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I don't think that they care too much about that

ISTM that data recovery companies could view this as an opportunity to score some ex post facto PR points with their customers by informing them of an opportunity to recover their costs.

https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/seagate
https://www.hbsslaw.com/uploads/case_do ... eagate.pdf


Personally I'm very sorry for Seagate, as they have always treated me very well. In the early 1990s they gave me complete technical manuals the size of phone books without charging me a cent. Their customer service was always exemplary. The only HDD manufacturer that gave me better support was Control Data, a company which Seagate subsequently purchased. I have seen just about every HDD manufacturer come and go, and I hope that this suit does not signal the end for yet another major player.

That said, some years ago I made Seagate aware of a bug in the firmware updater for their 1TB-per-platter drives, including the 3TB DM drive that is the subject of the complaint. This bug prevented the update from being applied to ANY of their targeted drives. I explained in detail the cause of the bug (wrong filenames) and also provided a simple workaround, all in their own forum. Three years later the same bug was still present, and my posts, and their old forum, had been consigned to the e-dustbin.

BTW, I'm not suggesting that a firmware update would have reduced the chances of failure.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

@fzabkar, times have changed and Seagate decided to produce crap the last years.

A lot of DR companies have wasted a lot of time and it took some time to realize that seagate's HDD's need a special pricing for recovery.
not to mention the fact that a lot of people lost their data, because of the crap they produced and they couldn't afford the high price, and people who could able to afford it , sometimes they had to pay a really high price for their data, and sometimes, even they agree to pay the high quoted price the have been given, the data wasn't recoverable.

Therefore in my eyes it's time for them to vanish from earth, enough damaged.

My 2¢.

At first, I was quite frustrated with the Seagate DM issues. However, as time has passed, it has only helped me better understand Seagate drives. Although we almost always have at least one tough DM drive to deal with at any point in time, I'd estimate that we are able to easily recover 90% of those we get these days...knock on wood that we don't get a batch of really tough projects now that I've made this post.

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Luke
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I don't think any HDD manufacturer has ever "decided" to produce a bad product. History shows that it often only takes one bad product to kill a company. If Seagate dies, then imagine how much we would be paying for WD's products (are they really that much better than Seagate's?). The market needs at least two big players to keep each other honest.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

WD from a development perspective are far superior IMHO.

Seagate hasn't a clue

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

So what specifically is failing in Seagate's drives? Is it the heads?

I remember a thread at Seagate's old forum where a user measured the transfer rates for each head using a HD Tune read benchmark. It showed that the ratio of transfer rates between two particular heads in the outer zone was 1.6:1. This was confirmed via a terminal dump. Moreover, this was a 2TB DM drive with 3 platters and 5 heads. To me these huge tolerances suggest that Seagate has serious yield and quality problems with their heads, but I can't see how this could translate into actual head failures.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

ha-ha.
The same HDDs.
Spring and summer are bad.
A good fall and winter.
Maybe it was necessary to put the Air Con is good?

apart from DM series, seagate is not as bad as many think.

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It would be interesting to get say 1,000 DR places to show the very simple stat as brand of HDD of through the door jobs that were not user logical errors. Meaning just what brand the HDD is that has gone kaput for whatever reason.

But then I guess you would need to normalise it to percentage of sales as well.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... y-q3-2015/

Seagate's 4TB drives (ST4000DM000 and ST4000DX000) look OK. Their 6TB drive (ST6000DX000) has half the failure rate of the WD60EFRX, and a lower failure rate than HGST's 8TB Helium drive.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Exactly.
And the marketing approach of each DR lab. We get more WD's than Seagates, probably because we're WD certified.

Also it has to do with manufacturer's approach at each country. There has been a huge sales wave in Barracudas 7200.11 some years ago. Shops were selling them at ridiculous prices. Of course they started to fail one after the other so that increased the percentage of incoming .11 drives in our lab.


Yes, they are.

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How about current models?

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... y-q3-2015/

Seagate's 4TB drives (ST4000DM000 and ST4000DX000) look OK. Their 6TB drive (ST6000DX000) has half the failure rate of the WD60EFRX, and a lower failure rate than HGST's 8TB Helium drive.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I just checked and we've seen 11 Lombards (ST4000DM000).
6 of them with bad heads ---> 3 of them were 100% non recoverable due to severe media damage
The other 5 had logical failures and/or user mishandles.

We've had a RAID5 with 4 of these last week, 2 of them had too many bad blocks that caused the RAID to crash.

So, considering they're pretty new drives, they look like typical Seagate drives to me.

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Could it be that your negative perception of Seagate's current models is skewed by the relatively greater incidence of media problems or the greater complexity of data recovery? From a user's perspective, a dead drive is a dead drive, whether it is due to media faults or just a simple firmware issue. But from your perspective, one drive is recoverable whereas the other is not, so that may lead to an unconscious bias.

In any case, are all HDD manufacturers liars? For example, how can HGST/WDC justify their fantastic MTBF specs:

https://www.hgst.com/company/media-room ... eliability


100 drives x (1 year) / (2.5 million drive.hours of operation) = 0.35

That is, the MTBF spec corresponds to an annualised failure rate of 0.35%

Backblaze are experiencing actual failure rates that are 10 times greater.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

No I don't think I'm unconsciously biased. Fact is, I can see statistics that an end user can't. If I was to interpret those statistics I'd say I disagree with Backblaze.
They compare drives with different architecture and different purpose of use.
According to what I see, WD RE (not Black) are the ones with the smallest failure rate.
You're right a drive is a drive and an end user just buys a drive but I don't think that appeals to all drives in the list. For example, when someone buys a $900 He or a $500 SSD drive he is not just buying "a" drive.
But that's OUR stats and that's my .02$

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