# Seagate, how are they now?



## Horrux (Jun 6, 2011)

For the longest time they were #1 in HDD quality and reliability until a few years back they produced some horrible drives, which made me steer away from them for a while.

Now it's been some time, and I'm wondering if their HDDs are back to good or what?  How reliable are they compared to other brands, or to their previously stellar reputation?

Thanks


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## BarbaricSoul (Jun 6, 2011)

seagate is just as good as western digital afaik


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## Benetanegia (Jun 6, 2011)

I'll never buy Seagate again and I reccomend not doing it. 

We suffered from one of their crappy HDDs with faulty firmware. 

First they would not give us (or anyone) a solution, in fact they tried to hide the problem until they were caught publicly (well you know the story). Later they were forced by law to fix and recover the data inside the faulty HDDs for free, so after several years waiting we sent the HDD and surprise, they fixed nothing. The HDD is not even recognised by the BIOS. They said it was fixed, and sent it back, but not before saying that although the firmware was OK the data could not be retrieved and that in order to retrieve it we would have to pay them... wait for it... 700 euros. Lol we told them to send it back, so that we could retrieve the data by ourselves (we know people who do it for less than 50), or just consider the data gone for good and finally use the damn thing after a format. No way, like I said, it's not even recognised. We even think they broke it on purpose because we refused to get the 700 euros recovery service. This was 2 months ago.

The bottom line IMO is that no matter how much their products improve in general their support is crappy and just plainly evil. You never know when you could face off another bad unit, so honestly I will never touch a Seagate product ever again.


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## entropy13 (Jun 6, 2011)

EDIT: lol nevermind, it just so happens that some logistics company offers free shipping for Seagate RMAs over here LOL.

Still though, a 5 year warranty looks good enough and experience with a Seagate SV35.5 and a Barracuda 7200.12 is the same as a Western Digital Caviar Black.


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## Bo$$ (Jun 6, 2011)

well i have found both WD and Seagate really good!
Just avoid Hitachi drives i think ive had about 11 drives fail on me over the years


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## Deleted member 3 (Jun 6, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> I'll never buy Seagate again and I reccomend not doing it.
> 
> We suffered from one of their crappy HDDs with faulty firmware.


I'm taking it you live on some deserted beach because you boycott every company in existence? They all make mistakes, they all have some bad product line.



Benetanegia said:


> We even think they broke it on purpose because we refused to get the 700 euros recovery service. This was 2 months ago.



Not just that, I think penguins dig tunnels through the planet to illegally meet with polar bears. Mail me your address and I'll ship you some tin foil so you can make some hats.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 6, 2011)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> I'm taking it you live on some deserted beach because you boycott every company in existence? They all make mistakes, they all have some bad product line.
> 
> 
> 
> Not just that, I think penguins dig tunnels through the planet to illegally meet with polar bears. Mail me your address and I'll ship you some tin foil so you can make some hats.



Oh wow, how mature. Let's attack the customer. I hope you have no links to seagate, because that would make it worse.

I have no problem at all with faulty hardware. It just happens.

It's the way they always tried to cover it up and never offered any solution until law forced them to do it and how even then they didn't fix it. They said the drive was working but that the data was corrupt. The platters were never broken, since the drive just broke 1 week after we bought it, and it was the firmware, which was a very documented failure for that exact model. So laugh as much as you want big boy, but tell me HOW if they could see that the data was corrupted, HOW on earth we have the EXACT same roblem on that HDD as we had before sending it?? There¡s only 2 options, a) they broke it again b) they never fixed it.

EDIT: And could you please tell me which other companies I¡m trying to boycott? lol I'm not even boycotting Seagate. THAT HDD was crappy as hell, period, which is not to say that all their products are crappy. I just can't trust their support, so even if another failure is less likely, if it does happen I know that I'm most probably screwed. Blame them for that not me. This is not a CPU or GPU or anything like that that can be replaced with no consequence. This is HDDs where we store our data, ANY failure is big if it means I will lose my data for good. And please don't tell me to have backups, we do, but on that particular case we didn't, because the drive was just 1 week old ffs. We bought 2 Seagate HDDs, in one we would store the data the second one was the backup, we just didn't have the time to do it. In fact it failed while we were transfering some data. So laugh, laugh. In the name of all the people that have ever been screwed up, thank you for your support.


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## Deleted member 3 (Jun 6, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> Oh wow, how mature. Let's attack the customer. I hope you have no links to seagate, because that would make it worse.
> 
> I have no problem at all with faulty hardware. It just happens.
> 
> It's the way they always tried to cover it up and never offered any solution until law forced them to do it and how even then they didn't fix it. They said the drive was working but that the data was corrupt. The platters were never broken, since the drive just broke 1 week after we bought it, and it was the firmware, which was a very documented failure for that exact model. So laugh as much as you want big boy, but tell me HOW if they could see that the data was corrupted, HOW on earth we have the EXACT same roblem on that HDD as we had before sending it?? There¡s only 2 options, a) they broke it again b) they never fixed it.



Maturity is an inefficient way to get a point across. Seagate had an 11.3 billion revenue last year and has 52600 employees. A company of that size will screw up by definition. WD does it as well, as do Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, IBM, mc Donalds, coca cola, etc. Screwups are made, coverups are attempted. Just think about all the times they did successfully cover up their screwups. Welcome to capitalism. 

Thinking they broke your disk on purpose because you didn't want to pay definitely isn't a decent argument. People who disagree with such logic surely must work for Seagate though.


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## 95Viper (Jun 6, 2011)

Gomer Pyle said it best, "Surprise Surprise Surprise"

And, Seagate has surprised me; because, I was, sort of, leery of their drives after the firmware problems they rather candy coated over at first, then tried to fix.
Since then I received a Seagate ST31000528AS with a bundle deal, and it is quiet, cool, and, also, rather quick. 
No problems with it so far; so, as of this moment, I would buy from them again.


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## Dbiggs9 (Jun 6, 2011)

I love my seagate drives, i will say though i bought X4 320Gb drives years back and all 4 caught on fire.
I own 
x2 250g Slims both work great and have been for years
x4 320 fat drives All 4 Failed withen 1-3 years ( seagate replaced with 320 slims and replaced my Mobo they Killed)
x6 1TB all work great
All drives are 7200rpms


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## Benetanegia (Jun 6, 2011)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Maturity is an inefficient way to get a point across. Seagate had an 11.3 billion revenue last year and has 52600 employees. A company of that size will screw up by definition. WD does it as well, as do Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, IBM, mc Donalds, coca cola, etc. Screwups are made, coverups are attempted. Just think about all the times they did successfully cover up their screwups. Welcome to capitalism.
> 
> Thinking they broke your disk on purpose because you didn't want to pay definitely isn't a decent argument. People who disagree with such logic surely must work for Seagate though.



Please give me an explanation of how they could see the HDD, 2 days before we received it then (bear in mind the ~24h delivery time) and when we received it it's not posible... Where did they screw up? They had a working HDD, working enough to be seen in the BIOS and be able to tell the data was corrupted. Then they sent it and maybe some fairies, a penguin maybe intercepted it and broke it? The firmware? Again?

They either broke it or was never rapaired, which is in both cases a clear wrongdoing and I'm not going to appologise for having an opinion.


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## Deleted member 3 (Jun 6, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> Please give me an explanation of how they could see the HDD, 2 days before we received it then (bear in mind the ~24h delivery time) and when we received it it's not posible... Where did they screw up? They had a working HDD, working enough to be seen in the BIOS and be able to tell the data was corrupted. Then they sent it and maybe some fairies, a penguin maybe intercepted it and broke it? The firmware? Again?
> 
> They either broke it or was never rapaired, which is in both cases a clear wrongdoing and I'm not going to appologise for having an opinion.



I'm not asking you to apologize. You're free to have any opinion you like. And I'm free to point out the flaws in it. And again you are free to point out whatever you feel seems wrong with my statements. It's called a discussion.

The major screwup I'm talking about is the whole 7200.11 series. Your specific case, I would not know what happened. I'm not taking your interesting conspiracy theory as a serious argument though. You could just have had bad luck, it happens you know. When you contacted them about it, what did they say?


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## Benetanegia (Jun 6, 2011)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> I'm not asking you to apologize. You're free to have any opinion you like. And I'm free to point out the flaws in it. And again you are free to point out whatever you feel seems wrong with my statements. It's called a discussion.
> 
> The major screwup I'm talking about is the whole 7200.11 series. Your specific case, I would not know what happened. I'm not taking your interesting conspiracy theory as a serious argument though. You could just have had bad luck, it happens you know. When you contacted them about it, what did they say?



I don't know, it was my brother who made the whole process (it was his data which was lost). I gave up almost 2 years ago, and stopped caring about that HDD, when it seemed pointless. The only thing you should care about is that it was just not resolved. Since you are not from Seagate, it's none of your bussiness anyway. Nor is this thread about resolving our problem. The OP asked if Seagate had changed, and I shared my experience that demostrates they have not changed at least when it comes to trying to avoid their responsabilty on failed HDDs. 

I also just shared my opinion, which you don't agree with, and apparently offends you, but I would never be doing all this if I had any doubts. They acted wrong prior, during and after the fact and if it was not because of the news that were posted here on TPU, I would have never learnt about the real problem behind the failure of our HDD. Even after it was a well known problem, they would try to evade the issue on the contacts we made and tried to offer us a simple replacement instead of the service we deserved, so no there's absolutely no way in which I can consider the faulty HDD a coincidence.


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## Horrux (Jun 6, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> I'll never buy Seagate again and I reccomend not doing it.
> 
> We suffered from one of their crappy HDDs with faulty firmware.
> 
> ...



I quite comprehend your being incensed at them.

To tell the truth, I only own WDs because Seagate failed, as I had been a Seagate faithful for well over 10 years until that screwup happened, but never purchased from them again afterwards.

Actually I love the Samsung F1 drives, and I think the F3s are likely even better, but sadly they are not widely available here.


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## Darkgundam111 (Jun 6, 2011)

so only the 7200.11 series had problems? How bout the 7200.12? im looking at buying this one:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IZN3YI/?tag=tec06d-20

but seems that there are bad reviews for it (failure rates)


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## cadaveca (Jun 6, 2011)

I've got many Seagate drives, and although I had issues like many, years ago with firmware problems, I haven't had any issues with my seagate drives in over 2 years now.


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## entropy13 (Jun 6, 2011)

I have a 7200.12 since December and I have no problems with it, either with my Core i7 920 rig or my current Sandy Bridge setup.


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## Fourstaff (Jun 6, 2011)

I am with Benetanegia on this one, if a company screws up its their duty to fix the screwup rather than cover it up or brush it aside. 

I am fine with Seagate, WD, Samsung and to some extent others. I am not fine with Hitachi (still waiting for people to convince me that their Deskstars are reliable).


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## Widjaja (Jun 6, 2011)

I think there was some higher rate of failiures with the 7200.11s or something quite a while back but other than that I have not heard any issues with them.

I know they flick off odd ball sized HDDs to companies like HP to stick into their machines.
Maybe HDDs which have had the bad sectors blocked off and since HP is interested in the drives than they have a place to sell them.

Currently WD appear to be the recent ones under fire with the WD Green Power drives and their WDIdle3 so yes each manufacturer have had their moments.

I personally stick with WD because WD was the first brand I had and have had no issues with their drives as of yet.

But if I was given no option like my netbook which comes with a Seagate, I wouldn't change it.


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## Dbiggs9 (Jun 6, 2011)

Fourstaff said:


> I am with Benetanegia on this one, if a company screws up its their duty to fix the screwup rather than cover it up or brush it aside.
> 
> I am fine with Seagate, WD, Samsung and to some extent others. I am not fine with Hitachi (still waiting for people to convince me that their Deskstars are reliable).



I bought Hitachi 2TB was a DOA, sent in for RMA and got a DOA again..... Replaced with Seagate 1TB's that all work great. The first Hitachi might have been killed by the 320 that caught on fire, but the second one was a solo drive.

Hitachi is on my do not buy list...


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## BarbaricSoul (Jun 6, 2011)

Darkgundam111 said:


> so only the 7200.11 series had problems? How bout the 7200.12? im looking at buying this one:
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IZN3YI/?tag=tec06d-20
> 
> but seems that there are bad reviews for it (failure rates)



I replaced a 150gb raptorX with a 500gb 16mb cache 7200.12 and didnt really notice any slow downs or any performance lose for that matter. I've also have no issue with the driveaswell. I would not have a problem recommending a 7200.12 HD to anyone, including family.


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## AsRock (Jun 6, 2011)

Every Seagate i have had in the past always ended up getting bad blocks..  Although not had one over 7 years now so a lot can change in that time.  

I only get WD's and never had a issue and been in to computers since early 90's.


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## Batou1986 (Jun 6, 2011)

Ive never had a problem with WD they even replaced my old raptor with a new velocilraptor 
when i sent it in for a problem which was actually windows fault for corrupting the MFT.

The same problem of it not working in AHCI happened to the new one, turns out you shouldn't let win7 partition your drives in setup write 0's and its fine now


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## repman244 (Jun 6, 2011)

I've got a Hitachi, Samsung, WD, Seagate in my system ATM  all running fine without problems. I never really experienced any trouble with a specific brand.
At the end of the day ANY drive can fail, so I usually end up getting a drive with a good price for the GB's offered. 

But I do avoid drives that have firmware issues and such.


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## yogurt_21 (Jun 6, 2011)

we go through plenty of drives at my work and really, i've had an equal amount of failures between western digital and seagate. So it seems statistics ring true, the more of somehtign you observe, the more you'll see conspiracy type patterns disappear.


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## erocker (Jun 6, 2011)

yogurt_21 said:


> we go through plenty of drives at my work and really, i've had an equal amount of failures between western digital and seagate. So it seems statistics ring true, the more of somehtign you observe, the more you'll see conspiracy type patterns disappear.



QFT. I also have lots of hard drives at work, sometimes they go out. Brand doesn't matter at all and anyone who says differently is just not thinking it through or just loves to bash one thing or another because it 'wronged' them. I think Dan summed it up perfectly for me already.


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## Melvis (Jun 7, 2011)

Just buy WD, you will thank me later.

That been said over the last ten years of buying and using HDD's i have had more Seagate HDD's die on me more then WD, alot more TBH. I used to love Seagate drives, the older IDE drives just worked and wouldn't die, id get 7yrs at least out of them, but now im getting them back after as short as 2months, i think there just not as good as they used to be.


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## entropy13 (Jun 7, 2011)

Western Digital is more expensive than Seagate lately, and the bigger caches and higher price aren't exactly translating to actual performance advantages.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Jun 7, 2011)

anyone know when those 1 tb platter drives everybody announced are going to hit? so sick of this noisy/unreliable drive gen, and I need a storage overhaul


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## Horrux (Jun 7, 2011)

entropy13 said:


> Western Digital is more expensive than Seagate lately, and the bigger caches and higher price aren't exactly translating to actual performance advantages.



Yeah but HDD performance differentials are usually small to begin with, I much prefer have something a LOT more reliable than something that performs 2% faster.


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## qubit (Jun 7, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> This is not a CPU or GPU or anything like that that can be replaced with no consequence. This is HDDs where we store our data, ANY failure is big if it means I will lose my data for good. And please don't tell me to have backups, we do, but on that particular case we didn't, because the drive was just 1 week old ffs.



Bene,

*I'm with you:* on Seagate acting in a dishonest manner. Thanks for reporting your experiences to us and I'm sorry you got screwed over like that. It makes me very glad that I buy WD exclusively. I've been screwed over by British Telecom over their internet service due to atrocious customer service and now would not go back to them if you paid me, so I know how you feel. Besides, they throttle torrents something rotten.  I didn't realize just how much until I left them.

Here's more revelations about them. I saw an article on just how useless they are with tech support, even more than they were with me and had to post about it on TPU. 

BT have monkeys man their helpdesks


*I'm not with you:* on losing your data with this drive. Leaving a data backup for a whole week is asking for it. Sod's Law will hit in just the way you described unfortunately. I hope you don't wait so long now with them. It's horrible to lose data and I feel for you.

While there's no one, absolute "correct" way to do a backup, my personal backup routine is to now have 2 x 2GB WD Greens in RAID 1 for an instant mirror backup on my main PC. I then back up that data nightly over the network to another drive sitting in another computer. I'm considering increasing the frequency to twice a day, too.

My system drive isn't backed up, but I'm willing to live with the inconvenience of having to reinstall the OS and apps if something happens. Now, I have stuff on my desktop that isn't backed up...


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## Benetanegia (Jun 7, 2011)

qubit said:


> *I'm not with you:* on losing your data with this drive. Leaving a data backup for a whole week is asking for it. Sod's Law will hit in just the way you described unfortunately. I hope you don't wait so long now with them. It's horrible to lose data and I feel for you.
> 
> While there's no one, absolute "correct" way to do a backup, my personal backup routine is to now have 2 x 2GB WD Greens in RAID 1 for an instant mirror backup on my main PC. I then back up that data nightly over the network to another drive sitting in another computer. I'm considering increasing the frequency to twice a day, too.
> 
> My system drive isn't backed up, but I'm willing to live with the inconvenience of having to reinstall the OS and apps if something happens. Now, I have stuff on my desktop that isn't backed up...



The data was not there for 1 week. The HDD was one week old and had been functioning correctly*.

The data had just been copied minutes before. Just some minutes later** we were going to make a backup into the second seagate we had bought but never had a chance. We did make  the mistake of erasing it from the old drive after copying, because we needed it formatted, so I do take the blame for that particular mistake. However at any rate a consumer should never be forced to backup their data in a hurry, in a minute per minute basis. If I create something in 3dsmax or record some footage with a cam and it's late, I want to go to bed and not to have to worry about my data being lost overnight or the minute later if for example Windows has updated and wants to reboot.

* If we had had any doubt about the HDD not working properly we would have never copied anything and we would have never erased the data from the source.

That's the whle problem. That those drives would brick out of the blue, with no signs before. And that's not even the problem anyway, like I said, things just sometimes fail, but the problem is that Seagate knew that the HDDs failed out of the blue and never pulled them out of the market, they never offered good RMAs, for example even after launching the 7200.12s they still offered 7200.11s as replacements to faulty 7200.11s and they knew they would fail sooner or later and they failed, effecively, there's tons of reports in their forums about that and many people enraged. that0s why we never sent it to RMA until recently when they were supposd to do it right and offer data recovery for free. No chance.

** The minutes that I'm talking about is the time it takes to copy the data. not that we would go do something else. Simply, between copying one folder and another, I don't know why, we had to reboot and after reboot the drive was not there.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Jun 7, 2011)

I recommend moving away from raid for backup. It can a be a bitch to setup, maintain and upgrade, and has the risk of copying over table corruptions. Just use something like Syncback and you'll get a lot more options and not have to worry about any of that other crap.


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## qubit (Jun 7, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> The data was not there for 1 week. The HDD was one week old and had been functioning correctly*.
> 
> The data had just been copied minutes before. Just some minutes later we were going to make a backup into the second seagate we had bought but never had a chance. We did make  the mistake of erasing it from the old drive after copying, because we needed it formatted, so I do take the blame for that particular mistake. However at any rate a consumer should never be forced to backup their data in a hurry, in a minute per minute basis. If I create something in 3dsmax or record some footage with a cam and it's late, I want to go to bed and not to have to worry about my data being lost overnight or the minute later if for example Windows has updated and wants to reboot.
> 
> ...





Ok yeah, sorry, read it the wrong way.  Sure you were technically 'wrong' for erasing the old copy so quickly, but yeah, that's real bad luck if it dies minutes later. One should do a backup, but sheesh, the possibility of data loss shouldn't be _that_ great!


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## freaksavior (Jun 7, 2011)

I've had issues with them http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=143071&highlight=seagate+wores but I will continue to buy them for their outstanding customer service.


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## newtekie1 (Jun 7, 2011)

Seagate drives are just fine, in fact at this point, thanks to WD removing TLER and the known RAID issues WD drives have, I'd only buy Seagate for my personal machines unless I know the drive will never be used in a RAID array.

As for the Firmware issues, that was a clusterF*ck, but not all Seagate's fault.

I personally had *3* drives effected by it in my primary machine.  One drive they RMA'd without any hassle, because I shipped it back with the problem before the firmware news had hit.  In the processes of RMA'ing that drive, they confirmed the firmware issue(this does take a little while, it wasn't because they were trying to cover anything up, they were confirming the issue and how to fix it).  So after the issue was confirmed they emailed me the new firmware for the other two drives, I had emailed them about the issues and their responce was the email with the firmware.  The real problem got worse when people were unhappy with Seagate's "slow" response and the need to email Seagate and get the firmware from them after they confirmed their drive was one of the ones affected.  So Seagate publicly posted the firmware for people to download.  Of course this lead to everyone and their mother with a 7200.11 drive to flash the new firmware, which probably lead to more bricked drives than the actual original issue did.

The 3 drives that were affected by the problem are still happily working in my main rig today.



Benetanegia said:


> However at any rate a consumer should never be forced to backup their data in a hurry, in a minute per minute basis. If I create something in 3dsmax or record some footage with a cam and it's late, I want to go to bed and not to have to worry about my data being lost overnight or the minute later if for example Windows has updated and wants to reboot



Anything that is important will be backed up immediately, or at the minimum stored in a redundant RAID array.  If the data is important it will never be in just one place.  If it is in one place, and that one drive dies, then the only person to blame is the person that put it in one place only.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 7, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> Anything that is important will be backed up *immediatel*y, or at the minimum stored in a redundant RAID array.  If the data is important it will never be in just one place.  If it is in one place, and that one drive dies, then the only person to blame is the person that put it in one place only.



Define inmediately. The data would have been backed up 2 to 5 mins after the drive failed. Like I said 10 times, we did make the mistake of erasing the data from the source, because we were going to back up to another new HDD inmediately, but come on we are grasping at straws if we say it was a huge mistake and our fault that the HDD failed and lost the data because of those 2 critical and fatal minutes. HDD failure happens, but to that extent is not common, not even close. Most times you can recover the data easily, at least most of the data. With the way it failed a raid array was not even secure, since many people with arrays had 2 or more HDDs bricked at the same time. Or in my case the HDD where the data was going to be backed up was a 7200.11 too so what if it had failed at the same time.

And it's not even the fact that HDDs failed or the lost data, but how Seagate reacted to the whole thing. If they had offered data recovery services for free or cheaply from the point in which was clear that it was a problem with the model, there would have been no problem. If they had replaced the drives by the newer ones there would be no problem. Hell if they had flashed all of the HDD they sent for replacement, it would have been ok. How stupid can it be not to flash the drives you are sending as replacement to the properly working firmware? Well most HDDs did have the new firmaware but many didn¡t as could be read in their forums...


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## newtekie1 (Jun 7, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> Define inmediately. The data would have been backed up 2 to 5 mins after the drive failed. Like I said 10 times, we did make the mistake of erasing the data from the source, because we were going to back up to another new HDD inmediately, but come on we are grasping at straws if we say it was a huge mistake and our fault that the HDD failed and lost the data because of those 2 critical and fatal minutes. HDD failure happens, but to that extent is not common, not even close. Most times you can recover the data easily, at least most of the data. With the way it failed a raid array was not even secure, since many people with arrays had 2 or more HDDs bricked at the same time. Or in my case the HDD where the data was going to be backed up was a 7200.11 too so what if it had failed at the same time.
> 
> And it's not even the fact that HDDs failed or the lost data, but how Seagate reacted to the whole thing. If they had offered data recovery services for free or cheaply from the point in which was clear that it was a problem with the model, there would have been no problem. If they had replaced the drives by the newer ones there would be no problem. Hell if they had flashed all of the HDD they sent for replacement, it would have been ok. How stupid can it be not to flash the drives you are sending as replacement to the properly working firmware? Well most HDDs did have the new firmaware but many didn¡t as could be read in their forums...



They did flash the drive, the drive I recieved had the new firmware on it, and that was sent in before the Firmware issue was even in the news.

And yes, drives do die that quickly.  In fact most drives die extremely early in their life or seem to last forever.

Oh, and firmware issue, AFAIK, do not affect drives right away like you describe.  So it sounds like the ranting you've been going on about doesn't even relate to a firmware issue, but a legit dead drive.  You are probably one of those people that think every 7200.11 drive is affected by the bad firmware, and every failure with a Seagate drive must be firmware related.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 7, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> They did flash the drive, the drive I recieved had the new firmware on it, and that was sent in before the Firmware issue was even in the news.
> 
> And yes, drives do die that quickly.  In fact most drives die extremely early in their life or seem to last forever.
> 
> Oh, and firmware issue, AFAIK, do not affect drives right away like you describe.  So it sounds like the ranting you've been going on about doesn't even relate to a firmware issue, but a legit dead drive.  You are probably one of those people that think every 7200.11 drive is affected by the bad firmware, and every failure with a Seagate drive must be firmware related.



The drives usually failed after you rebooted, documentation is everywhere on the net so google if your memory fails. Suddenly they were not recognised by the bios and that's what happened to us.

I have had many bad sectors and I have had SATA drives that sometimes disconnect or are not recognized by Windows, but I have never had a drive not recognised by the BIOS after a reboot that takes what 30 s? I do not work with dozens of HDDs as many of you guys so that might be it, but it's not something you read a lot in the web either. Until the issue was posted in TPU front page I didn't know what the problem was because googling it gave 0 similar issues (the support guy didn't tell us either, even after the news was posted, which is one of the reasons I complain and say they were covering it). So it's not that common, maybe common to IT people who work with dozens or hundreds ayear.


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## MN12BIRD (Jun 8, 2011)

They had a lot of firmware issues with the 11th gen (7200.11) Barracuda drives but I haven't heard too many issues with the 12th gen drives.  No more than I've heard with WD's current line and I have heard a few issues with them this year too.  They both make mistakes.  The 12th gen drives also got higher bit density (500GB per platter) and the performance went up.  All good in my books.

I have 5 Seagate Hard Drives at home ranging from 1-4 years old and haven't had an issue with any of them.


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## xenocide (Jun 8, 2011)

I have had an 80GB Seagate running in 3 comps over 5 years.  It went... _okay_.


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## qubit (Jun 8, 2011)

xenocide said:


> I have had an 80GB Seagate running in 3 comps over 5 years.  It went... _okay_.



Okay... so what wasn't quite right?


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## newtekie1 (Jun 8, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> The drives usually failed after you rebooted, documentation is everywhere on the net so google if your memory fails. Suddenly they were not recognised by the bios and that's what happened to us.
> 
> I have had many bad sectors and I have had SATA drives that sometimes disconnect or are not recognized by Windows, but I have never had a drive not recognised by the BIOS after a reboot that takes what 30 s? I do not work with dozens of HDDs as many of you guys so that might be it, but it's not something you read a lot in the web either. Until the issue was posted in TPU front page I didn't know what the problem was because googling it gave 0 similar issues (the support guy didn't tell us either, even after the news was posted, which is one of the reasons I complain and say they were covering it). So it's not that common, maybe common to IT people who work with dozens or hundreds ayear.



I think you should perhaps do a little research if you don't remember correctly.  The firmware issue caused the drive to lockup in mid use, a reboot would result in the drive not being recognized at all.  The drives didn't fail because of the reboot, the failed before the reboot and after the reboot were no long detected by the BIOS.  A quick released firmware by Seagate didn't really solve the problem, but it did prevent the drives from being so screwed that the BIOS wouldn't detect them, so the drives could be re-flashed with another firmware and they would work again. At no point was the data on the drive ever really gone or ever needed recovery.  So I don't even know where that is coming from, and my guess is that because your drive died from some other, non-firmware related, issue seagate offered to recover the data for a fee.  Drives that died from the firmware issue didn't lose any data.  Worst case the PCB was replaced, but even that was unecessary since there are tools and devices that  you can use to flash the  firmware even if a computer won't recognize it, and I'm willing to bet that Seagate has these tools.


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## MN12BIRD (Jun 8, 2011)

I have one of the 500GB 7200.11's that was affected by the bad firmware and was advised to update the firmware in Seatools.  I did the update before I ever even used the drive a few years ago and it's been going strong since.


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## xenocide (Jun 8, 2011)

qubit said:


> Okay... so what wasn't quite right?



It's just a Reddit joke haha.  But in all seriousness WD and Seagate are the premier HDD manufacturers in my mind.  Every time I've tried something else (Hitachi especially) it ends poorly.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 8, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> I think you should perhaps do a little research if you don't remember correctly.  The firmware issue caused the drive to lockup in mid use, a reboot would result in the drive not being recognized at all.  The drives didn't fail because of the reboot, the failed before the reboot and after the reboot were no long detected by the BIOS.  A quick released firmware by Seagate didn't really solve the problem, but it did prevent the drives from being so screwed that the BIOS wouldn't detect them, so the drives could be re-flashed with another firmware and they would work again. At no point was the data on the drive ever really gone or ever needed recovery.  So I don't even know where that is coming from, and my guess is that because your drive died from some other, non-firmware related, issue seagate offered to recover the data for a fee.  Drives that died from the firmware issue didn't lose any data.  Worst case the PCB was replaced, but even that was unecessary since there are tools and devices that  you can use to flash the  firmware even if a computer won't recognize it, and I'm willing to bet that Seagate has these tools.



I know the story perfectly (besides my good memory there's a forum thread on seagate forums that I read again before starting my posts here) and it's not entirely like you say, some HDDs also failed without any previous notice, just after a reboot. And tbh our HDD may have failed during operation, I don't remember that much after 3 years, especially considering it was my brother who was doing it, while I was mostly watching TV while having a look at the PC monitor from time to time. All I remember correctly is that between the time we were trnasfering the files to let's call it "new Seagate HDD 1" and we backed up the data to "new Seagate HDD 2", we had to reboot the PC for a reason I don't really remember and the HDD was no longer there. Maybe it failed while on operation and that's why we rebooted. We didn't have AHCI enabled MB so the easy way I would have used to resolve any issue with sata was simply rebooting and see what happened. I don't know if that's what we did, but that would sound a lot like me.

And yeah yeah yeah I know the data was never lost and should be there (unless it was corrupted after the fact, by who knows what i.e. an EM field which cannot be ruled out), that's why we reclaimed the HDD back. The fact is we will never know because the HDD they sent back has the exact same problem as when we sent it, it's completely bricked, despite suposedly being right 40h earlier when it was on their hands.

It was confirmed by *them* that:

1- the HDD was affected by the firmware issue.
2- the firmware had been replaced successfully
3- the HDD was working properly, although data was corrupt, which should not have hapenned because point number 1.

It is is still possible that the data was corrupt and we would have dealt with that, but a bricked HDD again? I have never complained about the data being recovered or not, is not that what I have a problem with, but the fact that the firmware was never really fixed, since the HDD was working (according to them) and 40h later it is not even recognised "again", the exact same symptom as when it was sent to them. The chances for something like that are minimal. And I don't know what my brother did after that, but the issue was not resolved and he was just exasperated and gave up. Whch is what I did almost 2 years ago already and gave up. Period. How many e-mails are usually necessary to resolve an RMA for an HDD? I don't know, but a lot were going and coming and most of them were evasive, misleading and plainly put deceptive and if it weren't for the fact that I read a lot on technology news and TPU, and I learnt abuot the firmware issue, we would have had to pay all the shipping costs and a fee and whatnot. And that was all after the firmware issue was a very well known issue, although at first we didn't know of it.

/thread


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## Deleted member 3 (Jun 8, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> I don't know, it was my brother who made the whole process (it was his data which was lost). I gave up almost 2 years ago, and stopped caring about that HDD, when it seemed pointless. The only thing you should care about is that it was just not resolved. Since you are not from Seagate, it's none of your bussiness anyway. Nor is this thread about resolving our problem. The OP asked if Seagate had changed, and I shared my experience that demostrates they have not changed at least when it comes to trying to avoid their responsabilty on failed HDDs.
> 
> I also just shared my opinion, which you don't agree with, and apparently offends you, but I would never be doing all this if I had any doubts. They acted wrong prior, during and after the fact and if it was not because of the news that were posted here on TPU, I would have never learnt about the real problem behind the failure of our HDD. Even after it was a well known problem, they would try to evade the issue on the contacts we made and tried to offer us a simple replacement instead of the service we deserved, so no there's absolutely no way in which I can consider the faulty HDD a coincidence.



It became everyone's business when you posted your story here, welcome to teh internets. Then again, it now turns out it's not even your story and you don't know the exact facts either. You claim Seagate is a bad company based on a single experience which is partly hearsay, you don't know what Seagate replied. Who is to say they weren't completely reasonable? It wouldn't be the first time somebody posts half a story which turns out his/her own fault after getting more details.

My opinion is that your story lacks facts and that Seagate is not more and not less evil than other major companies. I'm not sure why you believe I am offended in any way. 

Also, the only service you deserve when your HD dies is a replacement HD or a repair. Data recovery is not something you are entitled to.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 8, 2011)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Also, the only service you deserve when your HD dies is a replacement HD or a repair. Data recovery is not something you are entitled to.



Yes when a lawsuit forced them to in regards to 7200.11, genius....

And what's up with the I'm smart and you are stupid attitude? The I never had a problem with them so it must be your fault attitude? The you don't know what happened attitude?

There's only 2 things I don't know:

1- Why exactly we rebooted.
2- Why exactly my brother completely gave up*.

*I do know that on their first response, they said that the HDD is no longer in warranty and that the firmware issue has been resolved (as far as they are concerned), so that if we want to RMA it again we have to pay shipping costs (to Netherlands, so no less than 25 euros) and if it turns out it's not their fault (something that them and ony them can confirm) we would probably have to pay labour and the shipping costs bak to us if we happen to want the HDD back. So no thank you very much a new HDD from Samsung or WD costs less than that.

What I don't know is what has happened after that, although that alone sounds like a good reason if he couldn't negotiate anything better.

But ey, anyway being insulted over and over again in the internets is really nice so thank you. Now I know that I am stupid enough not to know my hardware and troubleshoot it, I know that I'm stupid enough not to know how to read and interpret the words from a support guy and that people over the internet who have never seen anything first hand know MUCH MUCH more than I do about my own issue. Aaaaaah it's so rewarding. THANK YOU.



> My opinion is that your story lacks facts and that Seagate is not more and not less evil than other major companies.



With this I can agree, which does not change the fact that Seagate is not a company from which I would recommend buying, just in case. As simple as that. The OP wanted our opinion and I gave mine. I have never questioned the opinion of others. Its you and newtekie who are mostly questioning mine. The thing is simple, we post our opnion and experiences, knowing that others will do the same and we hope that the OP or any eventual reader will be intelligent enough to weigh in all the responses and make up their mine based on that*. That is IMO what a forum is for and it works, it works, so what is wrong in this thread? I'll tell you what. That the opinion of one poster is being challenged because "we did not have a problem".

I guess we could tell all the families of victims of Nazies, Pinochet and Franco, between others to fuck simply off, because ey you know, they didn't do anything to me or to other millions of people in the world and all dictators are bad anyways, why should we inform about the wrongdoings of one of them! All of them are as bad as each other after all, never mind the victims who died or disapeared in the sea.

* So far 7 people seem to have never had a problem with them and only 1, me had serious issues. Shouldn't that be enough data for someone to make up their mind ON THEIR OWN without the need for other users and especially moderators to try and tell them what to think, by trying to bring down any other opinion other than "they are good". Or is it really necessary to bring one legit poster's experience down at all cost, for no real reason? This is NOT the TPU that I know.


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## Deleted member 3 (Jun 8, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> Yes when a lawsuit forced them to in regards to 7200.11, genius....



There was a lawsuit forcing them to then? That would obviously change my standpoint. Google doesn't show anything right away, have a linky?



> And what's up with the I'm smart and you are stupid attitude? The I never had a problem with them so it must be your fault attitude? The you don't know what happened attitude?


There is no attitude, I simply disagree. Agreeing tends to leave less to discuss, threads full of people posting "+1" or "me too" are worthless. I have had problems with Seagate disks. Though I had problems with many products of many companies. Some were resolved better than others. Seagate wasn't the best, but surely handled things decently most times.


> There's only 2 things I don't know:
> 
> 1- Why exactly we rebooted.
> 2- Why exactly my brother completely gave up*.
> ...


25 euros for shipping within Europe? Spanish post is worse than the Dutch then, and they are already expensive. I would have to agree that having to pay 25 euros kinda demotivates one to RMA as a 2TB disk costs 60 new.

Anyway, was the disk still in warranty according to you then? You're again revealing new information which lacked in your original story. A few more posts and we know what really happened and the OP can decide if he believes Seagate is indeed as evil as you claim them to be. 
The new firmware was released like 2 years ago as far as I remember. So they can expect you to have applied to fix by now. If the disk is indeed out of warranty, I don't see how they did anything wrong in this specific case.



> What I don't know is what has happened after that, although that alone sounds like a good reason if he couldn't negotiate anything better.
> 
> But ey, anyway being insulted over and over again in the internets is really nice so thank you. Now I know that I am stupid enough not to know my hardware and troubleshoot it, I know that I'm stupid enough not to know how to read and interpret the words from a support guy and that people over the internet who have never seen anything first hand know MUCH MUCH more than I do about my own issue. Aaaaaah it's so rewarding. THANK YOU.


I'm not insulting you. You're the one who feels insulted and then reflects that to me by claiming I feel insulted in some way. I'm just trying to kindly disagree with most of your statements.



> With this I can agree, which does not change the fact that Seagate is not a company from which I would recommend buying, just in case. As simple as that. The OP wanted our opinion and I gave mine. I have never questioned the opinion of others. Its you and newtekie who are mostly questioning mine. The thing is simple, we post our opnion and experiences, knowing that others will do the same and we hope that the OP or any eventual reader will be intelligent enough to weigh in all the responses and make up their mine based on that*. That is IMO what a forum is for and it works, it works, so what is wrong in this thread? I'll tell you what. That the opinion of one poster is being challenged because "we did not have a problem".
> 
> I guess we could tell all the families of victims of Nazies, Pinochet and Franco, between others to fuck simply off, because ey you know, they didn't do anything to me or to other millions of people in the world and all dictators are bad anyways, why should we inform about the wrongdoings of one of them! All of them are as bad as each other after all, never mind the victims who died or disapeared in the sea.




Also, as a moderator I kindly request that you don't use pointless Nazi comparisons as an argument. They'll just start trouble. Besides, according to that logic I should probably track you down and kill you for all the horrors Spain caused in my country many years ago.



> * So far 7 people seem to have never had a problem with them and only 1, me had serious issues. Shouldn't that be enough data for someone to make up their mind ON THEIR OWN without the need for other users and especially moderators to try and tell them what to think, by trying to bring down any other opinion other than "they are good". Or is it really necessary to bring one legit poster's experience down at all cost, for no real reason? This is NOT the TPU that I know.


I am not trying to tell anyone what to think. I am reading your post, disagreeing and telling you why. I am not speaking as a moderator. Being a moderator does not disqualify me from joining discussions as a user. Nor does it change the value of whatever I say as a user.


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## xenocide (Jun 8, 2011)

Waiting for somebody to throw a chair, that's when shit really gets real...


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## Frick (Jun 8, 2011)

xenocide said:


> Waiting for somebody to throw a chair, that's when shit really gets real...



That would be Benetanegia, Dan doesn't do that.

Anyway, I still have some seagate 4GB disks and they still work fine. A bit loud though.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 8, 2011)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> There was a lawsuit forcing them to then? That would obviously change my standpoint. Google doesn't show anything right away, have a linky?



Well no I can't find a link now, Seagate + lawsuit on google brings dozens of results about a different lawsuit (all about the same btw). I hope you understand that I'm not goign to spend all day searching for one. I don't remember where we saw it, but it was enough to revive a RMA process that had been stalled for more than a year, just be mentioning it. Until then they only offered a replacement. Since the disk itself costs next to nothing that didnt interest us.

Which brings us to the next question.



> Anyway, was the disk still in warranty according to you then? You're again revealing new information which lacked in your original story. A few more posts and we know what really happened and the OP can decide if he believes Seagate is indeed as evil as you claim them to be.



The disk was in warranty when the RMA process was started, but it was not, probably, when the disk was finally sent to them and "repaired". The lawsuit alleguedly forced them to repair the firmware whether or not the disks were in warranty (due to the nature of the failure), and they did fix the firmware (according to them) so I suppose they are no longer obligued and we are at their mercy (which we cannot trust atm) and tbh we no longer care.




> The new firmware was released like 2 years ago as far as I remember. So they can expect you to have applied to fix by now.



The drives connot be flashed after they were bricked. The second one, the one that didn't fail was flashed as has worked properly until now. Like I said plenty of times, no complaints with the disks that do work.



> If the disk is indeed out of warranty, I don't see how they did anything wrong in this specific case.



Well, in order to do the right thing, you can accept the RMA or not, depending of if you have to. But accepting the RMA and telling the customer that you fixed it, when you didn't, well that falls withing the description of doing wrong in my book.


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## brandonwh64 (Jun 8, 2011)

I have seen quite a few western digital bashing in this thread. I have had great luck IMO but YMMV i would assume. Their warranty department is very good. I had a drive that i purchased from a platoon buddy and it started having errors due to being dropped a couple of times (MY FAULT) I checked the warranty and it was out of date so i call them and give them the paypal receipt of when i purchased it and they changed the date of warranty NO QUESTIONS ASKED! I also ended up getting a 500GB Blue drive when i sent back in a 400GB 5,400RPM drive!!!!


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## BarbaricSoul (Jun 8, 2011)

xenocide said:


> Waiting for somebody to throw a chair, that's when shit really gets real...









Ok, let's sum this up.

The Seagate 7200.11 did have a firmware problem. Benetanegia bought two of these drives, of which one had problems within a week of him getting it and he is not happy with how Seagate handled the situation, and because of this, he won't buy a Seagate product again(his choice). Meanwhile, most problems people had with the 7200.11 drives were resolved with the firmware update. The 7200.11 drives aren't made anymore, and the 7200.12 drives that replaced them have been superior harddrives, so I don't think we should dwell on the 7200.11 drives that much. If we did, we'd all still be bashing AMD for the lack luster performance of the original Phenom CPUs and Nvidia for the sub-par performance of the Geforce 5000 cards. Every major company at one time or another is gonna produce a product line that does not give the performance it's expected to, which is the case for Seagate with the 7200.11 drives.

Bottom line, the Seagate 7200.11 drives weren't that great, but the 7200.12 drives are. Western Digital has had issues with thier drives aswell. As shown in this thread, people have had problems with drives from every major HD manufacturer, which is to be expected. Also shown in this thread, Western Digital and Seagate are the most trusted HD manufacturers. So to answer the OP's question, Seagate drives are just as good as anyother manufacturers drives.


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## Horrux (Jun 8, 2011)

BarbaricSoul said:


> http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/11/2010/08/500x_custom_1282329135098_nenad.jpg
> 
> Ok, let's sum this up.
> 
> ...



Nice! Thanks for the summary! 

I also have had a very good experience with a single Samsung F1 drive, and wanted to buy more. I would think the F3s would also be very good, as in reliable, fast, and very quiet. That's what I observed from the F1 anyway. They aren't widely available, though.


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## Widjaja (Jun 8, 2011)

BarabaricSoul summed up the issue within this thread good and proper.


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## newtekie1 (Jun 8, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> I know the story perfectly (*besides my good memory* there's a forum thread on seagate forums that I read again before starting my posts here) and it's not entirely like you say, some HDDs also failed without any previous notice, just after a reboot. And tbh our HDD may have failed during operation, *I don't remember that much after 3 years*



I stopped reading there. When you can't even manage to go an entire paragraph without contradicting yourself, there isn't any point in reading the rest.  And a forum thread is not a reliable source of information.  It can be filled with people like you who have no clue what really caused their drive to die, but blame it on the firmware anyway.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 8, 2011)

newtekie1 said:


> I stopped reading there. When you can't even manage to go an entire paragraph without contradicting yourself, there isn't any point in reading the rest.  And a forum thread is not a reliable source of information.  It can be filled with people like you who have no clue what really caused their drive to die, but blame it on the firmware anyway.



If you had read any of my posts you would have known that I was watching tv so I did not pay attention, smartass.

This is ridiculous and a little bit sad anyway. I used to think you were wiser but I guess time puts everyone on their place. And you know *who* does not have a clue about what happened to *my* drive (or the others in the seagate forum thread I talked about)? *You* don't have a clue. Like I said and like you would have learnt if you had not been arrogant enough to not even read, you would have known that there's no need for me or you or anyone for that matter to guess what happened to my HDD, because the drive was sent to RMA and the Seagate technician who tested it confirmed the drive had in fact a faulty firmware. But of course without ever seing my drive, not even an screenshot or anything, even then you know not only more than me or any other person on the internet for that matter, but you know much more about my HDD and it's fate, than a technician who actually had the drive on his hands and tested it. Now that's impressive.


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## MN12BIRD (Jun 8, 2011)

Yes Seagate admitted they made a mistake and many RMA's on 7200.11 drive got free Data Recovery.  They did good on their mistake and they haven't had any major issues since.  So They're still the best in my book.

It doesn't matter if it was a Hardware issue or a Firmware issue.  You can't have one without the other.  Most Hardware has bugs in it that the Firmware needs to address or workaround and vice verse Firmware could cause Hardware failures.  So who cares what you say it was.  It was a mistake and it was fixed.


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## Tatty_One (Jun 8, 2011)

I think Barabric Soul has summed up the thread perfectly at post 54, I understand the several perspective's discussed here, methinks this thread has served it's purpose now, thanks for bringing issues to members attention and thanks for everyone who posted constructively on this topic.... case closed!


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