Goddamn Seagate hard drives!!!

[jakerock]

Man!
Bought a Seagate Momentum 160GB HD for my laptop around April... Crapped out in August (4 months) in the middle of a recording project...
Didnt lose recordings cause luckily I was backing up that partition everyday, but I run a dual boot laptop (audio / PC)
and I lost all kinds of documents and notes and media on that partition... Damn!

So, I go out the same day and get a new drive @ COMPUSA... What they have in stock just happens to be the SAME exact drive model again...
It bit the dirt today while I was recording a rehearsal...

I was convinced that it was the stupid M-BOX (which is another whole rant)... But I get home from rehearsal and attempt to boot it up and Error message PXE-E61 comes up again... Cant believe it.

These $140 drives by Seagate biting the dirt one after the other after like 4 months or less of use...

Boy am I sick of losing data!
I am getting to be a real pro at setting up dual boot XP's for audio though... Its literally about the 8th time I have done it.

I googled the Seagate model in question, no complaints from much of anyone, except I found this one fella who was using the same drive on a mac and had TWO of them go bad as well!! What luck we both have. Christ.

Anyone have strong opinions on drives (notebook or otherwise) that have been reliable for you???


Thanks for reading this rant... Just had to get it out of my system.

[Dstruct]

Hitachi drives

[Kihoalu]

Anyone have strong opinions on drives (notebook or otherwise) that have been reliable for you???

In my experience Hitachi (IBM) drives are no more reliable than any of the major manufacturers. At any given time I have about 20 Hard Drives in use for my studio. I have had more Hitachi/IBM failures recently than any others. Every year I have one or two drives that fail (So much for 1.5 million hour claimed MTBF!). It could also be you are the unlucky buyer of a bad batch or a new weak design (it happens).

The most reliable drives are the ones that are shipped to the Major OEM's (like Dell). The least reliable/odd-lot drives are sent to the retail markets (Fry's, CompUSA, etc). If you want a more reliable drive order one (replacement or upgrade) from Dell (they are the pickiest O.E.M.), but it will cost you a lot more.

I have twenty drives in use because I use them in pairs. My main drives are in a RAID 1 setup (two drives 100% redundant). This is the best way to obtain some real reliability against drive failure. My audio data drives are also kept in pairs, but they are not RAID. I just synchronise them after every studio session. (I keep all the audio drives in plug-drive cartridges) I have had several more drive failures since I implemented this system (I still buy the cheap drives from Fry's!) but have suffered absolutely NO data loss.



Cost of RAID card: less than $100
Cost of Hard Drives: about half of Dell's Price (net cost about the same)
Cost of Sanity: Priceless

[Armageddon]

I've been an IT technician in a past life.
Seagate hard drives have always been good ones. I used it many times and had a huge amount of machines equiped with these disks.
I considered it as a good and reliable brand.

What striked me is that you paid for another drive. In the past ALL Seagate drives where under waranty for 3 years.

Go check here (you will need the serial number of the drive) :
http://support.seagate.com/customer/warranty_validation.jsp

When I had a problem with one of their disk (still under waranty), I was sending it back and they returned a brand new disk of the same model in a week. Very good service !

Of course I was considered has a reseler, but you could try to contact them or go ask your favorite reseler.

If you want a better level of data security with your disks, check-out RAID systems.
RAID systems are "arrays" of multiple hard disks used as one "logical" disk. Some RAID levels are "failure resistant" to one or more hard disk crash. Of course it is more expensive, just check how much costs your data and your work.

[Deric]

I'd always used Seagate but no more.

After several drive failures in the past year (including an external Seagate model) I don't have confidence in their QA.

I'm happy, so far, with the Samsung disks I've been buying (they are quiet too).

Ps. If anyone hasn't noticed - there are now 32MB(buffer) disks available from Samsung, Seagate, and a few others, up to 1TB in capacity.

[Justin]

It's pretty random IMO, except for the classic 80GB IBM Deskstars that were defective...

-Justin

[Art Evans]

Lots of reading around on this subject - including what MTBF actually implies - eg http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html

[juanito]

Do Maxtor's still suck? lol.

- juanito

[juanito]

I'm seriously considering getting a Gigabit Network Attached Storage Array for the crib. I just seen one in Fry Electronic's annual Friday Newspaper ad for under 250 bucks? !!!!?

I wonder how cheap an iSCSI card goes for these days?

- juanito

[juanito]

Sorry to keep posting but the thought I had here was at least you should be able to get Seagate to replace the drive because last i heard, they still had a three year warranty on their drives although I don't know if that holds true with their notebook drives. It won't get your data back but at least you should be covered with regards to hardware.

The other thought I had was that some Notebook Makers offer S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring though BIOS which basically can monitor the health of your hard drive and even somewhat predict complete hardware failure of the drive before it happens though it doesn't always do it with pin point accuracy. :-/

There's also shareware software out there on the net' that you can install yourself if your notebook natively doesn't support S.M.A.R.T

- Juanito

[Art Evans]

(The rule to follow when buying hard drives is, don't buy till you need. Today's cheap drive will be cheaper tomorrow!)

[jakerock]

Sorry to keep posting but the thought I had here was at least you should be able to get Seagate to replace the drive because last i heard, they still had a three year warranty on their drives although I don't know if that holds true with their notebook drives. It won't get your data back but at least you should be covered with regards to hardware.

The other thought I had was that some Notebook Makers offer S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring though BIOS which basically can monitor the health of your hard drive and even somewhat predict complete hardware failure of the drive before it happens though it doesn't always do it with pin point accuracy. :-/

There's also shareware software out there on the net' that you can install yourself if your notebook natively doesn't support S.M.A.R.T

- Juanito

Yeah, they replaced them both with minimal hassle...
But getting a couple of refurbished drives in return for all this headache is sort of pathetic, and im not too confident about the reliability of a refurbished disk...

The S.M.A.R.T. thing is an OK idea, but actually does something useful when you run SpinRite on a SMART drive... Stressing and rewriting the sectors with SpinRite so that the bad ones can be found and marked by SMART.

Anyway... Bought a Couple of $15 USB enclosures and using the replacement drives that way.

[Charlie_M]

Do Maxtor's still suck? lol.

- juanito

Maxtor is out of business. They were bought by Seagate. If you can find anything out there today with the Maxtor brand on it, chances are it was produced while the company was in its final throes of death. I'd avoid that brand going forward.

Nobody knows what the future holds but we cannot be too surprised if we Hitachi sells their drive division. That division has been losing many millions per quarter. Hard drives are not the highest profit margin business in the world, in fact it's a very tough business. But times are pretty good for drive makers today, relatively speaking. A drive maker that can't make money in this market is unlikely to last. I'd leave it at that.

Charlie

[bluzkat]

Charlie,

I believe Seagate still markets drives with the Maxtor name.


@Jake,

I have been using Samsung (Spinpoint series) drives for awhile now and like them alot. I used Maxtors for along time before they went to shit. I've been happy with the Samsungs... quiet and fast. If you got some extra cash, check out 'Glyph' hard drives.

[DOBBY156]

well im a techie first, music is my hobbie, so when it comes to HDD's, there is really only one HDD company for me, that is western digital, if you need fast they have rapters, if you need large they have terabyte drives, if you been quite and reliable there cavier drives are that and cheap.