• Never ever use Seagate hard drives
    101 replies, posted
I've been a lifelong Seagate fan up until now. I've believed that their hard drives are of decent quality, and I haven't had any issues up until yesterday. I have 3 hard drives in my system. The first is a 1.5TB Seagate drive with my Windows 7 installation. That's the one that died today. The other two are 500GB and 80GB, and have OS X and Arch Linux, respectively. I started seeing the warning signs yesterday. My computer would freeze up a fair bit after bringing it back up from hibernation. Everything would be frozen except the mouse cursor for about 20 seconds, before everything would come back to life. I didn't really think much of it, instead just thinking "ugh, fucking computer." Fast forward to today. Same issue as yesterday with bringing it back up from hibernation, so I killed it and rebooted. I logged in and nothing loaded up - I had just a black screen to stare at. Ctrl Alt Delete didn't do anything, but I sat and waited for about 30 seconds before a message box appeared on my screen telling me that Windows encountered an error displaying shutdown and security options. This was when I had my first inkling that there might be deeper issues at play. So I rebooted, and not even the list of usernames appeared. All that was displayed was the default login screen background. I hit Ctrl Alt Delete a few times, but nothing happened so I killed it and restarted once again. It finally worked and I was able to get back in to my system. It was running for about 30 minutes and during this time I was talking to a friend about how I suspected I had a failing hard drive on my hands. When I told him that I had a 1.5TB Seagate drive, he just said was "Sorry, you're fucked" before telling me about how Seagate drives larger than 1TB had a reputation for dying. As I've never experienced any trouble with Seagate in the past, I didn't bother researching before I purchased my drive just under a year ago. Then, as I was talking to this friend, I experienced the freezing again. First Steam went, then Chrome, then Explorer. Everything was frozen except the mouse cursor. I couldn't open task manager or bring up the security options screen with Ctrl Alt Delete. This time however, it didn't fix itself as I was expecting it to after about 20 - 30 seconds. The system had been frozen for about a minute when a BSOD flashed itself across my screen and my computer rebooted itself. I began thinking about buying a new hard drive until I ran HDTune and I was only notified about 2 SMART warnings. After that, everything ran fine for the rest of the day. About half an hour ago, I had the exact same freezing problems. I gave up and reset. This time though, Windows wouldn't boot back up. All that was on the screen was BIOS telling me that it had experienced a "Disk read error" and that I had to hit Ctrl Alt Delete to restart. I got that message three times before putting in a Live CD I had handy and booting into Ubuntu. I immediately ran gparted, but all I got was this: [code] ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo gparted ====================== libparted : 2.2 ====================== Input/output error during read on /dev/sda Input/output error during read on /dev/sda Input/output error during read on /dev/sda Input/output error during read on /dev/sda [/code] So at the moment, it looks like I've lost everything on my hard drive. Music, documents, personal projects, important source code, [b]everything[/b]. I'm not sure what to do apart from buying a new hard drive ([b]not[/b] Seagate this time), reinstalling, and hoping for the best in regards to possibly salvaging my data. If anyone has any tips on maximizing my chances of getting anything off that hard drive, [i]please[/i] let me know. If it helps, I have two partitions of roughly equal size: a System partition, and a partition for my User Profile. Please heed my warning and stay as far as possible away from any Seagate hard drive. It'll only end in a crappy situation similar to mine. Also, if you ever, ever, [i]ever[/i] notice any warning signs that your hard drive is about to fail, [b]back everything up immediately[/b]. You'll thank me for it when your drive goes kaput.
Ouch, Ive recently had a 200Gig Maxator drive go, lost my windows installation and webserver. I currently have a 1Tb Hitatchi deathstar (nothing wrong so far).
"I[Seagate] have become death, destroyer of worlds!" IMO not all your data is lost, put it in a friends comp (or your one after you get a new HDD) and probs most of your doc's will be salvageable. Your Windows install seams dead tho, thats why I have it on a smaller separate SDD :smith:
All of Seagate's drives were rated as the most reliable drive a few years ago, what happened to those days ? :smithicide:
yeah i had to replace mine as both were failing
I had a 200 GB Seagate Barracuda and it broke after 1 year and 6 months of using. Mind the guarantee to electronics is 2 years here. I sent it in and got one back that even had 250 GB but I could tell it was a repaired one by the stickers and the serial. Now this bitch was LOUD as fuck, sounded like a remote controled car driving through my room. ANd it wasn't even consistent. It would go louder and quieter just in the right moments for you so you could not get used to it. After 2 months it broke with a loud cracking noise and Seagate refused replacement since my 2 years were over by now. Never again Seagate.
Damn, that sucks man. I actually have one of the Seagate 1tb drives that were known to cause problems, currently have 2 SMART warnings as well, although it hasn't gotten worse. I haven't had a single Seagate drive fail on me yet, so far it's only been a Western Digital (which cost all my music + photos). Waiting for a sale to purchase either a Samsung F3 or a WD Black... This guide at Gizmodo might help: [url=http://gizmodo.com/5741708/how-to-recover-your-data-mostly-free-and-easy]click[/url] If the BIOS still recognizes the drive, you're in luck. After my WD HDD crash, I've since done routine backups on all my stuff to an external hard drive. I'm also considering using [url=http://www.backblaze.com/]Backblaze[/url] for online backup ($5 for unlimited storage, has decent reviews too). Hope this helps.
Last Seagate drive i had the circuit board shorted out and blew, thank god i had backups
I have Seagate (500 GB) and the file transfer times are shit. Also, would Seagate be the cause of my Steam client (when not in game) crashing every ~30(?) minutes, for 5 minutes? This happened on my old computer, I later bought a new custom build, I only recycled the HDD and it sitll happens.
Friends 1,5TB seagate died recently. He gave it to me and I'm making a 3d model of it in autoCAD as my final exam for the course.
I gotta say.. to be frank. You're a fucking idiot. Over the course of an entire day you suspect multiple times that your HDD is failing, all of the symptoms are showing and you don't even consider backing stuff up? That's just bad sense. To be nice, if you rip out the HDD from the computer and load it externally or into a linux box, hopefully you will be able to get something from it.
I did some research, and it appears that the model I have is affected by the firmware bug that kills the drive after a certain number of boots. I'll have to send it in to Seagate to get it fixed, but all my data should still be there! Although, never again will I buy a Seagate drive. I'm going to get a Samsung 1TB tomorrow.
[QUOTE=Starpluck;27890918] Also, would Seagate be the cause of Steam client (when not in game) every 30 minutes, for 5 minutes? .[/QUOTE] Do you mean it randomly going "Not Responding"? My hardrive seems to be doing that loads, and it would alternate between Steam, MSN, etc.
[QUOTE=Sgt Pringles;27891065]Do you mean it randomly going "Not Responding"? My hardrive seems to be doing that loads, and it would alternate between Steam, MSN, etc.[/QUOTE] I was getting random Steam freezes too. As soon as it unfroze, it'd tell me how it finished updating a game
[QUOTE=pro ruby dev;27891055]I did some research, and it appears that the model I have is affected by the firmware bug that kills the drive after a certain number of boots. I'll have to send it in to Seagate to get it fixed, but all my data should still be there! Although, never again will I buy a Seagate drive. I'm going to get a Samsung 1TB tomorrow.[/QUOTE] I had this bug to. They fill fix it for free with all your data intact withing a week. No matter the warranty.
I had a seagate drive once it failed as well :(
[QUOTE=taipan;27891192]I had this bug to. They fill fix it for free with all your data intact withing a week. No matter the warranty.[/QUOTE] Should I just give them a call or something? I'm in Australia by the way
My Maxtor drive failed after just over a year of use. Hopefully my Western Digital will last longer, as I've always heard good things about them.
[QUOTE=Starpluck;27890918] Also, would Seagate be the cause of Steam client (when not in game) every 30 minutes, for 5 minutes?[/QUOTE] It causes your Steam Client to what?
A Seagate Barracuda acts as my OS drive, I keep it backed-up to my NAS just in case.
[QUOTE=pro ruby dev;27891216]Should I just give them a call or something? I'm in Australia by the way[/QUOTE] Only a small batch of drives got affected. You can check if yours is amongst them on their site by typing your serial.
I had two Seagate HDD's in RAID0 before. Both of them stopped working.
I have a 200 gb Seagate Barracuda in my old desktop, still works after 5 years.
This must be an exception, because I'm using Seagate drives now for almost 7 years and I never had any trouble. I just followed the following guidlines: [list] [*]Never touch or move the PC while it's on [*]Look for good air ventilation. According to a survey of google, temperature has no huge influence, if it's around 40-45°C but a bad when it's too cold or way to hot. [*]Switch drives every 1-2 years. I had to do this anyway because the space wasn't sufficient anymore. MTBF is around 3 years if I remember correctly, so keep a constant replacement cycle. [*]Switch off your PC or go to standby if you don't need it for an hour or more. Saves runtime of the HDD. But don't do this for short periods (see one line below) [*]Disable the hard-disk power-saving feature. The power-up and power-down cycle wears the drives motor. [*]Look for signs of fault using SMART errors like Sector Relocate Count - But this does not work reliable enough. [/list] I actually just had one close-HDD-fail near 2000 with an old IBM drive. It made strange noises (mostly a sign for a problem with aligning the read/write heads), so I backed everything up and removed that drive. I then used that drive as backup-drive and it failed a year later during writing a backup.
[QUOTE=pro ruby dev;27891055]I did some research, and it appears that the model I have is affected by the [u][b]firmware bug that kills the drive after a certain number of boots[/b][/u]. I'll have to send it in to Seagate to get it fixed, but all my data should still be there! Although, never again will I buy a Seagate drive. I'm going to get a Samsung 1TB tomorrow.[/QUOTE] :wtc: :v: :suicide:
[QUOTE=pro ruby dev;27891055]I did some research, and it appears that the model I have is affected by the firmware bug that kills the drive after a certain number of boots. I'll have to send it in to Seagate to get it fixed, but all my data should still be there! Although, never again will I buy a Seagate drive. I'm going to get a Samsung 1TB tomorrow.[/QUOTE] In fairness, that bug was pretty heavily publicised back when it was discovered... At least you'll get your data back, though.
i had a seagate 500gb as my downloads drive. it failed after about 2 years and i lost all my porn and stuff. now im packing a 1tb western digital.
I have two Seagate laptop drives. One 120GB, other 40GB. 120GB is for family pictures backups. No marks of failing yet. Also, we have family pics on fathers laptop too. 40GB is simply an external HDD. Powers on and off randomly, makes weird noises and beeps alot. Atleast it works.
Their smaller drives are fine. I've got a 320GB from 4 years ago and it's still running just like when I got it. I got a 500GB drive shortly after that and it died in under a year.
[QUOTE=pro ruby dev;27891092]I was getting random Steam freezes too. As soon as it unfroze, it'd tell me how it finished updating a game[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=Sgt Pringles;27891065]Do you mean it randomly going "Not Responding"? My hardrive seems to be doing that loads, and it would alternate between Steam, MSN, etc.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=B!N4RY;27891235]It causes your Steam Client to what?[/QUOTE] My bad, I meant yeah, it crashes. Not sure about MSN as I stopped using it before I got Seagate. The issue [B]also[/B] occurs if I begin to update a game. -- I just reproduced it by trying to update L4D2. Other then that, it just crashes every now and then for like 5 minutes.
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