Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows 452

AnInkle writes "Two months after acknowledging that their flagship 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11s could hang while streaming video or during low-speed file transfers, Seagate again faces a swell of complaints about more drives failing just months after purchase. Again, The Tech Report pursued the matter until they received a response acknowledging the bricking issue. Seagate says they've isolated a 'potential firmware issue.' They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.' If users don't like the idea of an expensive data-laden paperweight, Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade to address the matter, as well as data recovery services if needed. By offering free data recovery, Seagate seems to be trying to head off what could become a PR nightmare that may affect several models under both the Seagate and Maxtor brands."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows

Comments Filter:
  • by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:07PM (#26492837) Journal

    You better believe PR nightmare. After this how many will ever trust either the company or their products again?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:12PM (#26492885)

      Everybody.

      Over the past 20 years--its never been a question of the "perfect storage media vendor"--its been a question of "who has screwed me--lately?".

      --JSS, fromer Amiga HW Engineer, Rework tech of 400,000 defective Seagate HDD's, Class of '94.

      • by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:25PM (#26492975)

        Sadly, the AC is mostly correct. Everyone has brands they love and hate according to how often they've died.

        I abhor Maxtor and love WD. I've met other techs that love Maxtor and abhor WD.

        It actually just so happens that I'm using a Seagate 320GB in this machine and it's started to act funny lately. I've never had an issue with their drives before, but then... I haven't used them much.

        With this report, I may just buy another WD and replace it rather than wait for something to happen.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ender- ( 42944 )

          This is exactly right. As a matter of fact, over the years it's really been a cyclical thing. For a few years, Seagate drives will be great and say WD drives will suck horribly. Then for a few years, Seagate drives will suck and IBM has great drives. Then a few years later, IBM drives suck and Seagate is good again. Though as far as I can remember, Maxtor has always sucked and getting bought by Seagate didn't help.

          Anyway, I haven't purchased any drives lately, but due to the 5yr warranty and my past experie

          • by daoine_sidhe ( 619572 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:06AM (#26493323)
            Sadly, many of the Seagate HDDs are losing the 5 year warranty and moving to three. Here [seagate.com].
            • by KikassAssassin ( 318149 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:59AM (#26493719)

              On top of that, all of Western Digital's performance-tuned "Caviar Black" line of drives are now carrying 5-year warranties (in addition to their enterprise-class and Raptor drives, which have always had 5-year warranties). I used to be a big Seagate fanboy and only bought their drives when possible, but lately I've been a lot more impressed with Western Digital's product lineup. My next hard drive purchase will probably be WD.

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by Darkk ( 1296127 )

                I recently picked up the 2.5in Elite Series 500GB Western Digital portable hard drive from Costco when it was on sale and it's been running great so far.

                Also, picked up a 1TB Seagate SATAII drive as my primary HD for the PC I am using now. I thought about the 1.5TB and then I remember all the problems people are having with them so I picked up the 1TB instead. The little price difference wasn't worth it to me.

              • by choco ( 36913 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @01:51AM (#26494083) Homepage

                Hmmmm.

                I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs - Server and Desktop.

                On the Desktop, the Maxtor Story has been simply appalling. Fortunately we backup data properly and keep spares in the server room - so when a HDD dies, it's nothing more than a PITA. I don't even bother checking whether there's any kind of warranty. I don't want a replacement from Maxtor even if it is free.

                On the Server - well I was persuaded to buy some Seagate/Maxtor drives specifically intended for RAID. Everything cross checked for compatibility.

                Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason. "Hot Spare" prevented serious consequences, but the situation was not sustainable. A firmware flash improved things - but not enough. We've still got those drives lying around in boxes somewhere and give them to employees who want a HDD.

                So we went with WD and their (very) top end stuff.
                Result : Not hugely different.

                Current policy here is Raptors on the Desktop. They seem to be performing well.

                Top-end SAS only on the Servers and Raid. Even then only with every component fully cross-checked for specific support. If we are anything less than mega-fussy, it bites us!

                A.

                • by Anpheus ( 908711 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @03:16AM (#26494623)

                  Why are you buying a bunch of drives in bulk and then using them all at the same time? I think the Google study found that drives manufactured in the same plant, at close to the same time have a greater probability of failing in twos or threes within short periods of time. Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-? Sure, your drives won't all have exactly the same read/write speed, but the odds of those drives having anything in common hardware defect wise is minuscule.

                  Here's the relevant quote:

                  "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data." from http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf [google.com]

                  What this should tell you as a sysadmin is: stop equipping your server with X brand spanking new bleeding edge Ys from manufacturer Z. Sprinkle a few more letters in there, mix it up. You're less likely to wake up some morning and find that you had two drives kick the proverbial bit bucket in a two hour timespan.

                  • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                    by Just Some Guy ( 3352 )

                    Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-?

                    The biggest annoyance is that now your RAID is no faster than the slowest of the set. Perhaps on mirrored reads it's not as bad because the quickest drives will take of some of the slack, but on striped reads and all writes you have to wait until the Maxtor Pokeymatic gets done. A little bit of attention at buying time can alleviate a lot of that, but still, it's out there.

                  • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                    by gweihir ( 88907 )

                    I actually have two 3-way RAID1 with 3 different drive brands for high reliability. And, yes, one notebook drive keeps dropping out of one of the arrays every few months. The other two are fine. There are differences between HDDs and for redundancy it is best to mix, because one drive will be better than the others. And one will be the worst. In a bacth from the same manufacturer, possibly made on the same day by the same people, the drives will be a lot more similar and multiple failures are much more like

                • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2009 @09:42AM (#26496369)

                  Hmmmm.

                  I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs

                   

                  Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason.

                  No matter what it says on your business card, you're not a CTO, poser.

        • I had a set of Western digitial bought at the same time but put in unrelated computers that all failed within days of each other. Never bough another western digital in the last ten years. But now from what I read they have a good rep.

          My last drive was a refurbed Seagate 750GB. died after about 30 days. Vendor replaced it. then it died again. Seagate replaced it. Died again.

          So now Seagate is on my shit list. My next drive however is going to be a western digital as they seem to be very quiet compared

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Znork ( 31774 )

            You could always try Samsung. I've bought 4 of their Spinpoint F1 750GB drives that I'm happy with. Very silent, fast and reliable this far (going on 2 years now).

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @05:13AM (#26495129) Journal

        I bought two of the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I put them through the standard 7-day torture test pre-deployment before they went into production, which revealed a problem. A quick google search revealed that I wasn't the only one.

        Seagate support emailed me a firmware update that completely solved the problem. (knock on wood) They then easily passed the next round of torture test, and have been in production ever since as part of a D2D backup storage array.

        What parent poster says is true - ALL manufacturers have the occasional bad seed. In my experience, hard drive failures are usually due to mfg defects, much less so due to "wearing out". I have the most problems within the first month of purchase, or 5 years later, but I have plenty of drives from about 1 GB on up that have seen so many years of heavy, continuous use that their size is no longer relevant, but still work beautifully.

    • by Kent Recal ( 714863 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:32PM (#26493027)

      I will.
      Shit like this happens from time to time, read up on IBM's legendary "deathstar" fiasco to see how to really turn such a thing into a PR disaster.

      Seagate on the other hand is acknowledging the issue and seems to be communicating about it as open as possible. Plus they offer RMA and recovery services. What more can they do, really?

      We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition. They have a reputation to lose and it seems like they're trying their best to keep it.

      I see no reason why one screwed up model should remove my trust in a company that has served us well for so long. Cut them some slack and compare your historic failure rates of seagate drives versus others.

      • by Hurricane78 ( 562437 ) <deleted@slashdotMOSCOW.org minus city> on Saturday January 17, 2009 @01:04AM (#26493759)

        Question: How do you know the failure rate of the other companies' drives, when you almost exclusively buy Seagate drives?
        Those two or three other drives are far from a usable statistic don't you think?

        So what's left is what you heard, or what you remember from 5 years before.

      • Seagate may be making the "right moves" now, but IMHO, they should have been more proactive, before this many defective drives were out "in the wild".

        The 1.5TB Seagates have been drives to avoid for Apple Mac Pro owners since day 1, since they have all manner of issues in them. (Web sites like xlr8yourmac.com have advised people not to use them due to firmware issues.)

        It sounds like in both the case of the 1.5TB and now the troublesome model of the 1TB drive, Seagate was pretty slow to respond to complaint

    • by shawn(at)fsu ( 447153 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:39PM (#26493095) Homepage

      I will. All companies will have a problem from time to time if they've been in the game long enough. At least Seagate is showing they will stand behind their product and offer assistance to help the user get their data back.

      Mistakes will always happen, it's their response that counts.

    • I will. And I've actually been down on Seagate ever since they took AAM off their drives with the 7200.x series.

      But hey, just because I'm a W-D fan right now and not a Seagate fan doesn't mean I'll never trust Seagate again. This kind of stuff just goes around in circles. At one time, W-D couldn't make a drive that worked and Seagate was the top of the industry.

      Every company that is on top at one time has problems at another. Not every company that sucks makes it to the top though (I'm looking at you Maxtor

    • by Sopor42 ( 1134277 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:52PM (#26493221)
      I will always trust Seagate...

      ...if not to produce 100% failure-proof designs, then to do everything they can to fix the problem and make it right by the costumer.

      Years ago I had a Barracuda die and need replacement under warranty. It was real clear when I sent it in that there was NO guarantee of any sort for my data. What I received back was a different drive (different serial) complete with ALL of my data. That's as good as I can ask for.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        Years ago I had a Barracuda die and need replacement under warranty. It was real clear when I sent it in that there was NO guarantee of any sort for my data. What I received back was a different drive (different serial) complete with ALL of my data. That's as good as I can ask for.

        I can't argue about the service, but that's very trusting of you, sending your data as well. I can't imagine any business users doing this.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Ostracus ( 1354233 )

        "...if not to produce 100% failure-proof designs, then to do everything they can to fix the problem and make it right by the costumer."

        Then you might want to read this link [msfn.org] in it's entirety since it's obvious the person who modded me couldn't be bothered to. Seagate made right, but the arm twisting that it took shouldn't have happened.

  • Say what? (Score:5, Funny)

    by nametaken ( 610866 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:12PM (#26492881)

    " They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.'" ...so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 )

      It's a bit like saying "Yeah, your stuff is still in the safe, but there ain't nobody who knows the combination and unfortunately the only way to open it is to call in a team of our experts and blow it open it in their presence".

      So the data is still there. That's good. To access it, though, I'll probably have to send it to Seagate. That's bad. For two reasons. First, I don't want Seagate to be able to read the contents of my hard drive. A lot of the stuff on it is not for public viewing (and I'm not talking

      • by Hatta ( 162192 )

        You could always try the platter swap yourself, if you don't feel like letting Seagate do it for you.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Do you really have to go elsewhere and where? It seems to mean this is not exactly a quality issue. Its a firmware problem that only shows up under some conditions. Perhaps stricter QA might have caught this but thats hard to be sure of. Your points are not incorrect; but then you should have backs right? If you had backups most of your arguments go away. As for Seagate they seem to be doing the best they can to make good. They are offering free data recovery and to repair / replace the drives. Most

    • by rhizome ( 115711 )

      .so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.

      Yes, and it's fully accessible as long as the system is powered off.

    • The data is secured.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by marvinglenn ( 195135 )
      Your data is more secure if you keep the computer powered off, in the first place.
  • On linux... (Score:2, Informative)

    by leighklotz ( 192300 )

    For your first drive:
      sdparm -I /dev/sda
    For your second:
    sdparm -I /dev/sdb
    or whatever your drive is.

    It appears to affect 1GB drives as well, such as the ST31000333AS.

    I will ask if they have a firmware updater for Linux.

  • MS-Windows Only? No (Score:5, Informative)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:17PM (#26492915)

    And, of course, the Seagate referenced page says: "This can be done in Windows - it's easy! Download and run, or simply run as is, the Seagate Drive Detect software program." No mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD. So I guess there is an implied "If you are not using Windows - it's hard!".

    Then later in the page, "you can download SeaTools for Windows" with a convenient link. Again, no mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD.

    What they don't tell you is that you can create a self-booting (MS)-DOS floppy/CD so you can test your drive, regardless of your OS (as long as the system is X86). Get it here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg [seagate.com] but if you DO need to flash it, you have to contact Seagate via Email and wait for a response and code so you can use yet another program to flash the drive.

  • I guess we now know what generation disk integrated the Maxtor people/facilities. This presumably means Seagate joins Maxtor on the never-again list.

    • That's for sure.

      Never buy a hard drive from a manufacturer whose name begins with an M. Apparently Seagate starts with an M now.

  • Two of my drives are on the list of potentially affected drives. This is actually reassuring because one of the drives for a few weeks now has had mysterious issues similar the description in the article. I just wonder where I can download the firmware update... it appears that I have to contact seagate support, which I cannot do without registering on their website!
  • Bye Bye Seagate (Score:5, Interesting)

    by the_raptor ( 652941 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:30PM (#26493013)

    Given Seagates increasingly poor product quality, this has guaranteed I will never buy another Seagate drive. They used to be my favourite manufacturer, but this kind of sloppiness is unacceptable. Obviously all they care about is turning out high density cheap drives, with no thought to real quality assurance.

    With the economy as it is this could spell the death of Seagate.

    • Re:Bye Bye Seagate (Score:5, Informative)

      by TooMuchToDo ( 882796 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @02:37AM (#26494421)
      I doubt it. I own a hosting company and we buy about 5-10K drives a month from Seagate. We'll continue to buy drives from them, just not the ones they're having problems with (the 1.5TBs). Their service for us has been fantastic (and should be because of our volume with them). Feel free to not buy another drive from them. You'll be stuck in the same boat as US cellular customers. There's only a handful of businesses to choose from, and you have to buy from one of them if you need the product *shrugs*
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cowbutt ( 21077 )

        According to the linked Seagate Knowledge Base article [custkb.com], this is a new problem to the NCQ/CACHE FLUSH issue that Seagate publically acknowledge affects the 1.5TB models. This new problem apparently affects lots of current models.

        I avoided the 1.5TB models like you, but the 1TB Seagate drives I bought instead turn out to be affected by this new problem (hopefully I can get a pre-emptive fix from Seagate before they fail BSY). D'oh!

  • Now I can finally say I told you so to all the Seagate fanboys who wouldn't stop circle-jerking when I kept saying that after a decade of frontline support I know that Seagates have a higher rate of failure than even their higher marketshare can compensate for. I kept getting fed the same old lines about how long their warranties were and how that made everything ok. Nevermind that this offer of data recovery is a last-ditch desperate measure that's an exception to all precedent. In most cases when I've bee
    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:01AM (#26493293)

      And I've had 2 WD Caviar 160GB drives that crapped out on me in the 9 months before I switched manufacturers. Thank god for backups.

      That's the problem with anecdotal recommendations. They're always true, but rarely useful in the "statistically relevant" sense.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by King_TJ ( 85913 )

        Actually, there was a particular WD 160GB EIDE drive that was a real "dud" for WD. I remember each and every one of them we had in new Dell Optiplex computers dying on us, as well as one I bought personally for a home computer.

        But that said, I'd have to agree that otherwise, WD drives have always been fairly reliable for me. I've had a couple of DOA units, but that happens with any drive (and many times, you wonder if that's to really be blamed on the shipper tossing the box around).

        Seagate, I find just l

    • by radish ( 98371 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:12AM (#26493361) Homepage

      Well I only buy Seagate, and of the dozens I've bought...well they're all still working thanks. Anecdote's are pointless, Seagate are doing the decent thing here - saying we screwed up (it happens) - here's a new firmware and if you lost data we'll pay to try and get it back. That's a lot more than they're required to do and more than most companies would do. I don't see any reason to give them a hard time, or stop buying their products.

    • by daoine_sidhe ( 619572 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:18AM (#26493411)

      I can tell you from my decade of experience as a technician and running a small shop that Seagate HDDs have the lowest failure rate in the business.

      See how that works? This is why anecdotes are useless.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Barny ( 103770 )

        Yay for anecdotes, as a techy with over 10yrs of selling about 10-15 computers a week, I deal with about 98% seagate, 2% western digital. In that time I have installed about 15 drives not of either of those brands, and have RMAed 14 of them so far (waiting to see if the last samsung will be a homing pidgeon too).

  • So we're going to lynch them for being open and honest that their drives have a problem and they're doing everything possible to minimize the harm to their customers? My, my, how progressive of us all. We're going to rail on them because they only made a firmware patcher for Windows. Well -- color me silly here but this is an emergency patch. It's an issue that's been discovered fairly recently and so they haven't yet made a firmware loader for other operating systems that makeup Help your community instead

    • Wait - emergency patch? Not tested? It can fail?

      This is plain bullshit. They could have released the information so that the OSS people can write a patcher for the hard drives. But no. Any timelines "expect an OSX/linux patcher in 3 weeks"? No, no news at all.

      If they have competent developers, they could write it in a portable manner, but, I doubt it'll happen.

      And, I didn't realize the free software community was equivalent of being a gay, lesbian, bisexul or transexual. I thought we were just commun

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      So we're going to lynch them for being open and honest that their drives have a problem and they're doing everything possible to minimize the harm to their customers?

      No, we're going to lynch them because they've been aware of the issue since at least the beginning of December and have continually denied the existence of any problems until now, when the failure rate reached a point where they couldn't keep a lid on it any more. We're also going to lynch them because the SD15 firmware that's causing the
  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday January 16, 2009 @11:46PM (#26493171)

    Save yourself the time and effort, the required firmware updates are on bittorrent http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4627627/Seagate_1.5TB_ST31500341AS_Firmware_Update [thepiratebay.org]

  • The last time I had to replace a Seagate drive (about 3 years ago) I discovered that they had changed the way they replace drives. Years prior when I was a fan of their products, their replacement policy was to send the replacement drive to you first, so you could get your data off the failing drive and then send it back and have only a very minimal amount of downtime.

    However, this replacement for me was the opposite process, only worse. They also had a list of other things I had to comply with in order to get a replacement for a drive that failed when only 2 months old:
    • It had to be packed in their anti-static clamshell case
    • The case had to be in at least 2 inches of foam (no packing peanuts or bubble wrap allowed)
    • The box had to meet a prescribed standard
    • I had to pay for insured shipping both ways

    Needless to say, I wasn't happy with that. I spent some time on the phone with them, after spending two days running around town trying to find shipping materials that would comply with their asinine requirements (they stated they would void the warranty on my drive if I failed to comply with the packing requirements). Eventually I convinced the person on the phone - we'll call him Raj - to talk to his manager about the situation. Raj then was able to to get his manager to eventually approve of sending the drive first, so I would have the proper packing materials to send my drive back in.

    And then when the replacement arrived, there was a copy of a note that Raj had written while on the phone with me where he described me as "extremely irate". If I ever have to deal with them again, they'll see what irate really is when it comes from me...

    • by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:40AM (#26493597) Homepage

      I'm wondering if you got stuck with clueless support personnel, or it was a special case, or what.

      I've replaced several drives in that timeframe. The standard procedure is always to send the replacement first, and send the old one back in the same box, pre-paid. (IE, it doesn't cost you anything)

      They take your credit card details as insurance (otherwise an unscrupulous person would use this method to steal a hard drive by pretending theirs is bad) but that's acceptable.

      All the drive manufacturers I've dealt with (seagate, WD, Maxtor) work this way...

  • Nice to see that my xmas present might suddenly die...

    And it looks like Seagate is not being very helpful towards Linux users...

  • Western Digital went to crap a while back (personal opinion, based on professional experience)

    Now Seagate appears to be going down the same path

    Both are/were leading-edge drive manufacturers

    So has magnetic hard-drive technology simply reached an end-stage of current magnetic and mechanical capability, and does this hasten the introduction of technologies like SSD?

    • by Zymergy ( 803632 ) * on Saturday January 17, 2009 @03:53AM (#26494771)
      I'd wager ALL (or a good portion) of the magnetic hard drive manufacturer's BEST people are working on their prototype SSD units (NOT magnetic drives and their respective firmware)...

      Magnetic Media Hard Drives have now entered the time of their final epic journey to join their ancestors, Betamax, Cassettes, and 8-Track (et al.) at the great campfire in the sky...
  • by minion ( 162631 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:49AM (#26493647)

    I don't understand why manufacturer's keep insisting on writing the apps for Windows or DOS, with the growing trend to use these drives in other systems.

    I use Supermicro systems in my datacenter, and the coolest thing is, all of their flash utils, and CDROM discs boot FreeDOS. This alleviates the problem that you just might not be running Windows on your server. I wish all manufacturers would get the hint.

  • by bugi ( 8479 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:54AM (#26493693)

    I tried getting through their contact page. It was incredibly frustrating, and they won't even let you contact them unless you agree to some ridiculous terms absolving them from anything and everything, allowing them to email you whenever they want, stuff like that, in order to signup for an account.

    Google's a little more helpful. This page at least might be kinda sorta related: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/other_downloads/cuda-fw [seagate.com]

    Then I tried to search for some of the terms in the title of the page (eg. "SD14") and it couldn't find any pages. That's some search function you've got there, Seagate -- it isn't by any chance hooked up to an empty database is it? Did you by chance have it on a 7200.11 drive?

    • by Spikeles ( 972972 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @04:44AM (#26494997)

      Customers can expedite assistance by sending an email to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.

  • by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @04:17AM (#26494897)

    A few years ago, I put together yet another machine with a RAID array, it had 8 brand-new Seagate drives.

    Within a month, one drive had died. Within the next month, two more of the drives had died. Guess what Seagate replaced them with? Refurbs.

    Of the three refurbs, two died within two weeks. And another of the original.

    I called Seagate, and asked them to replace the entire lot, as they were obviously from a bum lot. They agreed, and I was happy... until they sent me 8 more REFURBS.

    Just for fun, I put them in a machine and gave it light duty. Within a month, FOUR of them had died.

    At that point, I decided to never buy Seagate again. Every manufacturer can (and does) have bad lots, but giving me refurbs was particularly low-class.

    Now, for SATA, I buy only WD RE or RE2 drives, and in buying them by the dozens for three years to run in RAID arrays, my failure rate has been lower than with any other IDE/SATA drives, I've only lost one or two. They're good enough that I install them on all of the desktops for my clients as well, and have yet to have one fail in that usage.

    I can't comment on WD's service, as I haven't had a chance to test it - and I like that.

  • by krunk7 ( 748055 ) on Saturday January 17, 2009 @12:01PM (#26497293)

    Why? Simple. During the DeathStar fiasco almost a decade ago, IBM refused to acknowledge the issue. Leaving small businesses to clean up their mess and cover the costs of replacing prematurely failed drives and lost customer data.

    Seagate, on the other hand, has readily acknowledged the issue and pledged to replace drives and pay for possible data recovery?

    That's absolutely amazing. No vendor is perfect, shit like this happens occasionally. The true test of a good supplier, vendor, manufacturer, etc. is not what they do when everything's going right. It's what they do when it goes all wrong.

"Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- A. Brilliant

Working...