My love for Seagate…has ended
This is a bit of a weird post, but I’m typing this after I’ve had one Seagate drive totally fail on me, and my Seagate backup drive is going to eventually bite the dust. This is my experience with Seagate hard drives, and why I’m never touching them ever again.
To the normal eye, Seagate drives look like a great value for price and performance. Good reviews on Amazon, cheap prices, and overall they seem to be a well manufactured product. Even though the top reviews on Amazon say that these drives fail in 6 months, when I began buying Seagate drives, I totally ignored this.
If you don’t know, I have a lot of hard drives, and I really do mean a lot. I’ve got 2 TB of storage on my NAS, another 2 TB on my backup server, a 2 TB backup drive at my home, and another 2 TB drive about 200 miles away as an offline backup. Throw in some computer SSDs and hard drives, and I’ve got at least 9-10 TB of total hard drives/SSDs. Most of these hard drives are Seagate ones, but I’ve grown suspicious of Seagate drives lately, and started purchasing WD drives instead. Turns out, I should of done this a lot earlier.
It was about two or so weeks ago that I was away from home when I did my usual checks on my servers. Everything was looking good until I checked my backup server – the software was reporting that my backup RAID had gone into read-only mode. I didn’t think much of it, maybe the RAID just filled up and I had to delete some files. So, I went on to netdata, and the RAID was reporting about 600 GB free, and I immediately thought that I had a RAID failure. One remote reboot later and the server wasn’t coming back online.
So, I got home, and began running investigations on the server. I swapped SATA ports around, no dice. Reconnect stuff, no dice. Through all of this, I saw that my Seagate drive in the raid wasn’t ever reporting – only the Hitachi drive. I managed to get the Seagate drive to get recognized by my desktop once, ran Hard Disk Sentinel, and saw that the Seagate drive had 3,000 bad sectors. Oops.
Of course, my backup RAID was set up in RAID 0 so there was no chance of getting back any data. I had to order a 2 TB WD drive from Amazon, re-setup the backup server and all the clients, and it generally wasn’t a fun experience.
Fast forward a few days now to my usual monthly server backups, and lone behold, more Seagate drive issues.
When backing up my servers, I usually plug the master hard drive into an ASMedia ASM1053 hard drive dock, and while it is known to sometimes lock up a hard drive, I’ve gotten use to it – or so I thought. Turns out, the Seagate backup drive was causing this issue all along.
Tonight, I was trying to finish up the November 2018 backups. Earlier in the week I was having issues with my backup hard drive locking up Windows multiple times, so I didn’t think anything about it. I tried again tonight, and I was still experiencing lockups on the hard drive. After plugging the hard drive directly into my SATA ports, it was still locking up. Might as well check the drive in Hard Disk Sentinel…
8 bad sectors.
Yep! Mind you, this hard drive has only been on for 29 days, and has accumulated 6.85 TB of lifetime writes. For a bit of context, I’ve only written the capacity of the hard drive to the hard drive about 3 times. How ludicrous is this? Pretty ludicrous.
So, the moral of the story here is that you shouldn’t really buy Seagate drives. They’ll entice you, absolutely, but you won’t be having fun when your Seagate HDD fails and you don’t have backups elsewhere. Just by Western Digital instead. Their hard drives seem to work better.
