Unreliable hard drives

[Protec]

I have two Seagate hard drives from my PC that have failed recently. The one on the left had around 13,000 hours when it died. It just started to re-spin every now and again and eventually went into a loop of re-spinning. It was left in the PC for a while until it eventually was undetected by the computer. The one on the right was installed later and went faulty today and now has 1 bad sector, only had 9198 hours! Suddenly I couldn't access my files and eventually it started working again. Not very impressive considering neither drives are that old. Left one made: 12/2013 and right one made: 12/5/2016. I'm sure this isn't a fault with my computer as other drives in the computer have been working reliably. Luckily I have my data backed up in several locations in and out of the PC. Any ideas what is causing such fast failure or is Seagate really this bad?

Edited February 17, 2020 by ZeroHour
Fixing some formatting bugs - ZH

[3s-gtech]

Seagate have had some really, really bad batches of drives over the years. There have been plenty of good Seagate drives, but their bad runs rather put me off. I’d rather SSD it up to 1TB now, I only buy HDDs for servers and NASs now.

[MatthewL]

I lost a Seagate years ago and have never used once since. Only other one to go was an OCZ SSD a few years ago. Tend to stick to WD and Samsung now.

[localzuk]

Yeah, I've had a lot of bad experiences with Seagate drives too - don't touch them these days. I stick to WD and HGST. Though, HGST were bought by WD, so that makes me pretty much a WD only man these days!

[localzuk]

Oh, and coincidentally - https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/02/13/seagate-12tb-drive-failure-rate-backblaze/ another model of drive with high failure rates compared to competitors. Looking at their stats on that article, every single Seagate disk they looked at was worse than HGST and Toshiba.

[markwilfan]

I've only ever had Seagates die. Careful too as "HP" drives were made by Seagate. Not sure if they still are

[Protec]

All of the ones I have had die were Seagate. My WD, Toshiba, Hitachi and my ancient Maxtor drive continue to work.

[Norphy]

I've only ever had Seagates die. Careful too as "HP" drives were made by Seagate. Not sure if they still are

 

Hard drives from all vendors fail. I’ve had failed hard drives from Seagate, WD, HGST, Samsung and many others that have been absorbed by the current duopoly. You get dud models from all manufacturers, I’ve seen some real stinkers from WD in the past and let’s not forget the notorious 75GXP and 60GXP from IBM, the forerunner of everyone’s current darlings at HGST.

 

I’d also be careful any using Backblaze’s data when deciding which hard drive to buy. Yes, it is certainly interesting but unless you’re planning to build a data centre of your own and run them vast hard drive arrays 24/7, I’m not sure just how valid their observations are for the average user.

[Protec]

The drives in my main desktop run about 10 hours a day. It's had 4 Seagates and all of them got bad sectors. 2 of them are still in use but are not reliable as they both have bad sectors and one has over 70k hours. Another PC has a Toshiba in and that PC runs 24/7 and constantly records video from the CCTV. The drive has been fine.

 

[HTCPCP]

Have stopped with seagate a few years ago in all critical applications. Any home builds that require spinning rust disks, then I use WD/HGST. Got burned with a load of Lacie Drivers a few years ago which all used Seagate mobile drives.