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Hard disk reliability examined once more: HGST rules, Seagate is alarming

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P

Polk

Member
kruis said:
I'm not surprised those 3TB Seagate drives are horrible. I had two of them that died after less than 18 months.
Click to expand...
Well, one of two models is horrible (43% failure), other one has 5% failure rate. Less than WD Red (almost 7%).
 
C

Choppasmith

Member
Ironic that I see this thread as I'm having strange problems with my WD external. It's a good few years old though.

And oh man I got a Seagate 3TB External just for my Bluray rips about a year ago or so. Now I'm scared.
 
R

RS4-

Member
There's some clown on another site that defends Seagate every time there's a "deal" on their branded drives.

Fuck em
 
D

Dick Justice

Banned
Yeah, the one Seagate product I ever bought was one of their external hard drives, which crapped out on me after a few months. Got a full refund from Amazon fortunately, and got a Western Digital one instead which has been working perfectly for a while now.

Though I do have a Samsung 840 EVO SSD in my PC, is that technically a Seagate product?
 
C

Canis lupus

Member
I've had 2 Seagate drives fail on me within a year. Absolutely terrible quality, but they're much cheaper than the rest. Sucks ass because with hdds in TBs now you lose so much at once. At least I learned how to detect a soon death Seagate drive, they make cracking noises getting out of sleep/accessing files.
 
M

M3d10n

Member
xsarien said:
I've owned one Seagate in my life.

One.

In all the years - and there are *many* - that I've been dorking around with the guts of computers, I've never had a HDD fail on me THAT FAST. It was breathtaking, we're talking months here. I've sworn allegiance to Western Digital. HGST-proper is nice, but the selection always seems to be pretty limited and branded WD price/space ratios are really hard to beat. Yay volume! :)
Click to expand...

The 1TB Seagate HDD they put on my workstation on my new job died in my first week in the job. We discovered it was actually a fucking refurbished HDD. I think that might be behind the many defect reports: I don't think many people are aware Seagate sells refurbished HDDs without much warning.
 
N

nature boy

Member
paulgandersman said:
Any thoughts on this drive? HGST 4tb 7200RPM external hard drive:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008JQNXLA/?tag=neogaf0e-20

I'm going with HGST based on the study posted here. The reviews on amazon aren't fantastic on this one, but I know usually people only go and review when they're upset. That price is just really fantastic...

close to pulling the trigger. do I do it?
Click to expand...

Depends on what the drive is for. If you're going to use it for long-term storage, it's probably best to buy a 2TB drive and buy a cloud backup solution.

For long-term/personal stuff, always have backup copies.

Just avoid Seagate and related brands (Samsung, Lacie) it seems safe to say that they have worse reliability across all models.
 
//ARCANUM

//ARCANUM

Member
nature boy said:
Depends on what the drive is for. If you're going to use it for long-term storage, it's probably best to buy a 2TB drive and buy a cloud backup solution.

For long-term/personal stuff, always have backup copies.

Just avoid Seagate and related brands (Samsung, Lacie) it seems safe to say that they have worse reliability across all models.
Click to expand...

I'm going to be using it for video editing. I know, I know, would be better to get thunderbolt (I'm editing on a mac and using FCPX), but I just can't make a thunderbolt drive work in my budget (unless you can point me to a decent one that's at least 2tb...). So this will be pretty much for about 3-4 hours of usage a day (editing at home for my freelance gigs). Thoughts?

edit: though now I'm wondering if I should get 2 of the 2tb models for redundancy:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004W7DQZS/?tag=neogaf0e-20
 
J

Jeff-DSA

Member
I have a 1TB Seagate drive full of stuff I would hate to lose. I should probably transfer that to a more reliable drive and use it only for temporary storage.
 
N

nature boy

Member
paulgandersman said:
I'm going to be using it for video editing. I know, I know, would be better to get thunderbolt (I'm editing on a mac and using FCPX), but I just can't make a thunderbolt drive work in my budget (unless you can point me to a decent one that's at least 2tb...). So this will be pretty much for about 3-4 hours of usage a day (editing at home for my freelance gigs). Thoughts?

edit: though now I'm wondering if I should get 2 of the 2tb models for redundancy:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004W7DQZS/?tag=neogaf0e-20
Click to expand...

Let me put it this way.

If your 4TB drive dies, you lose up to 4TB of data.

If one of your 2TB dies, it's very unlikely the second 2TB drive will die at the same time, so unless you need 4TB at all times it's probably best to hedge your bets.
 
D

Damaniel

Banned
I've had exactly 3 hard drives fail over the years I've been using computers. Two of them were Seagates - one internal, one external. Seagate drives were always the cheapest at the local Fry's, and I completely understand why.

(The third drive was a WD Red that I bought for my NAS. Apparently, if a WD Red is going to fail, it will do so in the first couple weeks of ownership - after that, it's generally smooth sailing. One of the four I bought failed a week and a half in; Western Digital replaced it immediately and all four have been working flawlessly since then.)
 
T

Trouble

Banned
nature boy said:
Let me put it this way.

If your 4TB drive dies, you lose up to 4TB of data.

If one of your 2TB dies, it's very unlikely the second 2TB drive will die at the same time, so unless you need 4TB at all times it's probably best to hedge your bets.
Click to expand...

Don't stripe the 2TB drives if that's your safety plan. Also, that's a terrible safety plan. Use some cloud backup or something.
 
A

Anion

Member
The only seagate drives I have are 1 tb 5400 rpm external for pc/mac backups and 4 tb raid 0 5400 rpm external for xbox one.

Next time I wont buy seagate....I hope these last for a bit...
 
R

Regret Upon Approval

Member
Given that several people were concerned about SSD lifespans, I attempted to find some data.

http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb

Could reach up to PB marks for some of them, issues start to appear for some in the several hundred TB mark.
To put that in perspective.

Lets go with 300 TB write until issues and go with a sample heavy desktop usage of 10 GB/day.

It would take 82.14 years to reach that write. Granted that doesn't encompass all aspects of SSD failure. But write endurance is sometimes a popular point of concern and that isn't quite the issue with newer SSDs by good manufacturers.
 
N

nature boy

Member
Trouble said:
Don't stripe the 2TB drives if that's your safety plan. Also, that's a terrible safety plan. Use some cloud backup or something.
Click to expand...

That depends on how critical the data is. The first thing I said was to consider a cloud backup, but storing 2TB of data on the cloud doesn't come cheap not to mention not everyone has fat pipes to upload GBs of data everytime they need a backup.


Regret Upon Approval said:
Given that several people were concerned about SSD lifespans, I attempted to find some data.

http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb

Could reach up to PB marks for some of them, issues start to appear for some in the several hundred TB mark.
To put that in perspective.

Lets go with 300 TB write until issues and go with a sample heavy desktop usage of 10 GB/day.

It would take 82.14 years to reach that write. Granted that doesn't encompass all aspects of SSD failure. But write endurance is sometimes a popular point of concern and that isn't quite the issue with newer SSDs by good manufacturers.
Click to expand...
Yes but for warranty purposes Crucial for example only go up to 70TB.
 
A

akileese

Member
I've always used HGST or WD for internal HDDs. I had gotten a bigger seagate in like, 2008 to replace an old 320gb iomega external and it failed inside of 2 weeks. Never again.

It's a shame you can't get iomega's anymore. I still use two 2TB Iomega externals. Each one is about 5 years old and they run like champs.
 
F

Flo_Evans

Member
terrisus said:
So what's the "WTF" for?
That's better than either of the Western Digital ones.
Click to expand...

Cause it was like a $750 drive that comes with the cheapest shit available? Just kind of aggravating, if I had known they used seagate drives I would have bought something else or just a box and put my own drives in.
 
terrisus

terrisus

Member
Flo_Evans said:
Cause it was like a $750 drive that comes with the cheapest shit available? Just kind of aggravating, if I had known they used seagate drives I would have bought something else or just a box and put my own drives in.
Click to expand...

But, according to this article, the 4TB Seagate drives that you have are reliable.
Yeah, not quite as good as the 4TB Hitachi ones, but better than either of the WD ones, and still within a relatively good range regardless.
 
I

Iolo

Member
xsarien said:
I've owned one Seagate in my life.

One.

In all the years - and there are *many* - that I've been dorking around with the guts of computers, I've never had a HDD fail on me THAT FAST. It was breathtaking, we're talking months here. I've sworn allegiance to Western Digital. HGST-proper is nice, but the selection always seems to be pretty limited and branded WD price/space ratios are really hard to beat. Yay volume! :)
Click to expand...

Earlier this week I had a new drive fail on me in under five minutes. It was 18GB though.
 
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