SEAGATE! AARRRRRAAGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!

[Texun]

<Rant Mode On>

Several years ago I bought a 540 meg Seagate that was dead in the box. Went to WD and had fairly bad luck with them. Had 4 out of 8 drives fail within 2 years, then switched to Maxtor and have had about 8 of them running strong with no problems at all.

Figured I would try Seagate again since they are known for being quiet and seem to be fairly popular in the PC community. Got the 120g 7200RPM\8Meg cache Model ST3120026A and it was great until last night. Windows crashed like a rock. When I attempted to let Windows repair the OS it said the partition was damaged or unformatted. Reformatted and loaded Windows this afternoon, then ran Setools from Seagate's website. Within about 10 seconds it came back with a report that my 6 month old drive was going Tango Uniform.

I already have the RMA number, but to be honest I don't care much for the idea of installing a rebuilt hard drive in here. Looks like it's time to go back to Maxtor.

Never again will I have another Seagate!!!!!!!

<Rant Mode Off>

 

[nick1985]

good, their 5 year warranty doesnt want you!

 

[animeba]

i think you just got a bad hard drive. I sure hoped that you backed up your data

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: nick1985
good, their 5 year warranty doesnt want you!

Cool.... then we're even.

 

[Sonic587]

Sh!t happens...

There's always a post every once in a while about how X HDD manufacturer sucks and how someone has had especially bad fortune with their products. The truth is that no company is immune to problems. You may have good luck with Maxtor, but there are people here who've sworn them off in the same fashion as you with Seagate. HDDs are very delicate technology, so you're bound to end up with duds. Not fun, but that's the way it is.

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: animeba
i think you just got a bad hard drive. I sure hoped that you backed up your data

I've always considered the HD business sort of a Ford Vs. Chevy thing. Everyone has one that feels best and works just right for them.

As far as backing up... it was close. I lost my address book but the data on all other partitions is now on my personal file server.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Originally posted by: Sonic587
Sh!t happens...

There's always a post every once in a while about how X HDD manufacturer sucks and how someone has had especially bad fortune with their products. The truth is that no company is immune to problems. You may have good luck with Maxtor, but there are people here who've sworn them off in the same fashion as you with Seagate. HDDs are very delicate technology, so you're bound to end up with duds. Not fun, but that's the way it is.

Ditto.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: StrangerGuy

Originally posted by: Sonic587
Sh!t happens...

There's always a post every once in a while about how X HDD manufacturer sucks and how someone has had especially bad fortune with their products. The truth is that no company is immune to problems. You may have good luck with Maxtor, but there are people here who've sworn them off in the same fashion as you with Seagate. HDDs are very delicate technology, so you're bound to end up with duds. Not fun, but that's the way it is.

Ditto.

So true.

I'm the same way with Hitachi (that &amp; they are almost impossible to find in Canada).

But i know many people love their IBMs, so it's purely a personal preference thing for me.

 

[capricorn]

My experience is that they all have their good and bad times if you've been around them long enough. My recent "love" had been Maxtors - that is until a my two month old 160 GB just stopped being a disk drive last week and became dead weight instead. Luckily, it was only half of a RAID 1 system. The other drive was/is a matching Maxtor 160 GB. I replaced the dead one with a Seagate 160 GB. I lost a few GB in the process as the Seagate 160 is that much smaller than the Maxtor (fewer cylinders), but I feel better in that I'm now splitting my chances across a couple manufacturers. Before that though, pretty much every drive in every system I've built in the last few years is (still) running on Maxtor drives, with the exception of one system running a Seagate 160 as the only drive. I'd read an article recently where the author asked what was up with Maxtor drives as he had two new ones fail recently. The pair of Maxtor 160s originally replaced a two-year old pair of Maxtor 60 GB drives (in RAID 1) that ran flawlessly since day one. They just had gotten too small as 60 GB of disk space. The winds of change, I guess.

As far as Seagates, I'd mostly used the SCSI version in Unix workstations at work and in one personal PC at home. I've had failures, but only in really, really ancient ones that were past their expected life. (I've still got a couple 1 GB Seagate SCSIs that I'd bet still work - if I could find any use for them.) The 18 and 36g GB 15000 RPM Seagate Cheetahs are still humming along after about 4 and 2 years, respectively. I did just pitch a Seagate drive a couple weeks ago - a 2.5 GB one from 1997. I figured that I can't harbor too much animosity toward that one. It ran for about six years before it was retired. Refused to come out of retirement though.

Western Digitals generally don't impress me as the ones I've had tended to be noisy. It's actually been several years since I've given them a chance, so maybe they're due. I had one WD drive fail within warranty (about 18 months) and the rebuilt one they sent me as a replacement failed in less than two months. I had another one just like it, however, that was still rattling away in a system I just gave away a couple weeks ago. We had a whole batch of HP desktops at work that had to have their WD hard drives replaced as they just started dropping like flies. HP replaced them in warranty, but still took up a lot of time. WD denied their was anything wrong before issuing a quiet recall a few months later. On the other hand, I know people who've had nothing but good luck with Western Digital drives and swear by them like I did Maxtors.

I think Fujitsu is probably the only brand I'd refuse to use. We bought a box of ten Fujitsu SCSI drives at work. Of those, eight failed to work ever, one formatted but had lots of errors, and one worked absolutely fine. (We replaced all 10 - with Seagates.) Fujitsu tried and tried to put off taking those back. I had one Fijitsu in a cheap PC I got, and it died in a few months. One Fujitsu laptop drive I had died in about six months. (I replaced it with an IBM Travelstar [AKA Deathstar] which has been running now for about two years, while a whole slew of people had [larger versions] of that model die almost instantly. ) In short, every single Fujitsu disk I've had died in under a year. Still, I'd bet there are people running five-year old ones without a single problem.

The more I deal with these things, the more I become a believer in RAID 1 and 5. With RAID 1, I blow the cost of a disk for twice the read speed and normal write speed. It's still zippier than a single drive, but not RAID 0 fast. I've been considering RAID 0+1, but just haven't gotten around to it. Sounds expensive right up until the moment one of the drives dies. Worth $100 for me to just not have to reload the OS and loose any data. At any rate, when my "new" Maxtor bought the farm a week ago, I was still in business.

 

[Jeff7]

And interestingly enough, I just RMA'd a Maxtor drive that had bad sectors. While they did send me back a drive that was 50GB larger (200 vs 250), it too had bad sectors. That's according to chkdsk though - their wonderous Powermax utility shows nothing. Therefore, no RMA, at least until more sectors go bad. :roll:

 

[0roo0roo]

i just had two maxtors fail, one a recent rma no less. in an antec case clone with drive bay fans.. so it wasn't my fault had drives from most all of the companies fail on me. its a cr@p shoot.

 

[sharq]

In my experience, the 2 things that fail first in a computer are the Harddrive and the Monitor. I've had numerous problems with hd's and monitors, most everything else works fine (with the exception of one cdrom).

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: sharq
In my experience, the 2 things that fail first in a computer are the Harddrive and the Monitor. I've had numerous problems with hd's and monitors, most everything else works fine (with the exception of one cdrom).

In my experience that has no relevance to this thread.

 

[sharq]

Originally posted by: Nebor

Originally posted by: sharq
In my experience, the 2 things that fail first in a computer are the Harddrive and the Monitor. I've had numerous problems with hd's and monitors, most everything else works fine (with the exception of one cdrom).

In my experience that has no relevance to this thread.

This thread is a rant about hd's failing. Explain to me how that has no relevance to this thread?

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: sharq

Originally posted by: Nebor

Originally posted by: sharq
In my experience, the 2 things that fail first in a computer are the Harddrive and the Monitor. I've had numerous problems with hd's and monitors, most everything else works fine (with the exception of one cdrom).

In my experience that has no relevance to this thread.

This thread is a rant about hd's failing. Explain to me how that has no relevance to this thread?

You're incorrectly assessing the topic.

 

[sharq]

Originally posted by: Nebor

Originally posted by: sharq

Originally posted by: Nebor

Originally posted by: sharq
In my experience, the 2 things that fail first in a computer are the Harddrive and the Monitor. I've had numerous problems with hd's and monitors, most everything else works fine (with the exception of one cdrom).

In my experience that has no relevance to this thread.

This thread is a rant about hd's failing. Explain to me how that has no relevance to this thread?

You're incorrectly assessing the topic.

o...k

 

[farmercal]

I have Maxtors, WD &amp; Seagates running all the time and with no problems. The only hard drive I ever had a problem with was a new Maxtor right out of the box, but it's repacement is still going strong. Stuff Happens, hard drives do go bad. What I don't understand is how so many people get so many problems with hard drives.

 

[amdguy]

i am fortunate to never have a HD failure on me and my preffered HDs are Maxtor and Seagate...

like some of the members here, i avoid WD and Fujitsu like a plaque...

 

[Texun]

I have chilled out a little since posting my rant and believe the drive failure has more in common with the law of averages than it does with Seagate. I've owned, swapped, sold and given away more drives over the past 5-10 years than I can even begin to count. The last one to croak was a WD and that was at least 8 years ago.

It's like a blind date; sometimes it pays off really big, and other times you end up with something you wish you had never seen.

 

[btsdev]

yeap, as others have said over and over in here, it really is a crap-shoot. i've found the best insurance against drive failures is just a solid psu and back-ups every few weeks or so.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: nick1985
good, their 5 year warranty doesnt want you!

I agree, I think that is the first time in my life I've ever heard of a Seagate hard drive fail.

good luck going back with Maxtor, the most worthless hardware company on the planet.

 

[Oyeve]

Originally posted by: CraigRT

Originally posted by: nick1985
good, their 5 year warranty doesnt want you!

I agree, I think that is the first time in my life I've ever heard of a Seagate hard drive fail.

good luck going back with Maxtor, the most worthless hardware company on the planet.

Ditto what Craig stated. I usually only used SCSI for over 7 years and at one time I had 18 SCSI HDs running at once and not one has ever failed or died. The reason i used SCSI was because in my experience I have seen too many problems with IDE, Maxtor in particular. They used to be the crappiest noisiest drives in the world. The reason I switched to IDE was the noise. 18 U160 10k rpm drives drove my wife and son nuts. I have switched to IDE and now have 6 in my system ranging from WD, Seagate and one 250gb Maxtor SATA drive (my main drive). I am scared as sh!t about the maxtor failing. In less than 6 months it has already developed 4 bad clusters. Thank God I use Norton Ghost all the time! And backup everything to DLT.

 

[Texun]

Update: Seagate's customer service people (person actually) get an A+ in my book. I RMA'd online and then called the 1-800 number. It took all of about 3 minutes to speak to a very nice and helpful customer rep who said she would send me the advance replacement ASAP. This was Wednesday and the refurb'd drive was delivered today (Friday morning). They won't charge my card or even put a hit on it until the deadline for my RMA has passed, which will not be a problem since the drive was received by them on Thursday.

Got home and was ready to get deep into loading the "new" drive, but... it failed during the partitioning step during the Windows installation. The drive was jumpered and ID'd correctly by the BIOS and I was going back with 4 partitions, the same as I had in the old one, and it stopped responding and returned a I\O read error after I set the 3rd partition. Rebooting got strange at that point. It took the screen a full 45 seconds to move on to the CDRom once the POST identified the HD. Something was clearly tying up the controller.

Back to Seagate again. I already have the 2nd RMA#.

I pulled out a 6g Maxtor\5400RPM\256k cache and loaded Windows in about 45 minutes. I'm using it now, and I can tell anyone who may be taking for granted the benefit of more RPM and cache that you really should go back to something like this to fully appreciate the speed of today's drives.

 

[0roo0roo]

well you were luckier then i was then. i recieved my rma. it was doa thats quality for ya maxtor.

my other rma of a 1yr old rma? oh, the warrantee only applies to the original drive should make an exception for excessively short life.

double rma fun with maxtor!! grrrrrr

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
well you were luckier then i was then. i recieved my rma. it was doa thats quality for ya maxtor.

my other rma of a 1yr old rma? oh, the warrantee only applies to the original drive should make an exception for excessively short life.

double rma fun with maxtor!! grrrrrr

Heheheh. It wasn't Maxtor.... it was another dead SEAGATE.

I said it before, After many years of trouble free HD use I think it's my turn to get skroood by the computer gremlins. I've read tons of info on Seagates from review sites and users. Each one says they are great drives.

I'll give Samsung a shot. NE has a 160g 7200\8m cache for $100 shipped. Reviews and users favor it over Maxtor and many WD's. Hitachi shows up good as well but some complain that it runs hotter than others and also makes a meow sound. Go figure...