Seagate continues to scrape the bottom of the barrel
Seagate is widely regarded for making sub-par hard drives overall which it dismisses when you call them because they have a "1% failure rate", but when you look at the reviews of those that actually bothered to update them after initially booting up the disk then you see a very different story. Most comment on a 30-50% failure rate, one I can attest to with me having used about 18 of these 3TB drives in the past 3 years and 16 of them have failed.
If you're going to order these things order them in groups of 3 because most likely 1 will
be dead on arrival or going to die. Out of my last 3 HDDs I ordered 2 weeks ago (because I had yet ANOTHER failure), one arrived that failed the smart tests immediately with all sorts of bad sectors popping up during a surface scan and deemed "going to die soon". Another had numerous slow response sectors (over 50,000) which is most likely an indication of a drive that'll last less than a year under more than normal duress but was still usable so I kept it. I'm afraid to even get a replacement drive directly from Seagate because the one that failed was a replacement drive that I just got a few months ago which replaced another replacement drive from Seagate which was DOA.
NONE of my drives have lasted longer than ONE YEAR so far. These things are advertised to be high performance, I have them in a would be high performance computer that is rarely used as more than a Youtube watching machine. The horrible Seagate rep suggested I buy enterprise level drives which cost at least 3X more! Then, they totally dismiss my claims because they have a "1% failure rate." Some engineers have even posted in-depth reviews of their supposed enterprise "raid drives" which claim that those special "raid drives" are actually horrible for raid setups because that low, constant spindle speed causes some drives not to boot up when needed which causes data loss among other things such as setting off raid alarms because the drives drop out of the arrays when they don't spin up.
I used to work as a lead engineer at a very large billion dollar corporation with over 65k employees worldwide. We ordered over 25,000 laptops, a good majority of which had Seagate drives in them. 40% of those drives failed within the first few months of us deploying those laptops which we brought up with Lenovo (who was supposed to reach out to Seagate). It was chalked up to a "bad batch of hard drives". When a company generating $16 billion a year on the same level of Seagate has 40% of it's hard drives failing then I would say that definitely says something about the quality of the drives. Those drives reflected bad upon my entire department with all the downtime and lost data and we devoted a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of the bluescreens and failures only to find out it was just "bad drives."
The 3TB drives also take up a lot of resources when writing to for some odd reason. 32gb of RAM, an 8-core processor, the latest graphics card, and an OS loaded onto an SSD doesn't stop my system from hiccuping when writing mere 500mb files to these drives.
Yet, Seagate continues to claim they have a "1% failure rate" and dismiss every negative review. The manager of the reps said that "If you release the perfect product, there's always going to be someone that complains." He left no room for improvement upon his own product and suggested Seagate drives were perfect!
People, update your reviews to reflect your true experience with these drives after months of usage. Let Seagate know the exact quality of these drives so they can't continue to live in their fantasy realm where they don't suck. No wonder Seagate and other HDD manufacturers got destroyed when SSDs were released, I'm surprised they're even still in business. WD has a lower failure rate and their black series 3tb has faster read/write speeds so they're the better deal. When I get the chance I'm selling all these drives and buying all WD drives (unless 4TB SSDs drop down to a reasonable price.)
You think I'm lying? Check out Backblaze's report on Seagate drives compared to WD and Hitachi where 47,561 drive failures were looked at. In their reports Seagate's 3TB drives clocked in around a whopping 30% average failure rate over several years before they retired the model.
Update 6/22/16:
The last and final failure from a few months ago caused me to switch over to Western Digital/HGST's 10TB helium drives. I am no longer a Seagate customer and will no longer participate in giving them money for sub-par products.
Update 11/10/2019:
Over 3 years later with HGST Helium drives & none have failed. I've had no issues whatsoever & they still perform as if new, the polar opposite from Seagate's 3TB hard drives.
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