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Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

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Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#31

Post by PaulHoule »

Joker_vD wrote: post #26
felindev wrote: post #2

> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? Since you can't make an "X-gate" name for a scandal out of the Seagate's name, they can afford more bad publicity than other hard drive manufacturers. Truly an ingenious branding strategy.

Circa 2001 or so I bought about 5 Maxtor drives that all went bad in a year and I wasn't the only one. I never bought another Maxtor drive again.

On the other hand, I've owned probably 20 Seagate drives and had maybe 1 fail, so I see them as a partner as much as a aprt.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#33

Post by IAmGraydon »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #8

One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality. I've seen similar things happening more frequently in different markets, not just tech. If you notice something like it, the best way to deal with it imo is ask for your money back, make it public if possible and boycott the business from then on. Customers need to penalize such behavior as much…

>One way some companies and merchants deal with high inflation and increasing price pressure seems to be declining quality.

And some, apparently, turn to fraud.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#34

Post by danparsonson »

bluGill wrote: post #28
felindev wrote: post #2

> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

there are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)

The HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#35

Post by londons_explore »

PaulHoule wrote: post #30

Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at…

> make special SKUs

If your company is set up for it, special SKU's can be really cheap. Some can be software-only changes that even get applied after the product gets into the hands of the users.

eg. during the setup process, the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer and figures out which features to enable.

There might even be more SKU combinations than products have ever be produced.

Not saying hard drive manufacturers do it, but it is both possible and done in some industries.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#36

Post by toast0 »

felindev wrote: post #2

> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

It's either Seagate, Western Digital, or the rotating third player in the market, but there haven't really been any other options for scanadals.

I can't remember the last time the third player had a big scandal, but WD certainly goes through them from time to time. IBM DeskStar is a name that will live in infamy, but that was from before rotational drives really consolidated.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#37

Post by rasz »

Hamuko wrote: post #5
baobun wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? WDs image was IIRC already not the best when the WD Red SMR thing blew up. I recall feeling smug but forget the background. I think they have a strong claim on title of most scandalous HDD maker.

Does any WD model have its own Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 (I had one, it died just after its warranty ended but Seagate did send me a replacement after bitching about it for long enough.)

They both competed for worst drive :)

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...

" Western Digital supplied it with faulty disk drives during 1988 and 1989"

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#38

Post by teekert »

felindev wrote: post #2

> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

I avoid WD since the WD Red SMR controversy. Was under the impression Seagate has always been solid. Bummer.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#39

Post by tjoff »

PaulHoule wrote: post #30

Those Exos drives have been popular with homelab types because they are usually $50-$100 cheaper than prosumer drives that claim to save maybe 0.5 W and 2-3 db of noise on the datasheet. (The latter could be effaced by a bad bearing anywhere in your build, I haven't seen either claim tested by a review site) It's funny but in this case the enterprise product is the cheap mainstream product and the 10-20 SKUs aimed at…

Or the only difference of those specialized SKUs is a single parameter in the firmware making a different tradeoff for, lets say, random seek vs. sustained sequential reads/writes. A different cache strategy. Or whatever.

Being able to charge $100 more for that is very worthwhile.

Re: Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours

#40

Post by linsomniac »

bluGill wrote: post #28
felindev wrote: post #2

> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?

there are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)

I'm a die-hard Ultrastar fan who was disappointed by their eventual sale to WD. But, for a sample size of 8 over a decade, I've been happy with my Toshiba laptop 2TB drives I have running in a small storage server.
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