Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Id rather fork out for a Drobo 5D and fill it full of WD Red 4tb drives to be honest.

Same here. I had so many issues with LaCie back in 2007 and again in 2009 that I just gave up. Lost TB of data on these things and when I swapped out with a different drive, the LaCie controllers died shortly after.

My Drobo has been running strong for 4 years. Only 1 drive failed out of the 8 so far. I'm about to replace them on the 5th year one by one since they are spinning 24/7.

Only thing I wish for is the ability to afford the new Drobo B800 series cuz the Drobo Pro is slow. It takes almost 24 hours to replace a drive with all the data I have on the array. Luckily I use RAID-6 so I still have a spare.

----------

Seagate = automatic no sale.

Can't trust that much data to be lost to Seagate.

There would be a change in connections (whatever comes after USB 3.1, TB v.2) before I could fill up 25TB of space. How would you even back that up?

USB 4 and TB 3
 
We're running hundreds of Seagate spindles and have had only one failure in several years.

It's not about brand. It's about what batch you get, the running environment (heat kills) and just pure dumb luck.

Your best bet is to protect your data (with proper backups, not RAID) and rely on warranties when they're available. Storage is ridiculously cheap anyway; if you really need redundancy you can afford it.
 
My anecdotal 2 cents: my entire meticulously ripped, tagged, and playlisted 120,000 track music collection wiped out by a Seagate 4TB drive failure in a Thunderbolt adapter daisy chained with a display and 2 other drives. Replaced it with an identical backup drive and 2 days later it failed as well, leaving me screwed out of 5 years of work. Both Seagate Recovery and Encase Recovery said the heads crashed into the platter leaving only unrecoverable dust behind. Just seeing the Seagate logo now triggers post-traumatic stress seizures in my brain.

A had a similar experience with Seagate. All my music (and much more) lost forever.
 
TL;DR: Drives are made by big successful companies. Drives fail. Some precautions to follow to minimize problems.

Seagate is a public company with almost $14B in revenues. WD with almost $18B

Someone is purchasing their drives. There are large OEMs like Dell, Apple, Lenovo, and others who sell to consumers and enterprises. With such large numbers, there will be failures.

There are a handful of anecdotes here indicating issues. Not thousands, not millions. Considering that each company is delivering millions of drives to their customers every year, the numbers indicated here, there, and everyone are tiny in comparison. Combine that with the natural reflex action of wanting to complain whenever there is an issue, and harping on it again and again in a flailing attempt of "sticking it to the man", we learn little of the overall reliability of any particular drive series.

I'm not discounting failures that people have experienced. No one likes this at all.

If the companies buying disk drives did see a big problem with a particular company, we'd hear about it, and the companies would do something that would be heard worldwide. Both WDC and Seagate are public companies. Every quarter they answer to their shareholders.

Like others, I have purchased drives from several companies, some bare drives, some as externals. I've had a few drives fail, mostly all well out of warranty.

Some tips: if installing your own, be sure you know what you are doig. Take care when installing, avoiding bumps, and follow anti-static measures. Sometimes a simple bump or static discharge can render damage that takes a while to appear.

Keep bare drives in their anti-static bags when outside your computer or drive chassis. Avoid plastic bags or boxes, unless they were specifically designed for anti-static measures. Even better, retain the original packaging that protects drives from bumps and shock. Avoid purchase of drives that are sold without protective packaging. You never know how that drive may have been handled before it was sold to you.

For any drive, internal or external, don't move it while it is on and spinning. Don't! This is the most common way of damaging a drive as the heads float only microns above the spinning disc surface. A simple bump or fast movement no matter how gentle can slap the head against the disc surface.

Know your disk repair tools. Many times, it is the OS that has corrupted the file system, and most people don't know how to repair the problem. It could be a corrupted OS, a faulty app, or even flaky or loose cables contributing.

Bottom line: some drives fail, and sometimes it is due to inherent failures and sometimes due to the way a user has handled or used the drive.
 
Looked cool until I saw the word "Seagate". Beware.

----------

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've always bought Seagate HDD and SSD and only had 1 catastrophic failure and maybe 2 DOA. That's out of about 2,200

Well, Apple hasn't been so lucky with their Seagate drives in iMacs and MacBooks. So many recalls. They should have just bought from Hitachi.

----------

My anecdotal 2 cents: my entire meticulously ripped, tagged, and playlisted 120,000 track music collection wiped out by a Seagate 4TB drive failure in a Thunderbolt adapter daisy chained with a display and 2 other drives. Replaced it with an identical backup drive and 2 days later it failed as well, leaving me screwed out of 5 years of work. Both Seagate Recovery and Encase Recovery said the heads crashed into the platter leaving only unrecoverable dust behind. Just seeing the Seagate logo now triggers post-traumatic stress seizures in my brain.

You shouldn't ever use software made by the hard drive company unless required to (like on the WD RAID drives). CCC and Disk Utility are safer. Still, I would not be surprised at all if it wouldn't have made any difference for you since Seagate drives are mechanically terrible.

----------

Can we drop the "this brand is better than that brand" as it gets most people absolutely nowhere!

No. Especially when comparing two products that are exactly the same except in reliability.

----------


Finally someone used a direct link the Imgur image instead of posting a link to the Imgur page with the image on it. Yes, Thunderbolt is a ripoff still.
 
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've always bought Seagate HDD and SSD and only had 1 catastrophic failure and maybe 2 DOA. That's out of about 2,200

2,200 ? I can only assume you mean in your business. We always had Seagate drives and currently about 11k in production (datacenter) - they are obviously Enterprise graded SAS and SATA drives so I can't really talk about consumer ones (my home PC also runs the 15k rpm 600GB SAS drives).

Re Hitachi .. We tried changing once but we had a 23% failure rate. When we had two disks in a Raid 6 failing we decided to finally stick what we knew. Seagate. According to our internal statistic our DC guys swap about 1-2 Seagate drives per day. Compared to 5-8 Hitachi drives. Bearing in mind that those Seagate drives usually run for 2-3 years whereas the Hitachi swaps happening after weeks, if lucky maybe 2 months.
 
Last edited:
I can't wait for the day that spinning discs are no longer the most cost effective storage option.
 
I can't wait until terabyte SSD's are the norm.

At this rate, it'll be 10+ years before that'll happen.

Regular hard drives seem to be stuck at the 4TB mark, so I guess that's why all of these companies are trying to do these RAID solutions. I'm sure they are out there, but 99% of consumers don't need 25TB's of data in their home, much less 2 of these as a backup.
 
I can't wait until terabyte SSD's are the norm.

At this rate, it'll be 10+ years before that'll happen.

Regular hard drives seem to be stuck at the 4TB mark, so I guess that's why all of these companies are trying to do these RAID solutions. I'm sure they are out there, but 99% of consumers don't need 25TB's of data in their home, much less 2 of these as a backup.

You are correct. Not everyone needs 25 TB, let alone 5 TB.

As for 1TB SSD, Samsung Evo and Micron M500 have been less than $500 in recent weeks if you shop carefully. At $0.50 per GB, these are well within reach. Even 1TB is more than most people require, as not everyone has a huge media or photo library.

I think the challenge is that while these 1TB SSDs are available at retail, their may not be enough to meet OEM demands.

And factory capacity is indeed the limiting factor, as it will take quite a long time to develop the flash silicon capacity to meet the many petabytes capacity of HDD production.
 
So in other words, you guys would by 2 of these devices? Then store one of them off site, then bring it home to update the data?

Wow.

Depends on how your setup is configured, but certainly yes that's one option. Understand that many people aren't using these to store blu-rays they've downloaded and home videos they're messing around with as a hobby, but are using them for their business, in which case the value of off-site backup is priceless. As others have said, a large RAID0 array is not a backup -- in fact it's the opposite as it greatly increases your chances of failure. If you have 5 or 8 drives in a massive RAID array for anything of value you HAVE to have an offsite copy of the data. Preferably something updated nightly, but weekly would suffice for many.
 
I almost bit the bullet and bought a LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt when I saw it on the outlet store but was scared off by the measly 180-day warranty. If they are so sure of the quality of their products then why won't they put the full warranty on their refurbs like Apple does?
 
I almost bit the bullet and bought a LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt when I saw it on the outlet store but was scared off by the measly 180-day warranty. If they are so sure of the quality of their products then why won't they put the full warranty on their refurbs like Apple does?

Chances are you'll uncover any issues early on.

If you want the full warranty, I guess you'll need to pay more.

You may want to consider using certain credit cards which double the warranty. I use my American Express which both doubles the warranty, as well as extends return privileges for full refund on my purchases.

Some VISA and Master Card credit cards have this benefit, too.
 
re: stop quoting BackBlaze

I don't take issue with The Register challenging the validity of BackBlaze's claims about consumer drives having a reliability similar to / better than enterprise equivalents. That's a very questionable claim just based on my personal experience. (We have a number of Dell servers that are 7+ years old now and the original drives are still working fine in all of them. Those are all enterprise class drives. Meanwhile, we've already had several failures in RAID arrays when we just purchased new SATA drives off Amazon.com or what-not and upgraded older/smaller capacity drives. Those were all consumer grade.)

But just based on BackBlaze's fairly extensive purchase and use of Seagate branded drives and the reported percentage of failures they encountered with them, it tells me Seagate is putting out a second-rate product. I realize their study isn't ideal (especially with the relative few drives purchased from makers like Toshiba), but I could read between the lines there and disregard the stats on those models.


I don't question you experience, but let's stop quoting that article.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/
 
But just based on BackBlaze's fairly extensive purchase and use of Seagate branded drives and the reported percentage of failures they encountered with them, it tells me Seagate is putting out a second-rate product.

Maybe second-rate when you put them in an environment they were not designed for. And let's not mention the inhomogeneous conditions.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.