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Thread ID: 110053 2010-06-01 21:06:00 Are Seagates junk? Nomad (952) PC World Chat
Post ID Timestamp Content User
1105858 2010-06-02 09:22:00 Seagate and WD both seem to have the lowest failure rates I've found in HDD manufacturers. I've laso noticed that we seem to get failures of both those brands in batches - perhaps firmware issues or something? And extraordinarily low failure rates outside of those batches. Hell I still have some old 2GB drives from both Seagate & WD running here, hah. inphinity (7274)
1105859 2010-06-02 10:12:00 yeah. i have an old 4.3gb seagate drive which had win 98 on it. i had no use for it so i popped windows 3.11 on it. i also have a 250mb seagate hard drive which still works. goodiesguy (15316)
1105860 2010-06-02 10:16:00 The only thing you can be sure of is if you've got an IBM Deskstar it will break

There's nothing you can be sure of with hard drives except that the next one will be bigger. I still have a Nov 2000 IBM Deskstar running.
PaulD (232)
1105861 2010-06-02 12:08:00 But for how long? It will break eventually, too. Even if it doesn't suffer from the same defect as the ... defective ones which were infamous for dying.

You can also be sure if you have a Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, etc etc that they will all die.

That is why we make backups. If you have a good backup plan you don't have to give a damn about reliability of your drive.

Of course it's nice to not have to restore every five minutes but if that was the case I would hope to see a change to a different brand of hard drive...
Agent_24 (57)
1105862 2010-06-02 22:57:00 I've got a Seagate medalist ST32122A 2GB (Malaysia), an ST34321A (China), a pair of Barracuda ATA IV 20GBs (Singapore) and a 40GB that I can't get to at present that are all in good order. I ran them all recently while looking for a lost file. The 2GBs have had well over 10 years use, being installed in the mid '90s and the 20/40GBs are coming up on 10 years.

So far I've only had one apparent failure, and I say 'apparent' because I kept the 'faulty' disk and tried it recently while I has a USB enclosure open and it was working fine.

I put the longevity down to switching off every night which means that they have only about 55/60% of the hours they'd run if left on 24/7.

I'm on WD now and if I get half as good service out of those I'll be happy!

Cheers

Billy 8-{)
Billy T (70)
1105863 2010-06-03 01:42:00 Why did you switch to Western Digital? Agent_24 (57)
1105864 2010-06-03 01:46:00 Drives measured in GB are too young to say if they are reliable yet. ;) Old drives topped out at 10 MB for top of the line. Those new-fangled floppy drives have just faded away, cassettes seem to be still in need of work, but they are better than they were.
For reliable storage the old punched mylar tapes are still pretty tough. (Readers are hard to get at bargain prices lately, and getting harder.) Punch cards are no better, still humidity sensitive.
R2x1 (4628)
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