I just got finished (mostly, still waiting for some files to copy) fixing two malfunctioning computers. The primary cause was 4 seagate drives being kicked out of two separate RAID arrays. Two of the drives are confirmed faulty (tons of reallocated sectors, 16k for one, 32k for the other). One other might also be on the way out (65536 start stop events in smart), but I don't have a replacement for that one, and a firmware update stopped the immediate cause of that (constant starts and stops, such an annoying noise).

It was quite the ordeal. Virtually all of the seagate drives in both machines had IMPORTANT firmware updates, and I hear if you let it go too long without the updates, it'll kill the drives (I'm pretty sure it's killed up to 4 of my seagates in the past couple years).

The recent failures aren't the only ones. I had 2-3 more fail in the past few years.

Ah well. If you want to read more about the entire process, see this post.

Seagate used to be known as the higher-quality, more expensive, brand! I bought an external Seagate drive to make sure my data was safe and it DESTROYED ITSELF within three months, along with everything I had "backed up" to it.

They RMA'd it, no hassle, no cost. It turns out a power saving feature actually destroys the drive--so future firmware disables it. But the damage is done. Some of my homemade music is gone forever.

That being said, I have no idea who makes good physical hard drives anymore. Meanwhile, my OCZ Vertex SSD drive, everyone said "Don't get an SSD! They're new and might be unreliable!" It's outlasted everything and works like a German train schedule.

Maxtor used to be the "Oh god, you bought a Maxtor?!" drive. Western Digital was good, Seagate best and quieter. Now, Seagate seems lesser. I don't know who to trust!

Google Drive is great for storing some small, but important stuff (my music, for example). But they weren't around ten years ago, their upload rate isn't "impressive", and their costs are decreasing but still too much for me.

I need to get a proper backup setup, but I honestly can't afford the price of an extra drive yet.

I thought that toshiba drives are the best buy price-performance-wise these days, so long as you can get them for the good prices that I can.

I like WD too. But no HDD is infallible. Seagate seem to be the best at high-performance SAS drives.

My advice that I have been following for long time and I told all my friends too:

You should not use external HDD directly, but instead use a NAS with RAID. You can put together a PC for less than $400, which is how much an empty 4-bay NAS tends to cost.

The cheapest and best will be to put together a minimum cost amd system (use 4gigs of RAM, take the absolute lowest cost CPU, I'd say get a cheap gigabyte motherboard), a cheapest case with no PSU, I like the lian li PC-8NB Black which I got for $69 AUD brand new, it is good standard case all aluminium no plastic, cheaper and better than standard Antec cases. I use a seasonic powersupply either the m12, s12, gold or platinum series.

Then you can run Linux and samba and dm_raid or whatever. Or you could install FreeBSD and run samba and zfs. That way you are protected from any single hard drive failure. Sometimes the HDD will be booted from the raid array when they are still fine, they just took too long to do the error recovery, so WD Reds are good because they wont timeout in the raid array.

And then you use that as an "external" hdd only you plug in via Ethernet instead of by usb, and then you browse the windows shares on it and just work directly off that. I usually mount the cifs directory manually on the command line because I've noticed that many Linux applications have trouble dealing directly with files on a auto-mounted windows share. Then when you shutdown and forgot to unmount you have to wait 30 seconds for them to timeout or some crap. I used to have a script in /etc/rc.local.shutdown or something but systemD ruined that.

It appears that their enterprise drives reliability isn't any better than their consumer drives, according to backblaze.

I built a decent nas a year or three ago.

Specs:

• Case: LianLi PC-Q25B

• Mobo: Intel S1200KP mITX

• CPU: Intel Core i3-2120

• Ram: 16GB 1333Mhz DDR3 ECC

• PSU: Seasonic PSU (650W+ can't remember exactly)

• System disk: Old OCZ Vertex SSD

• SATA Controller: IBM M1015 8 port LSI 2008 SAS

• RAID Disks: 5x2TB Seagate, 2x2TB WD Red

Nice little machine. works rather well, when disks aren't dying.

I can think of a few:

• Reduced load on clients

• Share with other computers

• It can run background stuff, things like Owncloud or Plex without bogging down your main computers

• Redundancy

I-I did? I think you give me too much credit, sir!

My. God.

[edit]

Also, it's interesting that HGST (I've never heard of them before) is a subsidiary of WD, but still outperforming them.

HGST is what happened when WD bought out Hitachi's HDD division.

Thankfully, I only ever purchased one 3TB Seagate. It failed after about a year.

Yeah because I have more hdds than I have sata ports, and good LSI or other good brand sata cards cost quite a bit compared to a cheap build.

I originally had like 9 hdd in a single PC, 5 and a CD drive on mobo sata, and an extra 4 on a highpoint card in a 4x3.5 in 3x5.25 adapter cage.

But I have since grown wiser and moved on from that.

Now I have 2 NAS setups, one is the primary, the other is the secondary, which is usually unplugged. Every weekend I turn it on and it syncs. Takes a long time.

Also I have my gaming PC (a 2011-3 build), my laptop (cheap amd hybrid gfx 17inch), my linux PC (micro ATX i3), and 2 other people with a desktop and laptop, and so files are always available even if normal computers are turned off. Most important for music collection I'd say. Too much hassle to have your songs on every computer, just put their folder into a NAS then play over network.

External HDD cadies have blown up their powersupplies on me and also I've had small usb-powered 2.5" externals go bad and also 1 OCZ ssd.

Go see if there's a firmware update for it. Check the SMART attributes. If there are a ton of reallocated sectors, it's done. If the SMART attributes are ok, the drive may be good, and just need a firmware update to stop it from erroring. One of my 3TB drives had issues till I flashed it. Also check with seagates diagnostics tools. If those say it's bad, RMA it right away.

I also had an SSD that was erroring on read, but I just did a full disk write using dd (actually dcfldd) and a subsequent full read succeeded. Sometimes it takes a write to clear a sector that just won't correct itself (on ssds and hdds).

When I was in highschool, a friend bought a 40-60 GB Maxtor. We laughed at him. It died within months. We called it "The Clicker" and he only plugged it in when he needed something off of it.

I never had bad luck with Maxtor.

I was a die hard Seagate fan for quite some many years. I've bought somewhere around 50 SATA drives, the majority of them (80%+) being Seagate. I didn't track them all, but I personally only ever had to get an RMA for one Seagate -- but several WD's, even though I've bought far fewer. WD has such a bad track record....

These days I couldn't care much less about drive brand, though. A dying power supply is often the culprit for dead drives.

I've never had a catastrophic failure, nor an unexpected one, and right now my "important" data is stored across a 6 year old Hitachi Deskstar, a 4 year old Seagate Hybrid Drive, and my Intel SSD. Soon to be an ADATA SSD... I think. $219 (CAD) for a 500GB SSD with 550 read/write seems like a good deal right?

It's the SP900. When looking up info on it I noticed this comparison with the SX900. It seems pretty negligible.

I spent a bit on this 120GB Intel, it will be 4 years old next month or so. I think I've decided against getting a new laptop just yet, and really just want the extra space so I can dual boot and run more local VMs. 120GB just isn't enough anymore.