....... 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.