I’m still not buying a seagate.
Nearly all brands have produced unreliable and a reliable series of hard drives.
Really have to look at them based on series / tech.
None of the big spinning rust brands really can be labeled as unreliable across the board
Got a source on that? According to Backblaze, Seagate seems to be doing okay (Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2024 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2024/), especially given how many models are in operation.
What brand is currently recommended? WD is taking the enshittification highway…
Latest story I know of: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/
I’ve bought 2 Seagate drives and both have failed. Meanwhile, I still have my 2 15yo WD drives working.
I hope I didn’t just jinx myself. Lol
Same here. I have a media server and just spent an afternoon of my weekend replacing a failed Seagate drive that was only used to to backup my more important files nightly that was purchased maybe 4-5 years ago. In the past 10 years, this is the third failed Seagate drive I’ve encountered (out of 5 total) while I have 9 WD drives that have had zero issues. One of them is even dedicated to torrents with constant R/W that is still chugging along just fine.
I’ve got the opposite experience, with WD.
You know who uses loads of Seagate drives? Backblaze. They also publish the stats. They wouldn’t be buying Seagate drives if they were significantly worse than the others.
The important thing is to back up your shit. All drives fail.
I bought a seagate. Brand new. 250gb, back when 250gb on one hard drive cost a fuckton.
It sat in a box until I was done burning the files on my old 60gb hard drive onto dvd-r’s.
Finally, like 2 months later, I open the box. Install the drive. Put all the files from dvds onto the hard drive.
And after I finished, 2 weeks later it totally dies. Outside of return window, but within the warranty period. Seagate refused to honor their warranty even though I still had the reciept.
That was like 2005. Western Digital has now gotten my business ever since. Multiple drives bought. Not because the drives die, but because datawise I outgrow them. My current setup is 18TB and a 12TB. I figure by 2027 I’ll need to update that 12TB to a 30TB. Which I assume will still cost $400 at that point.
Return customer? No no. We’ll hassle our customer and send bad vibes. Make him frustrated for ever shopping our brznd! Gotta protect that one time $400 purchase! It’s totally worth losing 20 years of sales!
- Seagate drives are generally way more reliable now than the pre-TB days.
- There is always a risk of premature failure with all hard drives (see the bathtub curve). You should never have only one copy of any data you aren’t okay with losing.
FYI: Backblaze is a cloud storage provider that uses HDDs at scale, and they publish their statistics every year regarding which models have the highest and lowest failure rates.
As @renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net said, infant mortality is a concern with spinning disks, if I recall (been out of reliability for a few years) things like bearings are super sensitive to handling and storage, vibrations and the like can totally cause microscopic damage causing premature failure, once they’re good though they’re good until they wear out. A lot of electronics follow that or the infant mortality curve, stuff dying out of the box sucks, but it’s not unexpected from a reliability POV.
Shitty of Seagate not to honour the warranty, that’d turn me off as well. Mine is pettier, when I was building my nas/server I initially bought some WD reds, returned those and went for some Seagate ironwolf drives because the reds made this really irritating whine you could hear across the room, at the time we had a single room apartment so was no good.
OK…what’s this HAMR technology and how does it play compared to the typical CMR/SMR performance differences?
Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. It uses a laser to heat the drive platter, allowing for higher areal density and increased capacity.
I am ignorant on the CMR/SMR differences in performance
I fear HAMR sounds like a variation on the idea of getting a coarser method to prepare the data to be written, just like on SMR. These kind of hard drives are good for slow predictable sequential storage, but they suck at writing more randomly. They’re good for surveillance storage and things like that, but no good for daily use in a computer.
That sounds absolutely fine to me.
Compared to an NVME SSD, which is what I have my OS and software installed on, every spinning disk drive is glacially slow. So it really doesn’t make much of a difference if my archive drive is a little bit slower at random R/W than it otherwise would be.
In fact I wish tape drives weren’t so expensive because I’m pretty sure I’d rather have one of those.
If you need high R/W performance and huge capacity at the same time (like for editing gigantic high resolution videos) you probably want some kind of RAID array.
What about the writing and reading speeds?
I mean, newer server-grade models with independent actuators can easily saturate a SATA 3 connection. As far as speeds go, a raid-5 or raid-6 setup or equivalent should be pretty damn fast, especially if they start rolling out those independent actuators into the consumer market.
As far as latency goes? Yeah, you should stick to solid state…but this breathes new life into the HDD market for sure.
Now you can store even more data unsafely!
I’m going to remind you that these fuckers are LOUD, like ROARING LOUD, so might not be suitable for your living room server.
