Seagate external drives.....

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xpd

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#255743 27-Aug-2019 07:47

....... have obviously taken a dive in quality recently

Friend bought a 1TB 2.5" Seagate external last year. Been running fine until yesterday when I was copying some data for them and started getting crap transfer speeds (via USB3) - check the drive and HDSentinel is seeing multiple bad sectors.

They bought another similar drive but 2TB model yesterday, and that died completely 10mins after being taken out of the box. (click of death basically - very noticeable mechanical "clunk")

Think I'll be avoiding Seagate for a while.......

Each HDD manufacturer seems to go through these phases, Seagate bad now, WD good, then next year it'll be WD bad, Seagate good.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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timmmay

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#2306573 27-Aug-2019 08:37

WGST is a good brand, highly rated by BackBlaze, I get them from Amazon. Unless I need them in an enclosure full time I use a dock they slide into, and robust cases to keep them in.

Stu1

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#2306610 27-Aug-2019 09:47

I have found Seagate work fine until I connect them to a media player e.g xbox or DVD recoder. I am on my third in 2 years just got latest last week under warranty. They have 3 year warranty but I wouldn't trust them for family pics or important docs

surfisup1000

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#2306614 27-Aug-2019 09:54

I've bought a ton of seagate. Back in 2009/2010 or so, they had a really bad batch and I had 100% failure rate for about 4 or 5 of this model drive.

However, over the last 3 years, I've bought a number of seagates and haven't had a single one fail.

I guess it is a bit of luck too. One drive does have a warning though.

timmmay

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#2306620 27-Aug-2019 10:02

Of course you should never trust important data to any one disk, location, or technology. For example I have my data on disks connected to the computer, in the house disconnected from the computer, backed up incrementally at a friends house using a disk I collect and backup to occasionally, and to the cloud. In the cloud I have archives which I update every six months, in the interim I backup all new or changed data to S3 using version control.

xpd

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#2306665 27-Aug-2019 11:19

Yeah, Im going to recommend to her to look at something like basic 2 bay NAS in a RAID. She does a lot of digital art work, so wouldnt be a stupid move anyway.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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nitro

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#2306687 27-Aug-2019 12:11

xpd:

Yeah, Im going to recommend to her to look at something like basic 2 bay NAS in a RAID. She does a lot of digital art work, so wouldnt be a stupid move anyway.

you would still need to backup that RAID.

but yeah... no manufacturer is completely immune to having bad batches. admire timmay's discipline... i'm not quite at that level yet.

xpd

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#2306693 27-Aug-2019 12:36

nitro:

xpd:

Yeah, Im going to recommend to her to look at something like basic 2 bay NAS in a RAID. She does a lot of digital art work, so wouldnt be a stupid move anyway.

you would still need to backup that RAID.

but yeah... no manufacturer is completely immune to having bad batches. admire timmay's discipline... i'm not quite at that level yet.

RAID 1 would be setup, but I doubt she'd bother backing up elsewhere - I'm honestly surprised at how lucky shes been so far, she only has laptop and relies on it for everything, but has very lax backup :D

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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Jase2985

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#2306861 27-Aug-2019 16:53

ive found seagates to be temperamental with power. if the USB port doesn't output enough power then they will make some funny noises and not connect/transfer properly.

same drive as above but connected to something with good power zero issues.

happened on 3 different drives.

JimmyH

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#2307196 28-Aug-2019 11:14

I stopped buying Seagates entirely after suffering from an appallingly high failure rate on them way back in 2008-2010. Ever since, I won't touch the brand.

My luck with Western Digital has been much better. Both their external drives and the reds I am using in my NAS have been pretty reliable to date. If only the NZ pricing per TB was more in line with the US.......

1101

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#2307214 28-Aug-2019 11:41

JimmyH:

I stopped buying Seagates entirely after suffering from an appallingly high failure rate on them way back in 2008-2010. Ever since, I won't touch the brand.

My luck with Western Digital has been much better. Both their external drives and the reds I am using in my NAS have been pretty reliable to date. If only the NZ pricing per TB was more in line with the US......

.... as long as you avoid the WD greens
:-)