it said "replace drive" each time. No issues with WD or Toshiba.

Never again Seagate.

[DownInFlames]

I switched to WD years ago as well. I really love their Red drives. They run cool and quiet in my NAS.

I'm also a big fan of Backblaze. They've been doing those failure rate charts for years, and considering how many drives they use I trust their stats.

[Daradon]

How the heck to single drive types have an over 100% failure rate? Does that mean they've lost data more than once in a single drive?

[DownInFlames]

Originally Posted by Daradon

How the heck to single drive types have an over 100% failure rate? Does that mean they've lost data more than once in a single drive?

I think it means the replacement drives also fail.

From the article:

On top of that, the suit alleges that replacement drives sent to consumers after an original drive failure were also faulty and unreliable, violating consumer law and Seagate's drive warranties.

[Rathji]

Just bought a Red WD Drive a few days ago after going back and forth over if it was worth the extra bucks over the Seagate drive. My research indicated that it was a better reliability choice at the time, and with this news I am glad I did.

[DownhillGoat]

Is this applicable to the Seagate Portable drives too? Pretty much all of my photos and backups are on the 1TB Backup Plus, but don't see that on the chart.

[Fuzz]

You could probably look up exactly what drive is inside that, but I'd say yes, don't trust any seagate drives that much. Never have your valuable data in only 1 spot! I like 3. 2 online, and one offline.

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

You could probably look up exactly what drive is inside that, but I'd say yes, don't trust any seagate drives that much. Never have your valuable data in only 1 spot! I like 3. 2 online, and one offline.

I've got a number offline. Haha most of them are Seagates though. Guess I'll grab another WD.

[Russic]

I've been using a drobo for about 6 years now, which holds 4 drives. It has redundant backup, so it just uses your largest drive as a storage shed to move stuff around should a problem arise. I've had 2 drives fail completely and they were both seagate. If I didn't have them in a drobo I would have been totally screwed.

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Just bought a Red WD Drive a few days ago after going back and forth over if it was worth the extra bucks over the Seagate drive. My research indicated that it was a better reliability choice at the time, and with this news I am glad I did.

The description for the Red WD says it's a NAS drive. Can it not be used in a regular computer setup? (This is something I'm not too familiar with)

[iLoveLamp]

Heh. I've had a 1TB Seagate for a few years and it's never given me any problems. (knock wood)

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

The description for the Red WD says it's a NAS drive. Can it not be used in a regular computer setup? (This is something I'm not too familiar with)

It can be, it just handles access and power management in a way that is advantageous for most NAS setups. You can look up the details pretty easily.

I am using it for my plex media storage drive, so it's perfect for me.