HDD Seagate reliable

toshiba, hitachi or western digital

i won't buy another seagate

Had issues with Seagate and I don't recommend it. What is important with HHD's is a warranty. Look which has longer warranty. As I know WD black comes with 5 years warranty.
Also have heard good things about Hitachi HDD's.

i believe i have that toshiba but the 1 tb model

it has worked very well so far

one thin i notice it is that is very silent, almost 200mbsa on sata 3, perfect for gta v and a couple games more

there are 2 categories of harddisks ,

Consumer grade that come with 2 and 3 years warranty ... ALL make them , seagate and WD and ETC . for example WD Blue..

and the high end and enterprise range , they come with 5 years warranty and can work 24/7 without problem for 5 years continuous !!!

there are seagate and WD of these , WD black is high end

people who say I dont recommend Seagate know nothing about it. Seagate are the Largest Harddisk manufacturer in the world . and very famous ..

they actually bought Samsung Harddisks , Quantum Harddisks , Maxtor harddisks ... they are 70% of the market in real. they are the ones who buy Harddisks companies !!! and Swallow them !

+1

Where can I find the Data of failure rates ? I need to research this please thanks .

It's in the above link

At the 2 GB Size you are looking at, I would suggest a 2 TB Seagate SSHD

1. It has roughly the same failure rate as the WD Black, with the SSHD doing slightly better
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/954-6/disques-durs.html
0,45% WD Black WD2003FZEX
0,43% Seagate Desktop SSHD ST2000DX001

Click to expand...

I always like to say that "no one is ever wrong, they have simply been misinformed". The cause of the comments you read about Seagate comes from a study by Backblaze whereby they sell server space and their economic model relies on buying the cheapest drives they can find and using them as "throw aways". The results and methodology have been lambasted on numerous sited including THG but the worst error they make is misapplication.

Server drives are in constant use, they never stop. They are installed in rigid server racks placed on top of heavy concrete foundations. On the other hand, Backblaze, if you read the articles uses standard HD towers and secures the HDs in place with ... if you can believe it ... rubber bands. Server drives do not have a head parking feature because w/ heavy racks, secure mounting and heavy foundations, they don't need it.

On the contrary, consumer drives do. Many vendors include a safety feature called "head parking", where instead of the arm / head sitting above the platter, it is "parked". The reason for this in a consumer environment if floor vibrations, someone bumping into your desk, etc does not result in a head crash damaging the platter.

Consumer drives arm / head mechanisms are rated for a certain number of "parking cycles", which would take half a decade or more to reach. When placed in a server environment, these cycles can be used up in a matter of months. The backblaze data is therefore useless for examining the reliability of consumer drives in a consumer environment.

I need the source ... where did they get it from .. I want to see which is the best for RAID servers. low fail rate isvery important for RAID.

Their data source is explained in detail in each article; it's from a huge e-tailer and it's simply an accounting of sales versus RMAs. Just have to read it ... too long to translate and retype. Here... I popped it into Google Translate for you

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?act=url&depth=1&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=http://www.hardware.fr/articles/954-1/taux-retour-composants-15.html&usg=ALkJrhjx6eRy4hhwzAFbyTvvvMW1Te3rFw

A server, as described above, would warrant a server drive rather than a consumer drive and i doubt that anyone running a significantly sized server farm would be 'buying retail". Your quest to get server drive data would therefore be a more challenging effort.

The Seagate sshd's are quite simply not worth the money.There is very very little benefit to having a 8gb ssd cache

Stuck with the Toshiba 2tb you mentioned in your second post - I have half a dozen of these drives , they have had a lit ofbuse & are absolutely rock solid - fast , quiet , & reliable.

They're now my first choice every time on a price/performance basis.

I remember I saw a drive with 32GB of SSD cache ... forgot which model

as for Toshiba being queit , I disagree with you...

^ you can disagree as you like - I have 4 drives in one system & can't hear any of them above my case fans, depends what you consider noisy , WD drives are absolutely horrendous for noise.
Seagate fairly quiet , but reliability issues in the past put me off them when there are options for similar money.
I rate the tosh drives personally .

a five year warranwy means nothing to the end user if the hard disk dies and kills the information it was supposed to protect

seagate does that alot

western and toshiba doesn't

about silent, i tougth it was just my imagination, those toshiba desktop hard disks are really silent

my ps3 came without hard disk, so i installed 3 years ago a 320gbs hard disk, toshiba, no problems so far, i used and abused that ps3 and up to this day i use it daily, so that is a good hard disk

the warranty for most countries is not 5 or 3 years

is 1 year

if you buy oem hard disks, on a antistatic bag is 6 months

if a seagate dies at the 7th month, do you think i honestly can tell it is the largest vendor with the best reputation?

if i see another 5 doing similar things on laptops, not on desktops, do you think i can tell good thigns about seagate?

i bought a lenovo pc and sadly it comes with a 500gbs seagate, i can hear the thing working, noisy i must say, compared to a 7 year old toshiba hard disk i took out of a toshiba laptop i killed 4 years ago, i know this thing will not last more than a year

i don't care about a long or short warranty, i don't need to apply warranty with a hard disk, i want my hard disk to last untill it dies 5 or 10 years later, not apply a 5 years warranty

some users can have great experience with seagate, good, but not all of us buy 3 seagate hard disk and have great experiences, when working on it, you can see 50 or 100 laptops all using that brand and having problems

not all hard disks are equal, so fortunatelly you don't hear horror stories every day of a entire work lost, personal files, that sort of stuf, but i can say i can't trust on some brands, others i trust a bit more

anyway, the 3,2,1 must be done always

3 backups, 2 different types of media and 1 backup outside your house, that at least will make some file survive

trust on only one hard disk this days is close to impossible, unrealistic expectations i think

I always used Seagate and Hitachi ... and used to buy Samsung as well was the lowest noise HD on the planet...

Seagate is tricky because you need to know which model to get ... and yes are more expensive if you get the good ones.

I never liked WD .. outside the Raptors when we had NO SSD around .. my only WD were the Raptors ... I miss those days .

The Seagate sshd's are quite simply not worth the money.There is very very little benefit to having a 8gb ssd cache

Click to expand...

1. Could you explain the basis for your conclusion with references ?. The Seagate let's your system perform 50% faster than the the WD Black in gaming for 25% less money ... It's also a lot faster than the Toshibas but the Tosh's are hardly on the class of drives w/ 5 year warrantees.

Your "very little benefit" characterization differences with published reviews and testing. In addition to THGs test results, tweaktown used words like "substantial performance boost", "tremendous performance boost"

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2013/-17-PCMark-7-Gaming,2915.html

Seagate SSHD = 9.76 MB/s
Toshiba 3 TB DT01ACA300 = 6.68 MB/s (SSHD is 46% faster)
Toshiba 1 TB DT01ACA100 = 5.14 MB/s (SSHD is 90% faster)

2. Toshiba apparently doesn't think they are very reliable since they only provide them with a 1 year warranty

On a $1500 system, I simply can not understand how increasing gaming performance by 50% or more and getting 5 times the warranty for < $30 (2%) is "not worth it"

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5748/seagate-desktop-2tb-sshd-st2000dx001-review/index9.html

With the increasing market penetration of the SSD, a lot of users have now had the chance to upgrade their PCs. Now we all know while SSDs offer massive benefits in terms of performance, they have always lacked in one area - capacity.

A situation like this left most power users using an SSD for their operating system, while still running a secondary mechanical drive for storage and games. A typical setup such as this would allow the OS to load very quickly, while leaving you stunned at how long it took to load a game. With the introduction of the Desktop SSHD, Seagate has again switched up the game, offering a substantial performance boost to those of you in this situation.

Now, if you are one that chooses to use a single drive for your operating system, and have held onto your standard desktop HDD for the benefit of capacity, the Desktop SSHD is calling your name. The 8GB of NAND cache in conjunction with Seagate's application optimized algorithms should offer a tremendous performance boost, and again the more you use, it the faster the drive will get, as it learns how you use your system.

In every case seen here today, the Seagate Desktop SSHD excels, whether it be a synthetic point and click benchmark like HD Tune or ATTO, or even application traces via PCMark 8, the drive just performs.

Click to expand...

In our own in house testing with a a desktop box equipped with (2) SSDs and (2) SSHDs, and a laptop w/ SSD + HD against a laptop w/ SSHD, not a single user was able to detect when we switched from SSD to SSHD.

Windows Boot Times were:

SSD = 15.6 seconds
SSHD = 16.5 seconds
HD = 21.2 seconds

We haven't used or installed a HD in a user build going on 7 years .... tho I consider this "lucky", I still see significance in the fact that no failures to date.

another example, my western digital hard disks are very silent, both laptop and desktop ones

toshiba is silent like in cementerey at night silent

You never bought a quality Seagate harddisk sadly ... as for Lenovo Harddisk choice ? well its their problem they put the lowest model in their cheap notebooks .

you need to understand that Seagate bought : Samsung HD , Quantum HD (was very popular) , Maxtor HD and they have all the Patents from all those companies ... in addition to their Seagate Patents ...

saying " Avoid Seagate , Just because you bought the cheapest ones .. is wrong.

Reference, other than discredited backblaze please

Again.... this is real data

Seagate 0,72% (contre 0,69%)
Toshiba 0,80% (contre 1,15%)
Western 1,04% (contre 1,03%)
HGST 1,13% (contre 0,60%)

Tosh did well in last period getting under 1% failure rate ....but the 6 month period before, they just about doubled Seagate's returns

In my experience if a drive is going to fail it is either down to user error or faults in the manufacturing process - if its down the manufacture then its going to fail well within 12 months.

12 months warranty is general in consumer electronics , fact is in the uk at least due to consumer legislation you absolutely 100% will get a minimum 2 years on any electrical product irregardless of the listed warranty.
Yes you have to push it yourself but you will get a refund or replacements on even a £60 hard drive if you know which buttons to press.

Seagate - they had a real bad production patch 4 or 5 years back which saw an awful amount of drive failures on the cheaper consumer models .it killed their reputation big time .
I'm guilty of tarring & feathering them with that brush myself even though their current drives are probably fine.
Their warranty procedure in the UK is goddam awful though at the end of the day (when you have 6 out of 10 drives fail within 6 months as a system builder its a nightmare) & that's why I will not buy them now

WD - good drives , their failure to make a decently priced 7200rpm model above 1tb though puts them out of the picture imo .Labelling a 2 tb drive a blue & tricking people into thinking they're getting a bigger variant of the 1tb 7200pm blue (which is a very very good drive) when in fact they're getting a slightly modified 5400rpm green with a few power saving features turned off is a dirty tactic

The black is just horrendously expensive

Sshd's?? - faster than a WD black - no , not a chance at all.The black is far faster in general use , an sshd only has a noticeable performance difference if you use the same 2 or 3 apps/games continuously & their boot cache is stored in the ssd cache section.
Just not worth the money at all.

i say i avoid seagate and recomend avoiding is nto worng because i say that based on the models i could buy on the time, so with my budget, same when i bought the toshiba hard disk, really didn0t changed but already showed that the investment, being on the cheap as you seem to suggest, was money better spent on that brands also western digital and seagate

so, you saying that i bought their products and they failed, has no weight or relevance that opinion

the cheap line should be decent, the expensive one should be decent too, if they sell cheap garbage, then i will not buy it, i will keep buying cheap garbage form toshiba, western digital, hitachi hgst that for years have confirmed that no matter the budget, they deliver

back when martor existed, i had many good maxtor hard disk that worked marvelously, when seagate bought the brand and killed it, something changed, more people began to complain

things after all those years seems that have remained or gotten worse, more and more poele complains, so you see a post asking if seagate is really a good brand or a skip brand

those number, made me remember the old days when samsung sold millions of units of crt monitors, most people got them and used it to the end, but others had to return units in the order of thousands

a perfect example of a bad batch or a internal change that showed that it was a bad decision

samsung more than anybody knows this, you can have a perfect 5 years of models and then boom, notes exploding everywhere

now, if they keep haing those numbers for the rest of the year and next year, that means that toshiba should be avoided too, so we limit to western digital and hitach, well, hitachi hgst now more for external hard disks, for desktops and laptops i haven't seen locally offerings from them in a long time

the 3,2,1 and a ssd with plans to pgrade each couple years seems to be the path for the future, unless toshiba fixes things and we have sor of 3 options, really 2 because westrn own hitachi now and hgst is more or less just a western digital line of products

@atljsf OK, so you have an anecdote about how a Seagate drive you bought died prematurely. You can find those for every product ever made, especially electronics. Do you have any empirical evidence to back up your claims that Seagate drives are more prone to failure than other brands?

Having used SSHDs and HDDs paired with an external SSD cache (8GB and 16GB) I'd have to disagree. The Achilles heel of HDDs are their 4k read/write speeds. They do fine at reading large files - their sequential speeds are up around 100-150 MB/s. They absolutely suck at small files - 4k speeds are barely above 1 MB/s, laptop HDDs are worse at about 0.75 MB/s.

This is where SSDs get most of their speed from. They're only about 4x faster than HDDs at sequential speeds (about 500 MB/s). But their 4k speeds can hit 30-70 MB/s - 30x to 70x faster than a HDD. The same holds for a SSHD. The vast majority of that 8GB cache ends up holding small files (as opposed to a RAM cache which only holds the most recently read data). And you can fit a heckuva lot of 4 kB files into 8GB.

On a Thinkpad with a HDD and 16GB cache SSD, I spent a couple nights playing around with disabling the cache, reformatting it for 4GB, 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB capacity. 8GB is *plenty* and dramatically sped up Windows boot times (from over 1 minute to about 20 seconds) and program start times. The drawback of a SSD cache is that it doesn't speed up writes.


You really have to look at the failure rates of individual drive models. If you read that link, the entirety of HGST's poor showing is due to a single model - the 1TB 5400 RPM 2.5" model with a 3.48% return rate. The other HGST models listed had a 0.32% and 0.21% return rate.

Each drive model includes a combination of different technology, different density, different components, and different failure rates. People want an easy "buy brand x, avoid brand y" rule of thumb, but there isn't one. You have to dig up failure rates or reliability reports for individual drive models. There are good and bad drive models from every manufacturer. (Speaking of which, HGST's 3.5" technology went to Toshiba, it's 2.5" tech went to WD - a condition various governments placed on the merger of WD with HGST. Previously Toshiba only made 2.5" drives.)

With that in mind, "7200 RPM 2TB Seagate Barracuda" is not enough info to narrow down to a single drive model, so it's impossible to say how reliable it is. I'll add that most of Seagate's reputation for bad drives comes from the 2000s, when they had over 50% of the HDD market. So there were simply more Seagate drives out there than other drives, and thus correspondingly more user reports of failed Seagate drives on forums. You can't just count the number of people reporting failed drives.

In 30 years of computer use, I've owned and installed drives from all the remaining HDD manufacturers or their predecessors, and have experienced failures with every one of them. With the low cost of HDDs, there's little point worrying about their reliability. Just make sure to regularly backup your data. If you happen to fall within the unfortunate 1% per year who suffer a drive failure, simply get it replaced under warranty and restore from your backup.