Really want to know your view of Seagate hard drives

A very knowledgeable techie on another website said : "I avoid Seagate like the plague and few other people I know in the business do too. From personal experience over the years, Seagate drive failure rates have far outweighed all other manufacturers combined."

I'm looking to have a computer built for me by allpczone, who has an exceedingly stellar rating on eBay. I want to get two 1 TB hard drives in my new computer. I'm also looking for a 2 TB hard drive to serve as a backup hard drive in some kind of external enclosure or dock. I could save a lot of money on the computer by going with Seagate. But…

 

The best place to check reviews of a specific hard drive model are either Newegg or Amazon. This being said, the reviews of a brand and size (e.g. Seagate 1TB) can vary widely based on the specific model.

This being said, my personal choice for best 1TB drive is the WD Caviar Black. It has a five year warranty and I have had very good luck with them in several custom builds.

http://www.directron.com/wd1002faex.html?_s_icmp=filter

PS: Directron is where I buy most of my stuff and, as of today, they're $16 less than Newegg on this same model.

 

I don't think it is fair to categorize all drives from a specific manufactures into the same category when they make 100s of different models. And this is particularly true of Seagate which absorbed Maxtor and Quantum and Samsung drives.

I have used drives from all sorts of makers over the years and frankly, for mechanical devices, drives in general are very reliable - regardless the maker. And besides, even if you buy the most highly rated drive, you still would be foolish if you did not keep a current backup handy because ALL drives WILL fail - eventually.

That said, I too like WD drives and I always look for models that have 5 year warranties. But if I found a Seagate with the same specs, same warranty, but an attractively lower price, I would get the Seagate UNLESS I found a bunch of reviews for that exact model reporting problems.

BTW, if me, I sure would get at least a 256GB SSD to use as my boot and application drive. Even the fastest spinner will be a bottleneck.

 

Thank you, gentlemen.

I haven't looked into SSDs enough at this point to put one in today. Is it easy to go back and put an SSD in a desktop later on?

 

Sure - no harder than adding a hard drive.

 

How common are those? I haven't yet looked at internal hard drives as much as other items, but what I have been seeing is 3-year warranties.

 

Little late (had a rough week . . . ) but as far as Seagate hard drives go I can't praise them enough. I own several of them, and never had one fail . . . most of the drives I have are the Barracuda model line, in fact the oldest one I have is this model.

That drive that has been in almost continuous operation since 2004 . . . I bought it for my first build, and since then it has been in several different computers as a main or secondary drive, been reformatted a gazillion times, and is now serving in a DVR I built. It did start making a clicking sound now and then months ago, but it doesn't seem to affect the drive's operation. Even if it fails tomorrow I can't fault over 9 years of life.

 

Most makers have 2, 3 or more "lines" of drives with their higher end drives having longer warranties. You just have to look for them. As gman noted and as seen here WD Blacks (and VelociRaptors) have 5-year warranties.

 

Too bad about OCZ's bankruptcy. I've had good luck with their products. I hope Toshiba does pick them up.

I have a Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb as my W8.1 boot and application drive on this i7-3770 system. I am still fascinated and amazed at the boot times - which from a cold start, are typically less than 20 seconds here too. Reboots (if no updates are happening) can be 10 seconds or less. And starts from sleep mode are less than that - which includes me entering my PW. :dood

If long term reliability is a major factor for you I would seriously consider skipping HDs, if the budget allows, and go all SSD. Note the cheapest 256Gb SSD from Newegg has a MTBF rate of 1,000,000 hours. That's more than 114 years!

 

Not to mention an SSD has an amazingly long MTBF rating . . .

 

Just noticed Digerati said the same thing. How did I read right over that . . . :confused

 

Do SSDs have any disadvantages vs HDD (other than the cost)?

 

[rant]
I have to admit, I've been taken in by those published MTBF ratings for SSDs. I certainly do not expect these devices to last 100+ years, but I do expect them to last a decent length of time - certainly longer than electro-mechanical devices which are subject to wear by friction between moving parts. Sadly, MTBF figures have been misused by many manufacturers and what convinced me drive makers were running a scam was when I noted some hard drives have a MTBF rate of 1.5 Million hours (171 years!) which is 50% more than many SSDs! How can an electro-mechanical device be expected to last so much longer than a purely electrical device? It can't.

So I have just recently stopped touting MTBF rate as a reason for choose SSD over HDs. Instead, I'll go for the more common-sense approach of "no moving parts", better performance, and amazing boot and wake times.

Still if budget allows, I would sure recommend the use of SSDs over HDs any day of the week, at least for the OS and applications. Data files, especially large ones like videos, photos and tunes, may go on a spinner to save some budget money, but I would still expect the mechanical device subject to wear from friction to fail before a purely electrical device with no moving parts. And in any event, the user still needs to perform regular backup of their critical data.

Alternatively, "hybrid hard drives" are a good, economical compromise. They have the lower costs of hard drives, but offer much of the advantage of SSDs by replacing the standard RAM buffers on traditional hard drives with much faster SSD buffers.
[/rant]

 

Hello,

Seagate did have a few problems in the past (I remember with their 11th generation series known as 7200.11).

I don't really prefer a brand over the other mainly cause any hard drive from any brand can fail at any time.

For example an old Samsung drive I had from 5 years ago died in less than 2 years (click of death). I got a hitachi after that and it's still rocking to this day, I happened to give it a bad sector check just 2 weeks ago and came out clean (after 3 years of heavy use).

I'm on a Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164 (2TB) drive for the past 6 months now and it's been running fine.

Only thing I'd be wary about Seagate is the infamous "notch" regarding large drives that come with 2 or 3 platters (the 3 platters version is slightly slower).

Link: http://technewspedia.com/the-confusing-2tb-seagate-barracuda-7200-14-st2000dm001/

This article happens to mention the same drive model I'm using but I'd check this on other models too. Other than this slight mess up I have no complaints with Seagate.

 

Interesting.

How many years do you think we are away from large SSDs becoming reasonably priced?

 

All the makers produce models with the exact same model number but the drives are not exactly the same. They may use a different platter configuration, though typically the controller boards have slightly different revision numbers and typically indicate the drives were made or assembled in different factories - often in different countries.

This issue surfaced more than 10 years ago. It used to be fairly easy to repair a drive (or make one good drive out of 2 bad) that had a bad controller board by swapping boards with a drive with the same model number that had bad motor bearing problems. But techs soon discovered this would not work unless the controller board revision number was identical too.

To make matters worse, drive makers did not stock spare boards separately by revision number - this was a consequence of the huge explosion in the number of home PC users and new factories ramping up to meet demands, and of drive prices dropping. Repairing hard drives was no longer cost effective. As a result, if you were able to order a replacement board, you would have no clue which revision you were getting until you opened the package. The problem became really bad a few years ago when several hard drive factories in SE Asia were flooded and other factories retooled to compensate.

I wish they showed images of the board side for those Seagate drives.

Many would say they are reasonably priced now. Considering I remember paying nearly $500 for a 80Mb (as in megabyte or .08Gb) hard drive back in the day - prices of SSDs already have dropped dramatically. I note today, you can get a Samsung 840 Pro 512Gb SSD that cost less than that 80Mb HD. That is why when I built this W8.1 system to replace my W7 system, I used SSDs.

It is hard, but when budgeting for and purchasing a new computer, consider the costs over the life of the computer. And note an extra $200 today for SSDs but spread it over 5 years and that is just $40 per year ($3.30) for greatly improved performance over that entire time.

See this Dec 2012 Computer World article, SSD prices continue to plummet.

 

Oh, I quite agree. I don't expect them to last that long either, but they are statistically likely to outlive a standard mechanical hard drive by a good margin. The potential longevity of this type of drive helps mitagate the intitial high cost for them. I do hope they continue to drop in price.

 

With no moving parts, no excessive heat, and less power consumption, I totally agree. But sadly, there are many hard drives out there with the same or better MTBR ratings - so that makes that specification worthless for comparison, except maybe within the same brand name.

Although I would like to agree here, not sure I can. It really is pretty rare for a hard drive to die before its time. They typically are replaced because they have too small a capacity, too big physically, or just because you get a new computer.

No doubt in notebooks, tablets and other hand-helds, SSDs will continue to replace HDs because of their size, power consumption and heat properties - and that should help lower costs for PC use too.

I have no doubt too that in few years, SSD costs will drop below HD costs.

 

Yeah, I don't see SSD costs staying high. Although the raw materials of the actual SSD memory components cost more than hard drive platters, I cannot imagine SSDs cost more to make than HDs. And being smaller and lighter they certainly cost less to package, store, and ship so that should work in the consumer's favor - at least when quantities go up.

For example, hard drives have to be assembled in huge, expensive to operate, clean rooms. One spec of dust on a platter can wreck havoc. But the memory modules used inside SSDs can be made inside clean machines. Once the machine spits out the module, dust is not a major concern.

And since they cost less to operate in electricity and cooling costs, strategic (long term) planners will see them as an investment (compared to hard drives, which consume more power and generate more heat).

Hybrid drives are certainly a good compromise as they add just a small premium in cost over conventional HD with standard buffers. But not sure they provide any strategic advantage with operating costs. There have been a few SSD only notebooks for a few years now. More to come, for sure.