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
I installed cctv DVRs and NVRs for 15 years featuring hard drives from multiple manufacturers.
Out of hundreds, a single WD drive has failed (a 4tb WD red that spun for 7 years before failure) and nearly every of multiple dozens of Seagate drives failed. The NVRs/DVRs that I used these Seagate 3tb drives in all failed within 12 months of deployment and cost our company tens of thousands of dollars in service calls to replace them, all at our own cost due to being in the warranty period.
Never again. WD for life.
iirc I bought 6 of them and all 6 failed in the first 3 years lol
Yeah, I lost 2 of the damn things. They were free, but damn.
I used a bunch of them for quite a few years. A handful of them did die less then a year after putting them in an mdadm raid5, but I never had any issues RMA'ing them so it never bothered me very much. At some point the replacements + remaining ones stopped failing so often, and I still have a few that were in recent use up until I retired the server they were in a few months ago -- at least one or two of said drives were in operation since they were new drives / 3TB was a good price point.
But yeah, they weren't great. Honestly I don't remember any brand's 3TB drives being all that great, and really it made more sense to buy based on the RMA process of the company then expecting any sort of actual reliability.
Possibly the most unreliable drive there's ever been.
I had one of these, didn't last too long before problems started showing. Got rid of it before it died.
Heh, this particular model is well known for having a high failure rate. Mine did pretty good, considering. I bought four when they were brand new and put them into my server, running OpenSolaris so that I could use ZFS. Ran them for a couple of years, then the server ended up being stored in a metal shed in a forest for five years. Used it for a short while then built a new server. Three of the four disks had a ton of bad sectors, but ZFS came to the rescue and let me transfer everything off without losing a thing - it just took a while. I used the fourth drive as a backup drive for a few months before it started throwing errors.
I still love Seagate and have always had great luck with them, it's just this particular model that had issues :P
Seagate Barracuda was so bad it literally became an inside joke in our school.
One of the classrooms had like around 10 computers, every single one of them had Barracuda on board.
I remember the PC I was working on started malfunctioning, so I jokingly slammed my desk with a fist, and to my surprise, the PC spit out a bluescreen, soon it turned out to be a HDD failure. I knew I wasn't in any trouble, I didn't even hit the table that hard.
The very next day, the PC on a completely different side of the room failed to boot. Yep, another Barracuda bit the dust that day.
Fast forward the next six or so days, all HDDs were dead. Literally all of the Barracudas we had died within a week.
It was so funny, because one of my classmates even said that mounting these Barracudas on school PC's was a bad idea, because he had one at home before and it died on him, but we all thought that he was just talking shit.
Same here. In the last 20 years, this drive is the only one that ever failed on me. (I had 2 of those actually, both failed around the same time.)
i'm a desktop user and i had 2 of those fail
They're not that bad. WD/HGST is just a lot better.
I use one for Plex and it has 4 years and 9 months up time
Can confirm. I had three. All failed within a year.
I got burned by some Seagate drives... about 25 years ago. And never bought another. Western Digital for me...
I've heard these are so bad that some people get PTSD just looking at this label.
Mine still works after being on for near 10 years now no issue only now starting to get some bad sectors
I use the Backblaze HD data when I teach workshops in survival analysis to data scientists (I'm a statistician) and indeed according to the data this is by far the worst HD among all the consumer HD they use. This is true even after adjusting for numbers of cycles and power-on hours.
The hazard ratio, a conventional measure of risk if you will, for this drive is approximately 25 times worse than that of the reference drive (another Seagate). That means they die at a rate that is 25 times worse (everything else being equal).
The other interesting part that emerged from the data is that Seagate both produced the worst and also one of the best drives in terms of survival (yet the damage was done by that model).
I bought 12 of these back in 2012 for my first RAID-based NAS. Had 7 of them fail with bad sectors within 6 months, usually one every 4-ish weeks. All warranty replacement drives came with 6-month warranties, so I lost out on the remaining 2+ years of the original warranties.
In 2013 I upgraded to 4TB WD Reds and never had a single problem for nearly 6 years until I upgraded to larger drives.
My first NAS had external USB drives. Never again. Now I only buy the Seagate Exos drives. Working great so far and they are cheap.
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.
In my experience Seagate in general has always been a regretful choice. I will only ever buy WD for the foreseeable future.
That drive is so bad it's got its own Wikipedia article, like the Sinking of the Titanic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
Apparently the failures are due to two disimilar, incompatible materials used in the parking ramp.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/08/apple-time-capsule-failure-hard-drive/
i have that drive, hes been chugging along for years WOOT I GOT LUCKY!!!
My experience with Seagate is:
Either they are super hard drive 9000 or die within a few years.
I had one of those, and it screamed until it died. I think I have an OLD video of it.
I am using the 8TB model in my QNAP. So, far no issues. The drives were previously used in a QNAP NAS per the seller.
Whew... I have 6 of the ST3000DM008-2DM166 in a RAID array. And to be honest, they were only so-so, so I'm not actually relieved that mine are newer/different. I had a couple of failures over the years. I started with 5.
1 out of 5 is still in mainline operation, one is my hot spare.
3 out of 5 failed and got sent back to Seagate for a refurb
1 of my replacement drives had an "unexpected sense" that I guess corrected itself after a rebuild.
4.1 years of operation
I'm definitely not thrilled.
I looked at one once and it died.
In fact I tend to kill Seagate's a lot lol, I generally avoid the brand.
To be fair to them. I've had a lot of Seagate drives and they're all still kicking (touch wood). It's just this 3TB version a lot of people seem to have had an issue with.
Mine died about a year into use after shucking from an external enclosure.
I found that there are at least 3 types of HDD user.
Got loads of 2TB models and they’ve been solid for ever. If I recall there were issues with this and maybe also the 5TB
I have a 2tb model that runs fine just on a specific setup. If I change the power outlet the drive is connected it fails. Crazy af