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  • nagi603 - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Well, there is a brand I trusted even less than Seagate. Especially after Seagate's newest offerings being actually reliable. I still remember a Maxtor HDD almost eating my years-long assignment.
  • Arbie - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    From these pictures it's apparent that Maxtor drives will have the same lack of ventilation as the Seagates. With predictable results. It's incredible that a company can produce such a technical marvel as the hard drive and not be able to put holes in a plastic box. Do they have the cleaning staff design the packaging?
  • BrokenCrayons - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    I'm not sure if you know it, but your ranting comment is probably one of the most amusing I've read here at AT in weeks. The line about the cleaning staff designing the package had the beauty of freshly shed unicorn tears, glimmering in the light cast by the morning sun as it rises from behind the hills around a tranquil, untouched forest. And no, those tears didn't come from Charlie the Unicorn either.

    I just thought you might wanna know. Please keep up the great work you're doing here. :)
  • aakash_sin - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    Haha! :P #Owned
  • BenJeremy - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Yeah, It seems that Seagate, when they bought Maxtor, switched over to all of the bad engineering and manufacturing of Maxtor, and shed whatever decent tech it had, because that was the moment Seagate quality tanked. I have stacks of Seagate drives, none I've owned in the past 10 years have lasted more than a few years - most taking terabytes of data without a single warning. As it stands, in terms of quality, Hitachi #1 (I'd trust a used server pull with 20k hours over a new Seagate), WD #2 (their network line, mostly), Toshiba #3 (distant), and Seagate #NEVER-NADA-ZIP-ZILCH.

    Even worse, they swallowed up Samsung's HDD line by buying it up and shutting it down. Samsung also made great drives.
  • Senti - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    It's a real pity that Samsung's HDD line was shut down. I have their 1TB and 2TB drives that still work flawlessly. Low noise and temperature, no annoying clicks that modern drives are quite famous for and still 0 reallocated sectors.
  • Samus - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Samsung drives were very reliable, but very slow. Especially their laptop drives. Good storage drives. But system builders are looking for drives you can run an OS from and Samsung drives were just not competitive which is why they had almost no OEM wins. A stark contrast to their SSD products that have many OEM wins, only bested by Sandisk.

    We can only hope the Samsung IP goes to good use, or has already gone to use in the latest portfolio of products.
  • StevoLincolnite - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    The Samsung Spinpoint F3 was actually pretty good from a performance perspective.
    Sure it wasn't going to out-bench a Western Digital Black... But it was also a heap cheaper.

    ***

    As for Seagate... The first HDD (That wasn't in a prebuilt) I bought back in the 90's was a Seagate Cheetah, it lasted a week and I haven't dared touch them since.
    Got 7x Western Digital Element external drives, a Western Digital Green 2tb drive at the moment... And they have all been humming along fine for years, but that's ancedotal of course.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    IIRC, the Spinpoint F3 launched prior to the WD Black that it competed with and still compared pretty decently after the WD Black launched. Could be nostalgia talking though.

    Anecdotally speaking, I've had quite the reverse of your experience. I had to service 49 systems over the span of 6 years with WD harddisks suffering from a distinctive clicking pattern and lack of function. I only had six clients with WD harddisks that were still functional. None of the drives (working or broken) were older than 18 months at time of service. I could identify WD brand harddisks by that sound over the phone. I've continued to deal with WD HDD failures at perhaps a slightly lesser rate. Though, I stopped keeping track after that period and hesitate to recommend anything from them short of a raptor drive. Seagate, on the other hand, made harddisks that I rarely ever had to service up until after the 1TB drives. Seagate got my recommendation until the Samsung Spinpoint F1 series launched. Seems like most major players in the industry had trouble to some extent making >1TB drives for a while. That said, the quality of Seagate has clearly waned and I've had to deal with more issues out of them since then. When Hitachi bought the IBM HDD division, I had plenty of reason to avoid them. There was a good reason the DeskStar lineup got the nickname "DeathStar" and IBM even got hit with class action lawsuits over it. That said, the Hitachi DeskStar of today is an entirely different beast. They've had my top spot since Samsung sold their HDD division to Seagate.
  • kmi187 - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    The Samsung Spinpoint series starting from F1, were some of the fastest drives that were out on the market when they launched.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    Samsung's Spinpoint F1 and F3 drives may not have been the fastest by the time all of their competition dropped their newest competitors, but they were definitely close. I'm pretty sure you are correct about the F1 being the fastest at launch. More impressively, they did it while remaining much cooler and quieter than the competition.
  • Samus - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Seagate has a history of acquiring shitbox companies. And so does Maxtor.

    Maxtor acquired Quantum, and both companies for the longest time made complete crap from the Quantum Bigfoot to the Quantum LCT (low cost technology) drives. Quantums magnetic tape division was their only bright spot and is presumably the only reason Maxtor bought them.

    Maxtor basically had the worst failure rates in the industry for years leading up until their inevitable bankruptcy and purchase by Seagate. I don't know what Seagate saw in Maxtor, but it was perhaps the IP from Quantum's DAT technology.

    But before all of this was the hilarious acquisition of Conner Peripherals. Conner perhaps made the most unreliable, and most ridiculous hard disk designs of all time. They actually made a dual actuator drive that effectively doubled the failure rate while not even increasing performance (the bus at the time was too limited to best the transfer rates of high rpm drives.) I'd never seen as many drives fail so systematically as Conner drives.

    The irony is, though most of these acquisitions, from the mid 90's to the mid 00's, Seagate made what I would consider THE MOST RELIABLE hard drives. Remember this was a time of the WD BB models that were out classed by their own JB models in reliability and performance. And who could forget the Deathstar 75GXP with their chronic GMR head failures. Yes, the Seagate 7200.7 was infinitely more reliable, faster, and quieter, than every other competitor at the time, and after buying Maxtor they really went to shit. These days, you are almost crazy to consider Seagate over WD or what's left of Hitachi. I keep hearing Seagate newer products are better, but considering they just rebuilt their entire product portfolio (iron wolf, really?) I think even they know something needs to happen with their product image, because the barracuda model brings shivers to my spin. And I'm not the only one, appearantly.
  • PandaBear - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    7200.7 is very reliable, I am still using two 120gb daily at 13 year, migrate on every upgrade.
  • Flunk - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link

    I still have 2 7200.7 drives that have been in my file server, powered constantly for about 10 years.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    But I like my Quantum Bigfoot. It is still just as functional today as the day I got it. Which is to say I acquired a broken drive and pulled the platters out for use as ornaments. Picks up fingerprints like mad though.
  • Morawka - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    i have the opposite experience with seagate drives.. If you have so many that fail, perhaps your operating conditions are bad.

    Give the 3.5 drives plenty of airflow, and use rubber based mounting mechanisms to cut down on vibration. Also, when you get a new drive, don't immediately fill it up to 75% or more. the heads were not built for continuous writing for 24 hour. Instead, fill up 30% per day
  • ohnoausername - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    So you're literally going with "you're holding it wrong"? The plural of anecdote is not data, but I've seen scores of Seagate drives fail in the last few years, most of them from right after the Maxtor acquisition when we stopped using them. Seen one WD fail in that time. Seagate is junk.
  • ohnoausername - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    And I should note that one WD was being used inappropriately.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    Were you holding it wrong?
  • Morawka - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    well if i see erroneous data, i have to question what other variables are at play. it was purely a scientific observation.

    Hard drives are a commodity, and are usually built pretty much the same no matter who makes it.
    Sure, there are different platter technologies, such as SMR, but my point is, they are built using the same components, same heads, same platters, same casing, etc..

    WD just sells 20% of the drives that Seagate does, that's why you think seagate is bad.

    Look at the latest backblaze report (Documentation of data center failures over time)

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliabil...
  • ohnoausername - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link

    The report you linked shows that HGST (a WD company) is by far the most reliable. It also shows that for 2014-2015 WD was more reliable. Granted, it does show a substantial improvement in reliability for 2016. I will say it does make me a little more worried about some common WD models, but even that linked data shows that although they are commodity parts, clearly there is still a significant range of reliability.
  • Flunk - Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - link

    I've had 2 of 4 2TB WD Green drives in my file server fail since I installed them 6 years ago. They're barely even read or written to! You aways get some bad drives and some good. Sometimes it's the batch, sometimes it's the model and sometimes it's just a single bad drive. The replacement drives, which are a slightly different model of WD green are still working fine.
  • BenJeremy - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Please... I've got more WD, Hitachi, and original Samsung drives still working just fine, working far longer. It's not operating conditions, unless you mean operating a Seagate drive under 0.3 earth gravity and at sub-zero temperatures for ideal operation of that brand of drive. My environment was dust free, well ventilated, and always air conditioned.

    I'm not the only person, by far, who has had the same experience with Seagate drives. I've certainly given them plenty of chances, but I've been burned every time.
  • PandaBear - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    I worked for Maxtor during the Seagate merger. They combine and shutdown based on location rather than performance so a lot of talents jumped boat instead of remain. Most importantly, their assumption that Maxtor 's new Chinese factory being state of the art ended up with very low yield because a lot of the know how were lost during the merger.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    So much makes sense now.
  • HomeworldFound - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Selling under the Samsung and Maxtor brand is pretty misleading, anything to avoid the name Seagate. I guess there's a fair amount of stigma that they want to avoid. I did see these drives for sale in an trade magazine but I had assumed they were old stock.
  • nwarawa - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Friggin' WHY? Maxtor was the biggest name on my avoid list, and made me avoid seagate for a year after the acquisition... And they want to revive THAT name?! Smh...
  • dgingeri - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    I miss some things of the old days, like the Quantum Fireball series drives. They were top of the heap in performance and pretty reliable. They were good quality products.

    Until the dark days. Until the Empire.

    Maxtor bought out Quantum's HD division and screwed everything up. I certainly don't miss Maxtor, and I'd prefer if that name just lies in the dust of history.
  • Valantar - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Am I the only one finding it kind of baffling that companies are still churning out _new_ products in late 2016 with the horrible USB 3.0 type-b connector, when type-C has been out for a while? Sure, Type-C is slightly trickier to implement (need to add protections against idiots plugging their laptop power adapter into the HDD ...), but other than that, it's a win-win(-win-win-win-win-win). USB 3.0 type-b, please die. Please.
  • HomeworldFound - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    They probably have factories full of the older connectors and cables to get rid of first.
  • Samus - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    I used to think that about "mechanical ball" mice for the longest time. Dell was still shipping them as late as 2011. Must have just had mountains of them lol.
  • BrokenCrayons - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    The connector is pretty stupid, but I've had more problems with B connector cables dying than the connectors themselves. The only thing I really like about that connector is that I can use a micro usb 2.0 cable. Since only one computer I own has USB 3.0 connectors, 2.0 cables (which I have quite a few of around) don't adversely harm transfer rate. In fact, the USB 3.0 type-b cables I do have are currently all non-functional except for one which is sort of iffy and I've stopped trying to replace them since I can just use a gen 2 micro on my two external drives.
  • dgingeri - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    What are you doing to break your cables?

    I have 4 USB 3.0 hard drives, two of which are mobile, and I pack them in my tool bag and carry them with me. I have yet to have a single USB 3.0 type B cable go bad. One drive went bad, and that was the 250GB drive inside the enclosure that went bad after several years of use. (It was one of the first USB 3.0 WD Passport drives.) The cable is still good, and sitting in my spare cables box. I still use it once in a while.

    Now, eSATA cables were horrible for me, back when I used them. Those would die in a few days without me even touching them. I'd attach a drive and leave it sitting behind my monitor without moving it, and the cable would disconnect at random after about 3 days, and become completely inoperable after about 10 days. Those things were horrible, and I left them behind after USB 3.0 came out.
  • Morawka - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    ever single maxtor drive i've ever owned has failed.

    Every single seagate drive i've ever owned still runs and i can retreive files from them. so they'res that
  • cuex - Thursday, December 1, 2016 - link

    Here comes again a famous BAD SECTOR HDD, a brand what many including ME will never ever buy again anymore, due to hard trauma of losing a big chunk of important data. Hitachi and WD are the only brands I trust.
  • Stanley van der Mill - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link

    Exactly nagi603, thanks to crappy Maxtor I had to spend 2k to recover all my lost files on their crashed disk by a disk recovery company. After that I bought 2 new portable disk to make sure it wouldn't happen again... What do you think...I bought 2 Samsung M3's, seeing the image above this seems exactly the same only with the crappy Maxtor logo on it. Grrr, scammer that's what the are. and what happend... history repeats itself, this SAMUNG drive just crashed on me yesterday. ADVICE to ALL of you out there DON'T BUY THIS MAXTOR CRAP or anything from SEAGATE. HELPDESK SERVICE, Warranty and returning policy suck bigtime.

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