News Flash! Seagate tests it's HDD's...

See:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/how-seagate-tests-hard-drives,4408.html


$2B/Yr and 35 years later... and Seagate HDD's are still loathed for 'performance', 'energy efficiency' and yeah; reliability.

Worst HDD's I've ever used. Ever. sigh...

 

Are you referring to Backblaze slandering of Seagate. All anecdotal evidence. I've been using a couple dozen Seagate drives for three years straight in my home servers and not one has failed. But half my WD's failed within two years which prompted me to go wtih Seagate. So...?

 

No, I'm talking about personal experience (as usual).

The issue with Seagate HDD's I have is that (usually) other brands give some early warning signs. Seagate's just don't.

That is the deal breaker for me.

HGST drives are still my recommended brand when all aspects are considered.

 

This. Never had an issue with Hitachi HDDs

 

Agreed... Really happy with my 1TB 7K1000 drive... Hope they make a 2TB 7K2000 drive

 

Actually, with WD's takeover of HGST, I'm hoping for an updated 4TB+ vRaptor.

Nothing sings like a 10K RPM HDD array (yeah; I want this in a NAS...).

 

Even if Backblaze's experiences are anecdotal, they still have a much bigger sample size than what any of us have at our homes .

 

Seems my experiences were similar to HTWingnut's. Lots of WD failures, at one time 4 different drives in less than 6 months from new. The thing they all had in common was high temperatures, something that can be hard at times to avoid when living in a hot country. Not saying that was definitely the problem but seemed to point that way. The Seagates though working under the same conditions never gave any problem at all.

Probably the best drive I ever owned was a Conner 120MB, that thing just kept on going and going well past it's usefulness in size. It was one of the biggest drives you could get with a laptop at the time.

 

And they run in a 24/7 hard driven server environment with consumer hard drives... hmmm.

Other than my old 74GB WD Raptors from ages ago, all other WD drives have failed me time and time again. I can't vouch for HGST since I don't own many or put them through serious tests.

If it's a new product, I trust user reviews more than any other review, otherwise I will trust my own experience above anything else. And look at it in the environment it will be used in. It's like looking at a sports car for off-road use...

 

I personally like Seagate drives most, and use their drives only. Because Seagate was first and best with 2.5" hybrid drives, and first and only to produce 2.5" 2TB 9.5mm drives. For the last n years, I didn't have any choice, really.

 

Pretty much every hard drive for the last several years is either made by Seagate or Western Digital, so there are really only 2 choices, despite each one selling under a few different brand names. I've had decent experiences with them both, although I currently lean more toward Western Digital.

 

True.

 

I've had HDD failure with 4 WD drives in the past 15 years and 1 Seagate. The Seagate was in a system that was dropped so I'm not sure I can condemn it too much for not surviving, seeing that the notebook itself was pretty trashed too. I tend to buy cheap/budget drives so it's quite possible that WD have better quality on their non-budget HDD's.

I have three Seagate drives that I use for backups (SSD for general system use) since they were cheapest at the time and they've been running strongly for about 7 years now. One of them was donated to a friend's system to get him through the summer and seems to be ok as an OS drive too - although not hugely fast, as you'd guess.

 

I had an 2.5" WD 1TB die in 3 days on an Christmas machine, was working fine and then started making a loud repeated click, I have tried since Christmas to see if i can get it to work just long enough to make an image, but no luck.

Apart from the WD above which was not mine, I have been lucky with no dead hdd, and i have used all different brands.

I have 4 seagate at the moment 2x2TB no problems, and an 250gb moments xt and an 1TB momentus xt no problems either, touch wood.

John.

 

Can't say anything bad for Seagate either, as a lot of the posters here. I have two 1TB in my LaCie 2big (which is used for quite some time), have a 3.5" 80GB from 2005 and still kickin'. I had my 7K1000 failed on me right before the warranty period (2 years) and was exchanged for a new with new warranty. Not sure if the last one is HGST or the company I bought it from, but I was more than surprised. My 2.5" WD Black 750GB failed on me, nut it was my fault, so I can't say anything bad for WD either. The thing is, before I got my LaCie, I read terrible reviews for every single external drive and most importantly the MyBook line of WD. All in all, although Seagate drive may have history of more failures, they kinda kept the failure rate, and even decreased it, unlike other brands and especially WD. I'm hugely disappointed from them, getting a back-up drive, that needs a back-up is not what I consider reliable.

 

HDD are only really used for storage for us guy`s on NBR as we almost all have SSD for our OS drive so they don't get that much use.

I also have an Seagate 4TB 3.5" no problems, and an 2GB 3.5" WD no problems.

I killed my uncles Seagate 2TB 3.5" external , it was connected to his notebook but not being used, I picked it up while it was running to show my uncle the centrifugal force effect, I did not shake it up or anything, I just turned it over and it died, It was a brand new drive so i just RMA it.

John.

 

I have a WD Black Scorpio 750GB (2.5" model) that's about 7 years old and has around 14k working hours. It has been in almost every laptop I have owned to date, except the one in the signature that is running 2 ssds.
When I get home and plug it in I will post a screenshot of crystaldiskinfo.

Pretty reliable i'd say.

 

In my experiences, I have had bad WD and Seagate drives, but never an issues with Toshiba or Hitachi, go figure.

 

Well I could honestly say this about WD drives,

and I'm pretty sure somebody else could legitimately say the same for some other brand.

 

Interesting to read about others experiences. Ty all.

 

WD is bad but the worst is toshiba. I've seen a fair share of toshiba's with bad sectors, still work but I have no confidence in them. These are the spinners, but I've also found oem toshiba SSD to be very slow.

 

A couple of years ago my preferred list would have been.

1: IBM/Hitachi
2: WD
3: Seagate
4: Toshiba
5: Samsung

Fujitsu ???

 

That's amusing WD the bad ...change that to Seagate leads that and is still leading. Since you didn't post what SSD model/make no one can confirm what your saying. Seagate caused more problems in the past and present then any WD that I used.

 

Both WD and Seagate have given me issues, and the former company was much easier to deal with when getting the drives replaced. I've had no problem with Toshiba drives. The only experience I've had with Hitachi are the two 1 TB 7200 RPM units in my Sager. So far so good, but it's only been a couple weeks.

 

Thus far, in 24/7/365 broadcast automation use, the HGST drives have been for me the best of the majors. Fujitsu very good, and Seagate there has been better than Western Digital (I usually get 5-6 years out of hard drives in that application, backed up daily and on other servers and media, including off site backups)

 

Already much varied results in drive failure rates here. I honestly don't think there's a whole lot of difference between them for consumer uses. Some of us have had better experience than others, but it's such a small sample size you never know. My WD drives that failed I bought all about the same time, so maybe there was an issue with a batch of them. Maybe my Seagate's were built with an improved process. Who knows. Bottom line is that hard drives, for quite a while now, been a more or less same-same type of component like RAM is. Unless you're looking for specific features, rest assured most anything you buy will be as good as the next.

 

We agree wholeheartedly with the varied reliability of specific brands.

But HDD's are not same/same at all.

The most balanced drive is an HGST drive. Period.

(Performance/Reliability/Noise/Vibration/Efficiency).

Other brands may bring one or the other of the above aspects a touch higher, but at a much worse detriment to one or all of the other aspects too.

 

Yes, n is too small.

Some more anecdotal 'evidence'; had 2 1TB Toshibas die, plus some Seagates. Still have going 3x 4TB WD, 1x 1TB WD and 1x 2TB Samsung (along with 2x Intel and 5x Samsung ssds). Also a dozen cheap WDs and Seagates from work to compare at similar cost+capacity; the WDs pale performance-wise. Would chance it with the Seagates and count on these to become capacity-irrelevant before their last traverse.

Anyway, StorageReview's Reliability Database was just the thing for this sort of thing (back in the days), but it petered out, unfortunately. Examples; Western Digital Caviar Green - WD20EARS and one of the Deathstars; Hitachi / IBM Deskstar 75GXP (for a ' way back in ... journey'; the latter was mentioned in PCWorld's ' The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time').

 

WD Green are the WORSE! I started with those in my old original WHS server and it was a nightmare. So slow. I thought there was something wrong with my network with speeds only about 30-40MB/sec and sometimes slower. No, it was the drives.

Had several go bad on me around the same time and took FOREVER to do chkdsk to figure out what was going on. I lost nearly a month of server time because of that. Replaced them with a mish mash of some new some older drives I had just to keep it going until I could afford to buy new and wanted to build a new machine with WHS 2011 anyhow.

I heard horrible things about Seagate, but at the time of my next server build they were cheapest which I needed considering the number of drives I had in mind, and I had planned a more robust backup solution. Well three years later still going strong, no issues, and ended up building a backup server using them that I put at my sister's house, and another two home servers for friends that wanted one using them, similar setup to my own and all have been going strong (knock on wood) without issue. I do use four WD Red in my backup station though.

Hoping to build a new server in the next year or two with Windows Server Essentials 2016 when it gets some legs behind it.