Huge External Drive Deal !

[Groovetube]

I snagged another t7 2tb in grey, can always use another samples drive!

 

[rbpeirce]

Let me put it this way. I've had a number of external Seagate branded rotating disk hard drives. Every single one of them turned out to be a POS. I wouldn't have one at any cost, because I value my data.

A friend in the hard drive recovery business told me that he sees more Seagate drives than any other brand, by far.

That's interesting. I have eight 4-5Tb Seagate Portable and Backup Plus drives and none has ever given me any trouble. I keep waiting for one to fail but they haven't. Maybe I've just been lucky.

 

[rbpeirce]

I got the Samsung t7 2tb drive last sale, it's a nice drive for the $$

I have three and they are terrific. Unfortunately they get pretty expensive pretty fast if you need something larger.

 

[Groovetube]

That's interesting. I have eight 4-5Tb Seagate Portable and Backup Plus drives and none has ever given me any trouble. I keep waiting for one to fail but they haven't. Maybe I've just been lucky.

This is my take on different hard drive brands. Over the last 30+ years of running a computer (since like, the IBM 086 with a 20meg drive...) every few years, a certain brand gets the rep of having more failures than the others. I have quite a few tech pals in various places where I get a general consensus, and I remember when quantum were failing enmasse, WD drives were the plague, and oh those Hitachi drives that all committed whatever. I think it isn't so much one brand, some techs have their biases and experiences. But, there is often a certain time period or range of models, that do have a high failure rate, and often that becomes known in a general consensus from shops country (world?) wide. I also work with a huge community of media/creatives that use very extensive hard drive systems with huge arrays and I hear often which drives blew up the most because boy the shouting when it happens is loud I have an expensive raid system with seagate that are approaching 8 years old, they run great. Though it's probably time to replace them and update them in the raid enclosures, and the landscape will be likely different now, so I'll decide based on that who to go with.

 

[Groovetube]

I have three and they are terrific. Unfortunately they get pretty expensive pretty fast if you need something larger.

Yea, they sure do. I use ssd mainly in situations when I need that kind of speed, like audio samples etc.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

... I have an expensive raid system with seagate that are approaching 8 years old, they run great.

There are two very important things to keep in mind:

1) My comment about Seagate-branded hard drives only refers to *external* rotating disk hard drives. They tend to have little or no thermal regulation, and very poor or no power supplies. Often without even an on/off switch. Utter POS's with a huge early failure rate.

With regard to Seagate *internal* mechanisms, Seagate makes both some of the very best mechanisms, and some of the very worst. It all depends on which model you buy or what specification an external drive vendor specifies.

For instance, the excellent Glyph Studio external drives use Seagate internal mechanisms. They are among the most reliable external rotating disk hard drives you can purchase. But they include a cooling fan and a huge power supply. They also test every internal mechanism that they get from Seagate before putting them into their external drives. This doesn't mean that, in general, all Seagate internal mechanisms are really good. It only means that the mechanisms that Glyph specs from Seagate are good, and then Glyph tests them again to make sure that they are good.

2) Things having to do with computers change very quickly. You can't, for instance, compare your huge laser printer from 15 years ago, that cost you $3,000, with the common small laser printers that are common today that go for a couple hundred dollars. Those old printers were tanks...but they were priced like tanks.

Seagate and Western Digital were really different companies years ago. They used to make all of their own hard drives, in their own factories, in the U.S. Now, neither company makes their own hard drives at all, they are all farmed out to be manufactured by various third party factories in southeast Asia.

In addition, because of cutthroat competition based on price, SD and Seagate now do little or next to no testing of assembled drives. Testing is expensive, so it is kept to the bare minimum. So rotating disk hard drives tend not to be as reliable as they used to be many years ago. It's cheaper for these companies to accept a high level of warranty returns than to do rigorous testing.

Backblaze publishes a study every year of reliability of various brands of internal drive mechanisms based on a huge server farm that they maintain. It's interesting to have a look at:
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

 

[Groovetube]

The two seagates I have are the 6tb rotational ones, it’s in a very good name brand raid enclosure. I used to use raid for speed but now I use ssd’s for that, I keep the raid and use it in 0 mirrored so both drives have a copy for redundancy and I use it as one of my backup drives. I thought of selling it actually.

I do keep my ears open as I said, because high failure rates change models and brands every cycle so I watch. I also backup to 4 different drives and Dropbox.

 

[Groovetube]

Just another note for Canadians, Best Buy has the Samsung T7 shield version of the 2 TB drive for 149can