We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
So how many more stories of these drives being absolute garbage do we all have?
Of all the drives I've ever owned. From Hitachi, Maxxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and others...this is the only one I've had that died. Apparently this is a trend with these particular drives?
This one is currently a paperweight
I used a bunch of them for quite a few years. A handful of them did die less then a year after putting them in an mdadm raid5, but I never had any issues RMA'ing them so it never bothered me very much. At some point the replacements + remaining ones stopped failing so often, and I still have a few that were in recent use up until I retired the server they were in a few months ago -- at least one or two of said drives were in operation since they were new drives / 3TB was a good price point.
But yeah, they weren't great. Honestly I don't remember any brand's 3TB drives being all that great, and really it made more sense to buy based on the RMA process of the company then expecting any sort of actual reliability.