G'day Gary,
Quote:

I'm not too sure about that, Cardinal. While the Seagates I've bought have been okay, I remember a time when they were failing out of the box. Also, depending on the model, there have been some very bad reviews on certain Seagate models on Newegg. I like my Free Agent drive, I use them at work for backup, and I have Seagates in our file server RAID array, and like them.

For my latest build, I went with Western Digital. I've always had good luck with WD drives.




WRT the Seagates failing out of the box, I can't help wondering... Some years back I started refusing to accept machines from our suppliers that were equipped with Quantum HDDs. Then Quantum sold it's HDD arm to Maxtor - and again I refused to accept machines with Maxtor drives - in both cases the failure rate was far too high - greater than 10% within warranty period and approaching 50% within 1 year of end of warranty. Guess maybe that's why Quantum got out of the HDD business. Their TBUs are very good! We specified either IBM or Seagate drives until about 12 month before IBM sold their drives to Hitachi (IBM had let quality deteriorate and reliability had become an issue) wherefore we dropped IBM and specified Seagates only. We tried Hitachi's for a while but were dissatisfied with reliability and performance.

Anyhow, to continue, a couple of years ago Seagate acquired Maxtor... It seemed to me that some of the Seagate models were simply Quantum and Maxtor models that had been rebadged, though I also read that Seagate had closed the acquired fabrication plants so I don't really know what was being shipped under what label there for a while.

Perhaps the Seagates with the bad reviews were really not Seagates at all..?

For my customers, we generally prefer Seagates. The only reason WD's are not as high on our preference list is simply performance - Seagate has faster standard drives (yes, I know, WD have some 10,000 RPM drives that are very fast but these are not their basic drives)

If you ask enough people, you will get horror stories about every manufacturer. For what its worth, we prefer to sell HP servers - IMHO they are without out peer in their storage subsystems and their Smart Array Controllers are simply the best in the world - bar none. HP currently use Seagate and WD drives in their servers - and have done for many years - this says a lot to me.

--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya laugh --=--
You're only paranoid if you're wrong!