Hello all,

Well, another Seagate 500GB hard drive has bitten the dust and finally failed.

Yesterday my home server locked up when I tried to access the network share for one of my media drives. The drive spun up, but then the whole system locked up. I thought this was unusual but gave it the benefit of the doubt and just reset the system. All was fine for the rest of the day, but then this morning it did it again. I checked the event logs and there it was, one of the disks failing and having access errors. Yet again it was one of the 500GB Seagate disks, of which I have had 3 fail this year already. So, I reset the system again and proceeded to copy all the data from it to another drive. Thankfully, it was only the backup drive, so nothing was lost besides the backups. Once all the data was copied from the drive, I removed it from the system, and reset the drive letter of the backup drive to the new disk so the scripts continued to run properly.

The disk was also showing lots of SMART errors, including over 200 reallocated sectors, the same as the other 3 failed Seagate drives from this year. Something tells me that Seagate have something wrong with their manufacturing process for those drives. A friend told me that the drives labeled .10 are good drives, and see very few failures, but the drives labeled .11, like mine, are very bad drives and should be avoided at all costs.

All in all, a disaster avoided, but the question remains why do these disks keep failing? I guess I'll never know, but one thing is for sure, I won't be buying any more Seagate disks after the 4 disks that have failed on me this year alone. My advice is also don't purchase any Seagate disks. I've found that Samsung disks are very reliable so far. I've had 3x1TB Samsung F1 disks since January this year and they're all perfect at 9 months old, and a 1TB Samsung F2, which is 2 months old. Once this Seagate 500GB has been returned, I'm going to get another 1TB Samsung F2 drive to replace it.

1TB drives are well down in price compared to 6 months ago, so its well worth it if you're about to replace a failing drive yourself, or simply need an upgrade. Until things change otherwise, I think I'll stick with Samsung drives.

Andy (Admin)

Seagate.... 'nuff said.

Their slogan should be: "Seagate, harddrive failures fit for a king!"

I've had about 12 Seagate drives in my life. One is still operational. To compare it I got 69 Samsung drives. Two has ever failed. I got 29 Western Digital drives. One has failed (by my own hand). 9 Maxtor drives, all still working.

If I would recommend a brand I would recommend Samsung F1/F2 for reliability, low temperature and low noise. Western Digital Veliciraptor for speed. Or an Intel SSD for the best of all worlds.

Funny thing. As I said to Hacker?pcs, I've been hearing a lot about failing hard drives, and it makes me uneasy about the 1Tb Western Digital my family bought last year. I suppose that nowadays HDD failure rates are because, as everone and their mother has now a PC, companies prefer to churn out components as fast as they can without having enough quality checks. Also cheap raw materials could be the reason.



-Commanderraf

Just thought I'd point out that I've had three SeaGates, and all three are still in perfect working order. One's been in use since 2001.

The .11s are crap the one in the comp nxt to me needs pc reset after power on for it to be ready for detection always has. Da pc still needs new ram as one stick was dead will have ram rmed like is happening and then when I sort that out I will buy a new 1tb hdd. Most likley WD Black Edition

I will NEVER buy Seagate disks, no matter what the reason is. WD is not better though

I've had a Seagate 40GB IDE and a Seagate 250GB SATA die for no apparent reason and yet my maxtor has been running since 2007 with no problems.
Going to stick with Samsung and WD drives

I'd certainly agree with recommending Samsung F1s, They're amazing drives, quiet, reliable and great performers. Well worth the very small extra you pay for them.

Hehe the F2's are out now

I just rang eBuyer, the RMA has been accepted and its being collected tomorrow. The drive is dis-continued (I wonder why?) so I can choose another drive with the credit they apply to my account. Great! Another 1TB Samsung F2 here I come

Josh, the F1's are faster than the F2's, but the F2's are quieter and use less power, so its your choice which you choose F2 is also cheaper

Hehe, I need power usage and noise levels down
WD 1TB green drives are really good aswell, got 2 of them

Makes me rethink getting a 1TB Seagate as my next external drive--wouln't want to lose 1TB of downloaded betas, warez, music Linux ISOs

Almost any drive is good except Hitachi and Seagate. I do recommend Samsung for 1TB's though.

Never had any problem with Seagate harddrives.
though there is a speed difference between the 1tb and 1.5tb drives.

Maxtor failed on me 3 times, where 1 time in 2001/2002 when the harddisk ''melted''.
Also WD is not great, but the smaller ones are better, like 40gb ones in HP/Compaq Machines, was running since 2003 and in 2009 when I bought it it is still as fast an strong as ever.

Maxtor never failed on me, my 8GB from 1998 is still going.

Funny, I've never had a Segate fail on me and I even have one inside my old-parts server (its a 10GB). That is a pretty old one and I havent noticed any failures on it either.

The hitachi drives I got with my laptops have lasted fine it's just they were slow so I replaced them.

I've had a good experience with Western Digital Drives, and I've only had one fail so far (that drive was constantly on in an office for over 8 years, so it's not so bad).

I've just checked three of my hard drives that failed (500GB, 400GB and 250GB) over the past four years and you'll never guess what make they are...

By any chance is the external USB drive seagate?

No, its Western Digital.

I'm nervous, all my files are on seagates

I best check the SMART status of my seagates

Never rely on SMART for knowing if a disk is going to fail or not. I was lucky this time that mine did show signs of dying. Always keep backups, no matter what make or model the disk is.

I have no backups of anything. I am going to backup now.

My main comp's primary maxtor has worked since 2005. so i guess i will only buy maxtors considering everone else likes the too.