Sell a bunch of damaged 1.5TB drive and save the good stuff for business users.

Ok -- Tom -- this is something you can maybe shed some light on.

How am I to know what Seagate Drives to trust?

First it was 1.5TB drives. Then 1TB drives...then between 2 of my 750GB Seagate's dying, they also said it affected some 750GB drives. So now what do I believe in? These were all Seagate drives that had a 5-yr warrantee.

Color me naive (beige?), but I'd think that 5-yr warranty drives were should be among best in class for reliability -- i.e.l they should be as good (or equiv)...as Business Class.

But obviously something big went through the QA process. Are most of the drives we see NOT business class.

Is the *only* way to ensure good drives to go SAS? I thought businesses were going for SATA for density -- but as someone who's had 3 Seagate drives (1T, 2x750GB) drives go bad in the past 2 months, I'm more than a little disenchanted with the brand.

I tried a WD 1TB, 'Green' drive, but the 1 and only I tried was DOA -- so I went back with Seagate, which used to have a sterling reputation. But now? What drives are best for reliability? -- What drives can I buy and 'forget about them' until its time for a technology refresh?

Second question -- maybe some drive manufacturers already do this -- but I was wondering -- is it possible for a multi-plate drive to act like a Raid-0 or RAID-1? I.e. read/write to multiple heads on different but aligned platters to achieve faster speeds? I.e. if you have 4 platters, you'd interleave read/writes from each of the 4 platters to achieve 4x read or write speeds?

A*a

is it safe? with news that the 1.5tb and other size seagate drives failing, it tells you that it's not a good choice to buy from seagate. two wrongs don't exactly make a right you know.

Considering this is a completely different class of product it would be safe to assume the inherent flaws of a different series don't carry over into this one. Besides the point that Seagate have released a firmware fix for the issues in these drives (although it doesn't fix already broken drives).

These should be a good drive, but id like to see some reviews first.

I've never had a drive go bad on machines I've put together. However, I'm not surprised people out there are having problems, many people simply don't have a clue about how to properly handle a hard disk.

I've seen colleagues stack drives on a table, putting them down like you put down a cup of coffee. Take an accelerometer to a drive when you try that - you can easily exceed the non-operating G-limit of 350 Gs. A drive is a lot safer once you've mounted it.

If you don't handle it properly, don't be surprised when it breaks. This goes for whatever brand you have out there...

I want to know when the SAS 2 controller cards will be out. I have not really been able to find any info out about them yet.

Constellation sounds like a Class of USS Starships.

The history?... A while back Seagate bought Maxtor, before this ... Maxtor went bad when the bought Quantum, before this... Quantum pushed things a little too fast (although I never had one fail).

I bought some 320gig Seagate drives at the time they bought Maxtor b/c I knew they would start releasing bad Maxtor drives. If you have one just make sure you cool it with fans heaps.

So just do some research and get a Seagate that is not from an old Maxtor factory or contains Maxtor components. I admit it is pretty hard to do that research sometimes.. my next drive will be a SSD

These drives won't have enough throughput to exceed SATA 3.0Gb/s, so having a SAS 2.0 (6b/s) is not going to offer an improvement in performace.

These Seagate drives NEVER existed and still do NOT exist 6 months later, I really can't wait any longer, so Seagate has lost another customer..

I have had a bad Quantum in a LaCie configuration. Bad motor drive. A few bangs with a hammer got it spinning again. It was time to back up that drive and replace it. 3 years isn’t bad for a non server grade drive running 24/7. For those that don’t understand the types of drives, here it is. Enterprise Server (24/7), Prosumer workstation (5 days a week), Home user (nights and weekends) and CHEAP (hobby). Cost are respective but not only that, drive capabilities. The higher end drives are going to have more error correction and fault tolerance. Think of it as a 2.5 TB drive derated to a 2 TB drive and it doesn’t stop there. I use Workstation drives in my 6 TB server. I have had no issues with this configuration. I am still less than 1 year on the drives. I have adopted a 3 to 4 year change out cycle for drives unless they are in storage. It has served me well and made many people happy on eBay. ;-)

To the guy that destroys all the new hard drives he gets. Don’t buy the new 1st generation stuff. As much as I love Ford. There new 6.0 Liter Diesel engine has been plagued with problems. Note the drive I use. 11th generation. Also maybe it is you or your equipment. Just something to consider.

And as for not using up the 3.0G/s bandwidth. Try striping your drives. 3G/s gets full very fast. I welcome SAS 6.0G/s +.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive