I will never buy Seagate Hard Drive again

i used to have a pair of wd blacks. i had them and 2 rma's die in under half a year. the shortest one lived was under a week.

my 1tb drives have all been rock solid for years.

i've used seagates and have had them going for years

my own thoughts are to avoid larger than 1tb drives if i dont raid them. while not all drives might be unreliable it left a bad taste in my mouth. of course it has certainly been a few years since all that..

i ran raid 1 with the drives and it helped. for awhile there i was paranoid but given how the 1.5/2tb drives were not reliable for me i was questionable. i've never had a 1tb seagate or wd drive fail on me in the short term though.

recovering data from a failed drive is a very expensive process. it is far better to rely on backup copies instead of recovery. get into the habit of placing files in multiple backup locations.

And I just had a Seagate delivered...
4TB IronWolf, to go into the NAS box.

The 4 in there are all old Seagate and WD 3TB, and what I had laying around.
To be replaced over the next month by 4 x dedicated NAS drives, RAID 5.
2 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB, 2 x WD Red 4TB. Just to spread the possible fail potential around.

The only spinning drive I've had fail this decade was a 3TB WD Green. 1 week past the Amazon 30 day easy return, but WD just sent a new one.

if you consider some forms of raid to be equivalent to doing a proper system backup.. its really not much different than doing such in an automated way.

raid 1 is two drives with the same information. the benefit is that if one dies on you your information is not lost and when you replace th drive it will rewrite the information onto the new drive creating a backup again. in order to fail both drives would need to fail at the same time (or the second failing before you replaced the first) which is not likely as long as you get right on replacement. this is why i used it.

i believe defrag is considered bad for ssds due to the excessive write/rewrite options on the drive given how the memory chips have set lifespans.

Wow that really sucks. I've had my Seagate 2tb for 4-5 years now

Ive never had a hard drive fail on me but I tend to replace by boot drive every 2 years. Just start using a SSD boot drive but my 2TB seagate got 3 years ago has a data error its unable to set aside. I used chkdsk /r and replaced with the SSD but I'm a bit worries about using it as a data disk.

Here's the latest hard data for Seagate "consumer drives" used in a "consumer environment".

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

Click to expand...

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/954-6/disques-durs.html

That 1st number represents how many drives were RMA'd on the last 6 months... the one in parenthesis the 6 months before that. Averaging the two numbers, that puts them about 0.705% and they have maintained close to that rate going and that lead going back about 4 years.

As for SSDSs, prices are dropping but still out of the realm for satisfactory cost per TB for most folks. We have had more SSD failures than HD failures over the years but those failures were bought just after 120 GB drives became a realistic option. With today's hardier designs, we haven't had one fail that was purchased in the last 5 years

Our standard build consists usually of a 250/256 Samsung Pro SSD, and one of more 2 TB SSHD. We haven't installed a HD in about 7 years other than for testing purposes. Using our test box ... we recorded the following data:

Boot Time SSD: 15.6 seconds
Boot Time SSD: 16.5 seconds
Hard Drive: 21.2 seconds

Other speed advantages are of course dependent on the application. In gaming for example, we see that the Seagate SSD is 54% faster than the WD Black

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

Seagate SSHD = 9.76 MB/s
WD Black = 6.34

The advantages of SSHDs will also much depend on how you use them. I will speak to our SOHO uses:

During the day, my box (as well as others on the office, serves as a workstation preparing CAD Drawings, creating Operation and Maintenance Manuals and turning them into PDFs, writing engineering reports, many with significant graphical content, drafting technical specifications. Here, as you might imagine, we tend to start a project ... frequently uses the files of 2 or 3 projects over the course of a period from 2 weeks to 3 months. Because the SSHD keeps those "frequently used files" on the SSD portion of the SSHD, we benefit from the speed bump. It's also nice that we don't have to manually move stuff back and forth between slower and faster storage as it does this all by itself.

After hours, on the gaming side, users here have pretty much the same usage patterns as above. They tend to "serial game" .... playing Far Cry 3 for example for a few weeks and then moving on to say Far Cry 4. The benefit that THG measured serves well with this usage pattern. If you the type that in the course of a week might be loading 16 games with no particular "favorite", you will not see this advantage.

As for "not seeing the difference" ... that's perfectly normal. Peeps buy a SSD and are inclined to say it's much faster because they read a article and saw the benchmarks. But the fact is, it doesn't have any real impact on your day. I had an employee once ask for an SSD in order to "improve his productivity". I smiled because even today that case can not be made but used this as an engineering object lesson and asked him to make a case to justify the investment. So he picked a number (one many times the real advantage) and multiplied it by 220 work days at his salary rate and he came up with a dollar number that was about a third of the price of an SSD after 3 years.

But "boot time" was the major part of that, and the days that he was preparing this analysis, I observed his morning routine. Arrive, take off jacket, turn on PC, walk around say Hi to everyone, make coffee and arrive at desk anywhere from 5 to 1o minutes later. Then he'd listen to phone messages and go thru the pile in his inbox. So the faster boot time provided no advantage. When he took out something from his inbox that required editing, he'd open the program/ file and start reading the markups and maybe a minute or 2 later would start making edits ... again, the PC was ready long before the human was ready to use it. Pick any industry you want and outside animation workstations, rendering machines, video editing an the like, faster storage system have no impact because the weakest link in the chain is the human.

One of the greatest enemies of HDs is heat and this is generally not a problem in enthusiast boxes or gaming boxes as users tend to address this adequately to keep their GFX and CPU cool/. But I have seen many HD failures in "store bought" Dell / HP like boxes. If ya can keep temps in the mid 30s, you should not have problems in this respect. IBM released a report in the mid 90s showing that a 10C increase cut expected life in half.

As for the SSHD life expectancy.... it fared a bit better than drives with similar 5 year warrantees but the difference isn't statistically relevant. We have had no failures as yet in the 7 years since we started using. Tho after 4 - 5 years of use they get relegated to external storage (backup) drives where they get baxke dup to every day for a week then spend a week off site in rotation.

0,45% WD Black WD2003FZEX
0,43% Seagate Desktop SSHD ST2000DX001

Click to expand...

As for RAID, I built this box with the two Samsung Pros in RAID 0 ... saw no performance improvement, the Samsung utilities did not work and Samsung does not support RAID so I broke the array and performance improved very slightly.

The two SSHDs were set up as RAID 1 .... again, after a few months I broke the array as one of the drives would disappear (solved simply by a reboot). I get the same function using free "Set it and forget it" backup software which keeps the 2nd drive as a mirror of the 1st.

Hi JackNaylorPE,

we would like to thank you for an excellent post!

Although we are aware that some users might like one brand better than another, objectively all major hard drive manufacturers are working hard to optimize performance as well as reliability with each new generation of drives. It is correct that each physical drive will fail at some point - however, if the right drive type is used in each scenario, modern hard drives usually last much longer than their minimum life time expectancy. We can say with certainty that our engineering team is working diligently to make sure that the drives that we put out are of the highest quality found in any market.