whiic wrote:Sidrack Marinbo would probably qualify as a fanboy or hired propagandist: Seagate failures -> failures caused by high capacity alone and present in all manufacturers flagships. I'm pretty sure that if 1TB Hitachis were falling the same way as Seagates do, SidMar (and thousands of other Seagate-fanboys) all around the world would cry "Deathstar" without a second of hesitation.
I hope Seagate reputation would get a hit from this 7200.11 issue. While some data will be lost in the process (though Seagate has promised firmware updates for drives not yet dead, and free data recovery for drives already dead), it would make most Seagate-fanboys to accept the reality that no brand can be always superior to others and that Seagate is no exception. Seagate has not been superior with the 7200.10 or 7200.9 either... people just assume they were.
Bursting the Seagate reliability bubble which is fed by closed-loop feedback within Seagate fandom and the 5-year-warranty (which Seagate has given up for consumer grade drives!) is definitely a good thing. Getting rid of the superiority illusion will give other manufacturers a good chance at competing the supergiant of HDD manufacturers. And with the good products from all the competitors have made recently, they actually deserve their chance to get some more customers. Monopoly and guaranteed sales aren't good motivators for evolving so even Seagate customers would likely benefit from the issues on a longer time period (just skipping the 7200.11 until issues have been solved with certainty).
But, due to Seagate-fanboyism, these issues will most likely be swept under the rug. This 7200.11 will not be enough to make the bubble to break, unfortunately. But that's just my prediction of what's going to happen / not going to happen. This issue falls quite a bit short from Deathstar disaster... the biggest difference being that IBM never admitted the disaster while Seagate eventually did (after a period of censorship and denial).
I would have to disagree with you here. I don't think there is any 'Seagate reliability bubble'. I've never heard of such a thing nor seen any evidence for one (beyond as exists for all manufacturers). One of the reasons why Seagate is popular in the retail market is because of the 5 year warranty. Not because it means their drives are going to last longer simply that everything else being equal, for many people a 2 year extra warranty is a big difference. Here in NZ and also in Malaysia, the price difference has varied depending on drive and other stuff but the Seagate drives have usually been on the low end of the scale. Seagate also had an excellent online warranty procedure in NZ and Malaysia (along with Hitachi IIRC) which WD lacked (for a long while it wasn't available for the Asia Pacific region) and Samsung still lacks (other then for India).
When it comes down it what else is there? Performance is a more tricky issue. However the trouble with HDD performance is it depends so much on your app. I used to care about performance, however I was greatly disillusioned when StorageReview updated their benchmark suite and there was such a drastic change in how each drive ranked. I realised then what I should have realised long ago. With something like HDDs, performance is so variable depending on precisely what the HDD is being made to do that you have to take great care in generalising performance differences. If you know precisely what you're going to be doing then you can benchmark it but if not, you should IMHO take performance with a grain of salt. And this was with SR who actually do decent performance reviews unlike 99% of sites out there who have no idea what they were doing (SPR of course is another odd exception).
For many, particularly here, noise is a big concern and Seagate haven't generally done that well there in the past. For me though, I admit it's not the biggest concern at least when you're not talking about extreme difference. (For me, unless your talking about some old noisy POS the HDD noise is usually barely audible above other components). And let's face it, there are a lot of people who care even less then me.
Relaibility is a big concern, but the trouble is it's impossible to get anything close to meaningful figures for the ordinary public. Yes there are issues which crop up like the Seagate firmware issue or the WD Green Power issue with Linux. But all drives die. Some drives die more then others but we have no way of knowing which ones they are. Anecdotal reports are useless. There are just as many people claiming that all their Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung, or WD drives died as there are claiming that none of them died. In other words, unless there's a major issue, there's no point worrying about reliability since you'd never know which drive is actually better then the other. Just backup like you should and hope for the best.
So really, warranty and price are two of the biggest concern with worrying about and as I've already mentioned, Seagate have been excellent on both in general. IMHO that is the biggest reason for Seagates success in the retail market (if they have been the most successful in the retail market, which I'm not convinced, I've never really seen any figures showing Seagate dominating in the retail market).
Things may change now that Seagate gave up on the 5 year warranty. I myself am now looking at the alternatives. In some ways, it's interesting, it's been a while since I've really looked much into each manufacturer. (Of course let's remember the other manufacturers could have made me look at them before now. Indeed if any one of them chooses to do a Seagate and start 5 years from now on they'd have another loyal customer in me and a few others I know). Although admitedly since I'm putting together a HTPC for someone, I'm also looking at noise something as I said above I haven't looked that closely at before.
However let's face it, the retail market has little to do with Seagate's success. It's been the OEM market which is many orders of magnitude larger and more important. That has nothing to do with reliability bubbles. If Dell or HP or whoever buy Seagate HDDs more then others it's not because Michael Dell thinks Seagate HDDs are more reliable because he heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who read it on usenet. Large OEMs have meaningful figures. However I'm not saying Seagate's success in the OEM market has to do with better reliability. The truth is, I don't know what it is, I suspect it has more to do with price, good warranty procedures with the OEMs, economies of scale and perhaps simple inertia and/or abuse of their monopoly.
P.S. In case I didn't make it clear, I'm not saying there aren't Seagate fanboys. There are Seagate fanboys just as there are Samsung, Hitachi, and WD fanboys AND haters. All are equally stupid and I've not seen any evidence there are more Seagate ones then others. If anything I've seen more evidence of Seagate haters then Seagate fanboys.