this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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[–] zod000@lemmy.ml 22 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the "deathstars" (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I'd personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Many people can't accept that one drive model isn't going to kill a company or make everything from them bad.

The exception being the palladium drive. Although its not directly attributed to the fall of JTS, who at the time owned Atari. Its was clear from the frontline techs these things were absolute shit. The irony is that 1 out of say 10,000 was perfect. So much so I still have one of the 1.2 gig's that still spins up and reads and writes fine. Its nearly a unicorn though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok5JTwpv5go

[–] digilec@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I had one of these, it worked perfectly for years. I might even still have it. I remember it being a significant leap in size and cost per MB.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

We had failure rates over 90% on them. We sold around 8000 computers on contract to the local schools that year and took a hit to our rep. We started going from school to school replacing them before they could fail.

The drive in the picture is dated mar 16 97. I'm pretty sure it was one of thousands of warranty replacements we received. Like I said its still good but really hasn't been in service in over 30 years. I keep it because its a reminder of how bad, bad can be.

JT storage went out of business in 98. When we heard they had no one was surprised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT_Storage

[–] zod000@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

That is an absolutely wild fail rate.

[–] Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 3 points 1 day ago

There are loads of people who think a company is bad because of one product, one service etc. A friend of mine hates Seagate, but he bought 10 drives of the same model. Pretty sure he even bought some after the first one failed ... or people (like me) put desktop drives in a NAS or service with other drives. While mine are still good I expect them to fail any time since well they are not desinged for the use case I am using them for.

[–] MangioneDontMiss@lemm.ee 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

i dunno man, i have about 20 years worth of bad experiences with seagate. none of their drives have ever been reliable for me. WD drives have always been rock solid and overall just better drives in my experience. I have two WD externals sitting on my desk right now that are almost 15 years old. Still going strong.

[–] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 5 points 2 days ago

Seagate have never once secretly changed the underlying disk technology on a NAS grade drive to one utterly unsuited for use in a NAS drive and then sold it as a NAS grade drive at a premium price because it's a NAS grade drive. So there's that.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I have killed every single type of magnetic platter drive from every brand they are all bad

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Not "bad", consumable.

[–] Joeffect@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Maybe consider looking at what all those had in common... Ie you

[–] zod000@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it's all anecdotal, and I've had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I've owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven't had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can't recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the "bad" gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM's derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi's HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.

[–] abdominable@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It is not anecdotal, Seagate, FOR A DECADE, had quantifiably the worst drives with some models hitting 30% failure rate. They still, to this day, have shit models with over 10% and are almost always, the worst in back blaze reports of all data center drives. The only issue we have on the reports is nobody does random sampling and Seagate has always been the cheapest so they get overrepresented in reports.

[–] zod000@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It’s all anecdotal for the most part. I’ve had two DOA WD drives in a row before, but no dead seagates.

As a side note, I hope you have those two WDs backed up, they’re overdue for a death.

[–] MangioneDontMiss@lemm.ee -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Trust me, I've been waiting for those ancient WDs to die. I'm actually using them in a raid 1 config, so if one dies the other remains. I've also got anything really important backed up to cloud storage. I've worked in software (games) for 20+ years. I'm very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.

Anyway, much of my opinion on seagates comes from people I know who work in render farms and IT guys who manage entire studios. So its not really that anecdotal.

[–] PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.

Backs up anything "really important" to cloud storage

Yes, I do believe you are very well accustomed to data loss.

[–] MangioneDontMiss@lemm.ee 0 points 2 days ago

Almost every bit of data i have is redundant. The stuff I back up to cloud storage is the stuff I would care about if my house were to burn down. But that stuff is all double, and triple backed up, locally as well.