Seagate HDD Now With Disaster Recovery Services
Seagate is bundling two years of data recovery services with is new GoFlex Turbo Performance Drive models.
The new GoFlex is available in two flavors, with 500 GB capacity for $120 and with 750 GB capacity for $140. The "Performance" part of the name stems from the fact that these USB 3.0 drives rotate their platters with 7200 RPM, and not with 5400 RPM as their USB 2.0 siblings do.
However, the big news in those drives is Seagate's decision to bundle them with SafetyNet, which is a 2-year subscription to a data recovery service. Seagate considers the service as a bonus that provides "peace of mind" as far as the data security is concerned. I am not sure how much of a buying incentive the recovery service really is, but could be bringing in fence sitters who are storing valuable data on those drives - even if the SafetyNet program may not be exactly what you would want to have access to in the case of sudden data loss. According to the terms of the program, customers have to call Seagate, talk to a tech rep, who then determines if the case is eligible for data recovery service and whether any data is likely to be recovered. The drive may have to be shipped to Seagate and you may have to wait two weeks until you get your drive and data, if it is recoverable, back.
A hard drive can fail at any time, but the industry tells us that the risk of a failure dramatically increases after about five years of operation, at which a data recovery service may really be something you would want to invest in (or buy a new hard drive). Personally, I always found hard drive failures (I had plenty of them over the past 15 years) a pain in the neck to deal with and the more recent ones ended up at a local data recovery service, which was able to recover my data (not always in its entirety) within a few hours and less than $100 per case.
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Nice feature but IMO still not as good as having redundancy.
It a seagate...It needs it
It a HDD...I needs it
There fixed
Nice feature but IMO still not as good as having redundancy.
Agree. nothing like a good old redundancy and Backup's to keep everything you want.
back up back up and off site backup. Data recovery who needs it.
So this reminded me of a quote from Tommyboy:
"they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of $h!t. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I've got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from Western Digital."
Actually i probably buy 50/50 - WD/Seagate, just think its funny to offer this service. Just goes to show you that so many clueless people back up a MECHANICAL hard drive on another MECHANICAL hard drive and thats all. i made that mistake many years ago and now i wouldnt keep anything of importance on a single backup when Flash/DVD/BD or Interet storage is so cheap as extra redundancy! Now if they want to package this service on their drives at identical prices to their competition, i take back my criticisms!
I have had PCs for almost two decades with no HDD failures. It seems I should be playing the lotto more often... I always forget how often this happens to people.
I have had PCs for almost two decades with no HDD failures. It seems I should be playing the lotto more often... I always forget how often this happens to people.
Ah, I used to be like you. Then I lost 5 years worth of data (only 232 GB back then) and came to realize the importance of backups. At which point I proceeded to zip up my entire website as a "backup" and kept the backups on the same HDD as my website itself.
I'd rather have the 5 year Seagate warranty back! (they're trying to save some money by reducing it to 2 years)
I'd rather have the 5 year Seagate warranty back! (they're trying to save some money by reducing it to 2 years)
Well, a 5 year Seagate warranty equals a 100% claim rate.
back up back up and off site backup. Data recovery who needs it.
Most people are not that smart. And some can't afford it. But for those if the HDD dies, and by that I mean wont spin up or recognize on a PC at all, and this provides a way to retrieve that data its not that bad.
If you're not backing up critical data to a ... you deserve to lose it... IMO... besides... waiting 2 weeks for your data is just as bad as losing it... it only take a few seconds to destroy your business...
Well, a 5 year Seagate warranty equals a 100% claim rate.
thats funny, i've seen plenty of seagate drives that last more than 5 years.
maybe not a bad idea for people who take their drive on the GO.
$100 per case for Data Recovery is cheap. Where do I go? Last time I checked into Data Recovery it was about $100 per 100GB about a year ago.
Well, a 5 year Seagate warranty equals a 100% claim rate.
Funny, considering I've got several seagate drives from various years still functioning without issue and never had any of them crash and a couple of them are 7 to 8 years old.
Funny, considering I've got several seagate drives from various years still functioning without issue and never had any of them crash and a couple of them are 7 to 8 years old.
Seagate quality has really gone down the toilet in recent years. Even their enterprise Sata drives have high DOA and failure rates compared to other manufacturers.
Since Seagate bought Maxtor no wonder their reliability went bad. Almost all HDD failures in past that happened around me were Maxtor drives.
I mirror everything. Hard disks are cheap. 2x cheap is still affordable and provides extra peace of mind. It also means 'recovering' from a failure only takes a few minutes of my time, not hours. Of course, you still need a backup strategy on top of that.
As a IT tech that deals with failed hard drives all the time I can tell you that all brands fail. Years ago Western Digital was famous for their "click of death" which caused an instant death with no ability to recover data, many other brands develop bad sectors which still usually allows you to recover some if not most data from the drive. Either way I've had AS, NS, and Enterprise class SCSI drives die all the time. Windows 7 has a built in full image backup program, and you can get Acronis backup for XP for like 30 bucks. With external USB drives being so cheap there is no excuse not to have a backup anymore.
Get a bluray read/write drive....50GB per disc is nice for backing up everything, imaging the OS partition etc
Personally I believe everyone living in this modern day should have a good data backup routine...and MOST importantly it should be redundant. Keep your data on a computer with at least a Mirrored RAID configuration. THEN backup frequently...I do weekly fulls, and incs every other day. And this is still not enough...diversify and spread your data out...take advantage of cheap optical media or free cloud services as alternative paths for your data. Make copies of your backups! Its ridiculous how little time people take to do this but they spend so much time on the computer or other media devices.
Seagate quality has really gone down the toilet in recent years. Even their enterprise Sata drives have high DOA and failure rates compared to other manufacturers.
My personal experience with seagate has varied in the last years, in this very own pc i have a 10 year old 5400 rpm seagate drive working perfectly with 22.300 hours of use, here too, i have a defective 500 gb 7200 withs 2 and a ahalf years and it began with noise and trouble after about 7000 hours of use... 2 months after the guarantee passed.
I think seagate has decreased dramatically his product´s quality in the last few years, next time ill try a samsung´s hdd or WD and see what happens.
Don't count on RAID only - used to know a guy that both drives in a mirrored set up both died on the same day... he had like 30 some years of programming/coding lost, I think he paid $300 for data recovery. Now i think he uses an additional service like carbonite.
Backup, backup and oh yeah backup some more - or suffer
Usually companies want to avoid giving any signals that their drives aren't reliable.
backup is the first thing you think of just after you've lost everything.
Personally I've never had a drive totally fail on me. I had one samsung 24/7 for 3 years that started to throw up errors but it was a gradual process and I could still backup all my data from it before chucking it.
ps fail factors are heat, use and age. in case anyone didn't know