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  1. Member
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    Amazon and Newegg have 8TB Seagate external drives for $300. Amazon also has the internal drive for $318 .These use Seagate's Shingled Magnetic Recording technology vs HGST's helium technology accounting for the much lower cost. The Andantech thread I got this info from said the external was $285 when first spotted on Amazon, so there's still room for lower prices coming soon!

    Interestingly, the internal drive is listed as an Archive Drive per Seagate:


    "The Archive HDD 8TB SATA III Hard Drive from Seagate is a 3.5" internal drive with a 8.0TB storage capacity. The drive is designed for 24 × 7 workloads of 180TB per year. Free Seagate DiskWizard software allows you to install the hard drives in Windows without UEFI BIOS. With Seagate AcuTrac servo technology, it delivers dependable performance. This drive is suitable for cost-effective online archiving, object storage, Big Data cold storage, cloud active archive, and Web-scale archiving."

    Sure, 8TB is a lot to risk, but that's we make backups!

    Going to be an interesting Black Friday 2015!
    Last edited by lingyi; 7th Feb 2015 at 07:41. Reason: grammar
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    Seagate?

    No thanks!
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    Sadly, I have just completed building a new array using 6TB drives. I don't see the budget running to another array of 8TB drives any time in the near future.
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  4. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by newpball View Post
    Seagate?

    No thanks!
    Nothing wrong with seagate,been using them for years.
    I think,therefore i am a hamster.
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    Originally Posted by johns0 View Post
    Originally Posted by newpball View Post
    Seagate?

    No thanks!
    Nothing wrong with seagate,been using them for years.
    This writes volumes:



    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
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  6. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    Flawed study.
    I think,therefore i am a hamster.
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    The author of the report does acknowledge:

    "You can see that all the HGST (formerly Hitachi) drives, the Seagate 1.5 TB and 4.0 TB, and Western Digital 1.0 TB drives are all continuing to perform as well as they were before. But the Seagate and Western Digital 3.0 TB drives failure rates are up quite a bit.

    What is the likely cause of this?

    It may be that those drives are less well-suited to the data center environment. Or it could be that getting them by drive farming and removing them from external USB enclosures caused problems. We’ll continue to monitor and report on how these drives perform in the future."

    The raw data is now available and it will be interesting to see what more detailed analysis by others will bring about.

    Edit: Recommend anyone reading the article continue to the comments. There's a lot of interesting feedback there.
    Last edited by lingyi; 7th Feb 2015 at 22:16. Reason: Add comment
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  8. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    The study was done with their own hard drives,because of this it's not reliable since we do not know how the hdd were treated and if they all had the same operating conditions plus also if they bought a batch of drives that a segment were faulty that would skew the report since if the batch was sent to several stores to be sold then the failure rate would look much less and be unnoticed.
    I think,therefore i am a hamster.
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    Yeah I was looking at those charts from another thread, Hitachi Deathstars........
    LMAO!!!
    I have seen more actual failures from hitachi deskstars than any other HDD made over the last 10 years by a large percentage!!!

    I would not use one if it was given to me for free for anything important that I did not want to lose.

    But then look who is posting it
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    Originally Posted by johns0 View Post
    The study was done with their own hard drives,because of this it's not reliable since we do not know how the hdd were treated and if they all had the same operating conditions plus also if they bought a batch of drives that a segment were faulty that would skew the report since if the batch was sent to several stores to be sold then the failure rate would look much less and be unnoticed.
    We heard you the first time.

    All studies are challenged as being not reliable. You don't know who to believe.
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  11. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    I didn't say that the first time plus most studies that are done with enough facts aren't challenged.
    I think,therefore i am a hamster.
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  12. I WAS a supporter for Seagate also... until the Thailand flood a few years ago. Since that event, Seagate's drive starts getting unreliable, particularly the external drives.
    i have two seagate external hdd bought around that time failed suddenly just after 1 year of use....
    so sorry seagate, i have to stay away from you for quite a (long) while
    Stopping development until someone save me from poverty or get me out of Hong Kong...
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    Originally Posted by MaverickTse View Post
    I WAS a supporter for Seagate also... until the Thailand flood a few years ago. Since that event, Seagate's drive starts getting unreliable, particularly the external drives.
    Yes, I have exactly the same experience.

    What really bothers me is that they are not doing anything to try to restore their earlier reputation.

    Right now I am sticking to WD drives.

    By the way I like HGST drives but I do not like this grey "OEM" market where you can buy those drives for big discounts. If you buy a HGST drive online I suggest you get it from a reputable dealer.
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  14. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Got a bunch of 2TB Seagates a year ago, have been using them vigorously and they are still working great.Maybe you just got a bad batch.

    Scott
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    Originally Posted by MaverickTse View Post
    I WAS a supporter for Seagate also
    I also.

    I bought 6 x 3TB in August 2013. In December 2014 one died, then in January another died.

    To get them replaced under warranty was more than 60% of the original purchase price because PC-DIY in Melbourne refused to honor the warranty forcing me to send them back directly to Singapore. Or if I wanted to cut the return cost I could send them seamail and they would take up to 3 months to arrive at Seagate, by which time the RMA would have run out (it only lasts 30 days).

    I haven't usually had problems with Seagate drives, and having two fail within days of each other was disappointing. But the appalling service here in AU for Warranty is just plain ridiculous.

    But this is really no surprise. many businesses are cutting funding to support and customer service groups as they don't make money.
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  16. Member hech54's Avatar
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    It's all "Greek" to me, I've never had a hard drive failure EVER. I've got a mid-tower full (3) of Samsung drives right now. All Dell machines before this one with several unknown drives inside + numerous externals over the years that I also never bothered to find out exactly what was inside.
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    I've had one hard drive fail on me, but it happened right after I discovered flicking the 120/240 lever on my power supply was a VERY bad idea, so I'm not sure I should blame the drive.

    At the time I thought I'd be able to recover the data on the drive somehow so it's been sitting around ever since. Now I just haven't got round to throwing it out yet.
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  18. Member hech54's Avatar
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    It's funny how nerdy geeks brag about how many drives that have died while in their possession, yet NEVER entertain the thought that they had something to do with those failures.
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  19. Originally Posted by johns0 View Post
    The study was done with their own hard drives,because of this it's not reliable since we do not know how the hdd were treated and if they all had the same operating conditions plus also if they bought a batch of drives that a segment were faulty that would skew the report since if the batch was sent to several stores to be sold then the failure rate would look much less and be unnoticed.
    Actually you do know that, they released all their data along with usage patterns and operating conditions, the chart is just a simplified summary of what all the data shows.
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    ....Click....Click....Click....die....
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    Originally Posted by tun.tin View Post
    ....Click....Click....Click....die....
    No, no, no, if a drive clicks there is a way (but of course not guaranteed) to make it stop.

    See this:


    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMhdEp3SM_w

    But beware, it may void the guarantee!

    Last edited by newpball; 8th Feb 2015 at 14:10.
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    Originally Posted by johns0 View Post
    Nothing wrong with seagate,been using them for years.
    Originally Posted by johns0 View Post
    The study was done with their own hard drives
    The drives you've been using for years, are they someone else's drives? Otherwise it sounds like you're using a similar methodology.
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  23. I'd say pretty much every drive manufacturer has had problem designs at one time or another. I'm sure someone will have a story why Conner, Quantum, Maxtor or Samsung (just to name a few) drives were so bad that the company doesn't exist anymore. But I also remember how the WD 1GB Caviar were renowned for failing quickly. How the Deathstar name first applied to the IBM 75GXP line of Deskstar drives (it's unfortunate that they kept the name as the other lines are just fine). HGST (Hitachi) bought the business from IBM and Toshiba now owns it. Seagate is the only manufacturer I'm aware of that had to release multiple firmware updates to correct major blunders with their drives.

    Although I've repaired every drive brands, I've only been personally involved with hard drive failure on Maxtor 7540AV drives and Seagate 7200.10/11 (actually the .11 hasn't failed, but it's singing, that's how it begins). The Maxtors (five drives) were in the shop's computers and all had their bearing go bad at the same time. My Seagate .10 had the firmware update, but that didn't prevent it from starting to sing and eventually die, luckily it was still under warranty and I got a 7200.12 instead. Since I got bit by Seagate I shudder at the thought of buying another one.

    Doesn't help that they have taken the position of bargain basement drive supplier. Their bad show on the Backblaze study does nothing to inspire confidence. It might be biased in some way and may not be representative of every product Seagate makes, but there is one thing that's clear, someone has a quality control issue.
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  24. Originally Posted by nic2k4 View Post
    I'd say pretty much every drive manufacturer has had problem designs at one time or another. I'm sure someone will have a story why Conner, Quantum, Maxtor or Samsung (just to name a few) drives were so bad that the company doesn't exist anymore. But I also remember how the WD 1GB Caviar were renowned for failing quickly. How the Deathstar name first applied to the IBM 75GXP line of Deskstar drives (it's unfortunate that they kept the name as the other lines are just fine). HGST (Hitachi) bought the business from IBM and Toshiba now owns it. Seagate is the only manufacturer I'm aware of that had to release multiple firmware updates to correct major blunders with their drives.
    That bears repeating. Every manufacturer has put out some dodgy drives. It so happens that recently Seagate had two bum drives; the 1.5 and 3 TB drives in the Backblaze study. They used a good many of them, which is bound to make Seagate look very bad when it's graphed. OTOH, their 4 TB drives performed okay.

    I have two of the Seagate 4 TB drives in external enclosures, and two of those infamous 3 TB drives as internals. Got 'em cheap with Newegg promos. No problem with them in over a year, but I'm keeping an eye on them, and since everything is backed up regularly, I'm not worried. In fact, I'm curious as to how long they go before they fail.

    I too wonder about you guys who've lost so many hard drives. I can only remember two over the last 15 years: one a Maxtor, and one a Hitachi (I think). The Maxtor got really hot and was screeching when it failed, so I remember that one distinctly.

    All my old hard drives go into semi-retirement in my wife's computer at some point. Usually when they're just too small any more. She's got a bunch of them: one OS drive clone for emergency boot, the others for files and backups. They just won't die.
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    I have had drives die on me-only Western Digital as I recall. I have had drive incompatabilities in external enclosures with SATA/SAS RAID cards, and the ony manufacturer I have not had problems with are Hitachi. I prefer Hitachi drives for internal use, but have been buying cheap external seagate drives for bulk storage-copy from internal drives to external and fil up the external and buy another.
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    Originally Posted by fritzi93 View Post
    That bears repeating. Every manufacturer has put out some dodgy drives. It so happens that recently Seagate had two bum drives; the 1.5 and 3 TB drives in the Backblaze study. They used a good many of them, which is bound to make Seagate look very bad when it's graphed. OTOH, their 4 TB drives performed okay.
    That's how it works, you provide shoddy products and you will get a bad reputation.
    Remember Firestone?

    But to avoid adding insult to injury you make sure your next generation of drives are better quality and backed up by extra quality guarantees, not just in words but also in deeds. Yes, that means you have to cut your margins, it's gonna cost you to improve your quality. A simple ad saying you are committed to quality won't do! In fact if you do not change anything in your production such ad will harm you more as it shows that you have great disrespect for your customer base.

    But that is exactly what is wrong now with Seagate, Seagate is acting like nothing happened, nothing needs to improve.
    That means, in my opinion, that they are doomed.

    Originally Posted by fritzi93 View Post
    I too wonder about you guys who've lost so many hard drives. I can only remember two over the last 15 years: one a Maxtor, and one a Hitachi (I think). The Maxtor got really hot and was screeching when it failed, so I remember that one distinctly.
    How much do you use your drives?

    If you use your drives for capturing videos, heavy image and video processing their lifespan shortens a lot, at least in my experience!
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  27. My usage scenario is primarily capturing (with Hauppauge HD-PVR) and editing the captures. Secondarily, ripping my Blu-Rays, of which I have nearly 300 now, and re-encoding /putting into MKV container. I don't suppose I use them as hard as many other members here, but they see a lot of reads/writes. Then again, I doubt any members here use their drives as hard as Backblaze does.

    I don't trust those 3 TB Seagates for archiving, so what the hell, I use them for capturing and ripping. If they die, no big deal.

    I have a mix of other drives in my HTPC for documents, backups, and still others for archiving videos. Plus several 2 TB drives in externals, with the same media. And those newer 4 TB externals.

    I suppose I need a NAS, but I keep putting it off.

    [EDIT] I knew about the reputation of those 3 TB drives before buying them. Newegg was blowing them out, cheap, and many of the more knowledgeable reviews pointed out the firmware problem. I tried updating the firmware and failed, it just wouldn't take. Never tried to update a hard drive's firmware before, so dunno about the significance of that. I also had trouble with getting my mobo to recognize them when partitioned as GPT, without disappearing on reboot. (Hence the attempt to update the firmware). So I had to partition them as MBR (two partitions). They've been fine since then.

    Hey I'm not defending Seagate particularly, just pointing out that brand loyalty (or brand hatred, for that matter) is, hmm, often misplaced. Things change, bad products get discontinued, and new products come out. Seagate also has drives that have performed well.
    Last edited by fritzi93; 8th Feb 2015 at 19:25.
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    Originally Posted by fritzi93 View Post
    I don't trust those 3 TB Seagates for archiving, so what the hell, I use them for capturing and ripping. If they die, no big deal.
    Good strategy, but I like to use 1TB drives for that, much cheaper!
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  29. Originally Posted by newpball View Post
    Originally Posted by fritzi93 View Post
    I don't trust those 3 TB Seagates for archiving, so what the hell, I use them for capturing and ripping. If they die, no big deal.
    Good strategy, but I like to use 1TB drives for that, much cheaper!
    You're right, they're rather over-sized for scratch drives.

    Just checked my order history and they were $110 with promo. This was when prices were still high after the Thailand flood, when a 2 TB Samsung I also bought was $130. I'm a sucker for a deal and tend to be over-confident about getting something to work regardless.

    That GPT thing was puzzling at the time, since the mobo is a decent Asus board from 12/13, with UEFI BIOS. Each time the drives disappeared, I had to re-install the SATA drivers to see them again (as unallocated in Disk Management).

    The 3 TB drives I got came in external USB3 enclosures. Seagate was obviously unloading them , knowing full well they had firmware problems. It's my understanding that the enclosure controller's USB/SATA bridge was configured for 4k LBA, even though the drive behind still emulates 512 byte sectors, which I found out later with a bit of searching. That allows a MBR partition larger than 2 TB to be recognized. It seems most (all?) of the problems that home users had occurred when using the drives internally. Which is why the last of them (ST3000DM001_CH166) were sold as externals.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/292184-32-partition-table#6100497

    [EDIT] Sorry for the digression. I too am looking forward to seeing those 8 TB drives get cheaper. I'll take three please.
    Last edited by fritzi93; 9th Feb 2015 at 17:51.
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    Other than a few very rare highly documented instances (e.g. IBM/Hitachi "Deathstar", Seagate 3TB firmware), all HD reliability data (whether from Backblaze or personal experience) is statistically insignificant.

    Look beyond the Backblaze graph (i.e. read the rest of the article and comments) and you'll see that the 3TB Seagates (with their "high" failure rates) are a single model (ST3000DM001), likely purchased from a single production batch. The same circumstances (single model, single production batch) hold true for the HGST and all other drives.

    The data shows that there are/were 3,846 Seagate 3TB drives on which this data is based. This compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of this particular model, is statistically insignificant. If a large percentage of owners of these drives (say >50%) experienced the same failure rate (~16 out of 100), then we may have significant cause to state a general failure on the part of Seagate.

    There is anecdotal evidence that there was an issue with the firmware of this particular line of drives (including a number of other drives utilizing 1TB platters) that was a firmware update by Seagate.

    In addition, there is the unknown state of the other hardware in which these "high" (e.g. Seagate 3TB) or "low" (HGST 3&4TB) failure drives are/were used in. It seems likely that like drive for like drive (i.e. Seagate 3TB for Seagate 3TB) swaps were done. What if the host hardware had power supply or other issues? Perhaps this will be addressed and diagnosed in the extended data recently released by Backblaze.

    Compare Backblaze's 3,846 Segate's against your 2,3 perhaps >5 drives and it's clear that a "OMG! Seagate sux because it failed on me !" response is confirmation bias. While having one of three drives fail would be a 33.% failure rate for YOU, it hardly extrapolates across tens, hundreds or millions of drives. And certainly not indicative of the failure rate of the of hundreds or perhaps billions of hard drives currently in use.

    I'm not an fanboy of Seagate or any other manufacturer. I currently have ~24 hard drives (3,4 and 6TB Seagate, WD, HGST and Samsung) in use. A couple of these drives (those out of warranty) run 24/7 as personal network shares and I fully expect them to fail in the next 1-2 years because of their high use. Just last week, I had two hard drives die. A 2TB Samsung and a 3TB WD, both over 3 years old and out of warranty. Their last days were spent running 24/7 for months which probably lead to their inevitable death. Does this mean that I won't buy another Samsung or WD drive? No. I'll continue my strategy of the past 3-4 years. I'll use my drives continually until the brink of expiration of warranty, then either retire them as backup or use them as network shares. To replace them, I'll buy new larger drives for the same amount of my original purchase and start the cycle again.

    While many will disagree, I see hard drives today as a disposable commodity. I've posted many times on this forum that I have a duplicate backup of all my data on a second and for those very important files, third hard drive. These are drives that are past the "break-in" stage and while they may fail, there's always a backup!

    The way I figure it, if I put aside $0.50 a day ($182.50 / year), I can afford a new larger hard drive every year with a cost of less than <$.04 / GB. When large capacity SSDs or other storage format becomes available at a competitive cost, I'll migrate my data to those.

    I'll end this post with words of wisdom that have been stated by so many before me: "Hard drives WILL fail!" and "Backup, backup, backup!"
    Last edited by lingyi; 9th Feb 2015 at 20:19. Reason: grammar
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