Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

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silentmitx
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Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by silentmitx » Tue May 27, 2014 11:54 am

The HDD:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST3100052 ... B002FOPT46
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-ST31000 ... B006Z4IRUU

The issue: none as far as I know - it hasn't been used yet

The Question: Can / Should I use it for data

I got this drive a while ago (gift) but I didn't use it yet. But, I plan a new build and will use a SSD as the OS drive. I have a 1TB with 400GB left so when I run out, I'll want another data drive. It'll consist of various files including media.

There were good reviews of the lastest version of this model but not previous ones. I think this one is one of the decent ones but not sure.

Maybe there is some info you know about this? I googled but I can't find anything really bad per se except it's an older drive. It's a bit fast for a data drive but I believe it's considered cool-running and if not totally quiet, not as noisy as other drives. It's just to hold data. But, if there is some reason not to use it for that, then I'd want to know.

I currently have an older Intel LGA775 system and haven't decided if I will sell components from it, keep it or donate it to a family member. I could put a fresh HDD in there, too, even.

I just want to be aware of anything to be learned about the drive before using it. I think it should be okay but I was curious about any opinions on this drive. :)

Thanks in advance.

andyb
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by andyb » Sun Jun 01, 2014 10:37 am

I hope I am not too late in replying.

Seagate HDD's used to be very reliable, they are not and have not been reliable for a few years now, I would suggest a WD or Hitachi drive instead.


Andy

HellDiverUK
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by HellDiverUK » Wed Jul 02, 2014 10:38 am

andyb wrote:I hope I am not too late in replying.

Seagate HDD's used to be very reliable, they are not and have not been reliable for a few years now,
I wish you hadn't. Please stop spreading this FUD. Seagate are just as reliable as WD.

andyb
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by andyb » Wed Jul 02, 2014 1:10 pm

Yes, FUD.......

On a 3-year 27,000 HDD Study, Seagate HDD's were significantly less reliable than drives manufactured by WD or Hitachi.

To be specific, the 3TB Seagate drive had an annualized failure rate of around 10%, WD's 3TB HDD was around the 4^ mark and BHitachi's was nearer 1%.

And working as a PC engineer I see a lot of drives of a lot of ages in laptops and desktops, my personal experience back up the study that Seagate HDD's have been crap for a few years to the point that we stopped buying them because of their insane failure rate and lame 1-year warranty. One of my colleagues bout 4x identical Seagate (3TB 7200.12/13's I think), they all failed inside 2-months due to their shockingly awful firmware issue that Seagate publically denied for several months.

What a fantastic vote of confidence that instilled in me, Seagate dont test the firmware of an entire range of drives, ship millions of them, delete posts from their customers telling them of their problems, deny that there is a problem and then finally admit that there is a problem and issue a firmware update that in itself bricked huge numbers of drives.

Will I buy another Seagate HDD again.? probably. Will I buy one anytime soon, not a chance.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089464/ ... akers.html


Andy

HellDiverUK
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by HellDiverUK » Thu Jul 03, 2014 12:42 am

So, you're tarring all Seagates with the one brush, just because you anecdotally see lots of Seagate drives? Right, glad we got that sorted.

That's like saying a Ford Focus is more unreliable than a MG6, because you're a mechanic and see lots more broken Ford Focus. No shit you're going to see more Fords, because they're the most popular car on the road.

To quote the article you linked:
That doesn’t mean Backblaze is swearing off Seagate drives. In fact, the company has high hopes for Seagate’s new 4TB Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000). Other Seagate drives are also big favorites with the Backblazers.
Hitachi, which now make the most reliable drives (although they've been bought out by WD, so get those Hitachis while they last!) made some serious lemons in the past when they were called IBM - the 75GXP and 60GXP are prime examples.
And working as a PC engineer
Don't make me laugh. :lol:

andyb
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by andyb » Thu Jul 03, 2014 6:50 am

So, you're tarring all Seagates with the one brush, just because you anecdotally see lots of Seagate drives? Right, glad we got that sorted.
Yes, but not because I "see" a lot of faulty Seagate HDD's, but based on how many I have supplied in PC's and have become faulty inside the first year.

I refused to buy WD HDD's many years ago for that same reason. Before that I refused to buy any Maxtor HDD's, before that I refused to buy any Quantum HDD's, before that it was IBM because I had a 75GXP. I also said that I will likely buy Seagate HDD's again in the future as I have done with many of the other brands in the past.

If a company makes a bunch of totally shit products, refuses to acknowledge or fix their problems, then subsequently drops their warranties I wont buy their drives again until they have a track record of NOT making shit drives for some time and sells drives with real warranties - Seagate springs to mind..... Now why would I buy a Seagate HDD with a 1-year warranty and a "current" level of reliability that I know nothing about, when I can buy a WD HDD with a 2-year warranty and a good track record of reliability for £2 more.?

You would have to be insane to make that decision....

When Seagate HDD's have had a track record of NOT being shit and hugely unreliable AND have a 2+ year warranty they will get a look in again. I dont take any of these decisions lightly, and so long as there is another product available I have no problems with punishing a manufacturer that has caused me grief by NOT buying their products until they have sorted out their problems.

Here is a brief list of other products I have stopped buying over the years. OCZ PSU's, Corsair PSU's, Antec PSU's, Coolermaster PSU's - all for the same reasons, it depends on who actually manufacturers the PSU model that you are buying, all of these "brands" have "branded" exceptional PSU's and utterly horrible PSU's - I am now exceptionally careful with PSU's because I have sometimes found a PSU that I like and they have changed the actual OEM without changing the model number and the reliability has plummeted - most notably Corsair in recent times.

Asus motherboards, any RAM that is unbranded and doesn't have a massive warranty. Samsung DVD drives, Hanns-G (and Hanspree, they are the same company) monitors, anything made by Sony, HP laptops, anything made by Plextor and many more. Some of these were found to be very unreliable, others basically had no warranty due to the prohibitive expense of shipping the products overseas for replacement, knowing full well that the replacement will also be faulty, others like Hanns-G who took 3-months and 3-attampts to fix one monitor - I will never use them again because of the grief they caused me and the fact that I had to loan a customer a monitor for 3-months while these jokers f*cked around for ages - Hanns-G are now a sworn enemy of mine.
Don't make me laugh. :lol:
Nearly 15-years of fixing PC's and laptops, upgrading and building new PC's every day teaches you a few things.


Andy

HellDiverUK
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by HellDiverUK » Thu Jul 03, 2014 9:01 am

andyb wrote:
So, you're tarring all Seagates with the one brush, just because you anecdotally see lots of Seagate drives? Right, glad we got that sorted.
Yes, but not because I "see" a lot of faulty Seagate HDD's, but based on how many I have supplied in PC's and have become faulty inside the first year.
Which says to me either you, your supplier, or both are mishandling drives.
Nearly 15-years of fixing PC's and laptops, upgrading and building new PC's every day teaches you a few things.
I worked with guys who built PCs every day since 286 clones just came along, and they couldn't build a machine to save their lives. Bashing the drives around, motherboards not half screwed in, DIMMs in the wrong slots, underspecified PSUs, etc. I wouldn't use one of their PCs to hold open the door.

fuzzymath10
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by fuzzymath10 » Thu Jul 03, 2014 11:43 am

There are way too many variables that could impact any meaningful comparison of reliability but there are at least some practices that may help:

1) good power (enclosures are sketchy, as are poor quality ATX PSUs)
2) good cooling
3) appropriate duty cycle (e.g. not running a WD Green with 24/7 read/write activity)
4) proper mounting

The only drives I've lost data from hardware failure from are a 40GB 5400rpm Hitachi travelstar from 2003, and a 1GB seagate from 1996. Both crashed after around 6-7 years.

My current configuration includes a mix of Seagate, WD, and Toshiba drives and other than a DOA 1.5TB 7200.11 which was replaced with a refurb that has been great for 6.5 years, the best protection for any drive is to back your data up.

andyb
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by andyb » Thu Jul 03, 2014 11:44 am

Which says to me either you, your supplier, or both are mishandling drives.
Me absolutely not, I treat every hard drive as its my own. As for the suppliers, I have seen 3 extreme examples of the supplier being moronic, fist one was when I was working for a PC sales company and they had a dire returns rate at one point - it turns out that a forklift driver in the warehouse had dropped an entire pallet of drives - the failure rate was in the region of 50% in just a few months.

The second one was when we ordered about 20 drives in one go, the failure rate was over 30% inside 1-month, we returned an additional 5+ of the drives and we hadn't even unwrapped them.

Lastly, I was working for an IT company up London a bit over a year ago and a distributor sent 4x 3TB Hitachi server grade drives wrapped in thin plastic, no other packaging at all, unsurprisingly 2 of the 4 HDD's were DOA, very surprisingly when asked for those 4 HDD's to be replaced the distributor did the same thing again - the Distributor destroyed £2,400 worth of HDD's because of a total lack of packaging.

As for those specific Seagate HDD's that were all junk - it was the entire 7200.11 HDD range + other models with different names, a total of 30-models all affected with the same screwy firmware issue, some models were affected far more than others, but each and every one of them had the risk of destroying all of your data without warning, they were specifically useless in a RAID array which is how I first discovered the problem.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new ... es-failing

http://www.techpowerup.com/82331/seagat ... rives.html

3-months after Seagate started shipping these drives, Seagate finally did the right thing and admitted the problem existed and issued a firmware upgrade.

This was a mixed blessing for me and my business, the bad is that some of our customers lost data when drives failed and we had to pick up the pieces which cost the business money. The good is that we had drives turning up over the next several years with the bad firmware which generated us business, the other good thing is that we forced our suppliers to take back drives that the Seagate test tool said were OK before Seagate issued the firmware fix.

Needless to say when this first happened we stopped using Seagate desktop HDD's entirely and moved over to Samsung which were proven to be far more reliable, however we discovered that Seagate laptop drives were more reliable than Samsung laptop drives because we were supplying both at the same time, since then we have used nothing but WD drives for the last 2+ years and have been very happy with their reliability, and as such have no intention of switching brands until there is a compelling reason to do so.
I worked with guys who built PCs every day since 286 clones just came along, and they couldn't build a machine to save their lives. Bashing the drives around, motherboards not half screwed in, DIMMs in the wrong slots, underspecified PSUs, etc. I wouldn't use one of their PCs to hold open the door.
I have seen a lot of those over the years, and that is one of the reasons why we are so picky and refuse to price match anyone because we take time and care when picking components and time and care when building PC's - for a few years we were selling PC's with a 2-year warranty as standard because the reliability rate was so high, and at no real cost to the business because most of the components had a 3-year warranty anyway.

I cannot stand people who cobble a PC together from the cheapest available parts they are asking for trouble, and boy have I got some stories of stupidity. The first one that comes to mind is a guy who has got £500+ worth of components and an unbranded "600W" PSU (so actually a 300W PSU with a sticker that tells lies). The PSU of course took out the motherboard and graphics card when it blew costing the guy £300 because he used a £25 PSU rather than a £50 - £80 model so his net loss was £245 compared to buying an £80 quality PSU.


Andy

quest_for_silence
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Re: Seagate ST31000528AS okay?

Post by quest_for_silence » Thu Jul 03, 2014 1:24 pm

HellDiverUK wrote:
And working as a PC engineer
Don't make me laugh. :lol:

andyb knows I disagree with him about current Seagate line-up (and Toshiba also, IIRC), but nonetheless, even if I share some of your thoughts, now you're just pointless offensive.
Glad to see andyb didn't upset for your sarcasm/unpoliteness.

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