We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
So how many more stories of these drives being absolute garbage do we all have?
Of all the drives I've ever owned. From Hitachi, Maxxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and others...this is the only one I've had that died. Apparently this is a trend with these particular drives?
This one is currently a paperweight
The 3tb capacity drives- nearly all of the various models and brands- had huge issues- but these were among the worst drives I've ever seen. 2011 was a rough year- at the time I was helping fill in building white boxes and we used to order hard drives by the pallet from our VAR- the flooding in Thailand really screwed with our supply line for hard drives and jacked the prices wayyy up. I remember the day we opened the first full case of these (~20 drives iirc) and only 4 passed initial burn in testing. Well over half didn't even survive the initial clone. It was bad enough that our sales rep drove over with a UHAUL and a pallet of WD replacements later that week. Seagate also dropped the typical 3 year warranty to only 1 year about that same time. Needless to say we switched to WD and didn't look back. The big joke at the time was they had white labeled a new 'death star' hard drive (IBM/Hitachi Deskstar drives were notoriously bad) that had more storage than the old ones. At one point there was a class action lawsuit or two but I don't think they went anywhere. Huge mess. I will say the ones that survived burn in may have been fine long term, but we just did a full blanket swap with WD drives as it wasn't worth the risk.