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
idk ive never had good luck with seagate drives.
i have 10 Ultrastar helium drives and man, those things are bulletproof i love them
In my experience Seagate in general has always been a regretful choice. I will only ever buy WD for the foreseeable future.
It is over a decade old.
How long should a hard drive last, do you suppose?
More than the year it did. It's been used as a paperweight for close to a decade.
I am always so blown away by the ridiculous failure rate of the 3TB Barracuda when Seagate also made the 3TB Constellation I've been using without a hitch for so many years.
Never owned a Barracuda because the Backblaze report on their failure rates that showed the Barracuda as the worst of the worst came out before I started shopping for "big" hard drives.
Well to be fair that drive is over 10 years old based on the date code
It died about a year after I bought it. It's been a paperweight ever since
The reason I'll never buy Seagate drives again...
I've still got 8 of these running. They were pulls from external hard drives, still running strong after 6 years.
Barracudas, the B is for bin.
I’ve owned at least 4 of these and dozens of other makes and sizes. Every one of the Seagates died completely and suddenly. All my other retired drives (< 5) were due to increasing smart errors and never actually ceased working
Garbage
Jeejus key riced as an absolute noob few years back was so happy to be able to shuch these and then tragedy struck.
They had similar 4tb drives.
I lost 2 of them. Both died. Plink plink plink dead.
It was lightly used
Seagate drives are unreliable, avoid them!
I've had 3 or 4 fail
Seems to me that must have been a great drive. Lasted 10 years, despite the warranty being only three years. I would be happy if all my drives lasted that long.
Thanks for letting us know about your great experience with this drive.
10 years! Amazing!
I got once very old 120gb Seagate drive which I took out from Thermaltake case my father had long ago and it's still doing fine till today
I looked at one once and it died.
In fact I tend to kill Seagate's a lot lol, I generally avoid the brand.
To be fair to them. I've had a lot of Seagate drives and they're all still kicking (touch wood). It's just this 3TB version a lot of people seem to have had an issue with.
Mine died about a year into use after shucking from an external enclosure.
I found that there are at least 3 types of HDD user.
I have mine still collecting dust somewhere. Died after 2 years and I got no compensation at all. Went fully SSD for my non storage systems after that.
I've got six 2tb barracudas with 200k+ hrs and three with 80k+ I've only lost one barracuda over the years.
I got 7 years out of my old zpool using them. The second I got a failure I got a load of new drives. I still have 3 drives out of that array I use in a raidz2 tripple that I keep as a cold backup. They are not showing a single issue, 9 years later at this point. I did have two failures though. The original array was 5 drives, and I purchased them in a couple staggered sets. The two that failed were the same later released sub-model that was different from the others, and purchased together, so probably the same bach.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
ST3000DM001 is bad, even backblaze documented over 30% failure rate in their datacenter workload.
They're not that bad. WD/HGST is just a lot better.
iirc I bought 6 of them and all 6 failed in the first 3 years lol
i'm a desktop user and i had 2 of those fail
Possibly the most unreliable drive there's ever been.
I had one of these, didn't last too long before problems started showing. Got rid of it before it died.
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.
Heh, this particular model is well known for having a high failure rate. Mine did pretty good, considering. I bought four when they were brand new and put them into my server, running OpenSolaris so that I could use ZFS. Ran them for a couple of years, then the server ended up being stored in a metal shed in a forest for five years. Used it for a short while then built a new server. Three of the four disks had a ton of bad sectors, but ZFS came to the rescue and let me transfer everything off without losing a thing - it just took a while. I used the fourth drive as a backup drive for a few months before it started throwing errors.
I still love Seagate and have always had great luck with them, it's just this particular model that had issues :P
That drive is so bad it's got its own Wikipedia article, like the Sinking of the Titanic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
Apparently the failures are due to two disimilar, incompatible materials used in the parking ramp.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/08/apple-time-capsule-failure-hard-drive/
Can confirm. I had three. All failed within a year.
I installed cctv DVRs and NVRs for 15 years featuring hard drives from multiple manufacturers.
Out of hundreds, a single WD drive has failed (a 4tb WD red that spun for 7 years before failure) and nearly every of multiple dozens of Seagate drives failed. The NVRs/DVRs that I used these Seagate 3tb drives in all failed within 12 months of deployment and cost our company tens of thousands of dollars in service calls to replace them, all at our own cost due to being in the warranty period.
Never again. WD for life.