Seagate drives.

[8ender]

I work at a computer store currently, and Seagate is an enigma to us.

As far as we can tell, they used to sit in the server market for HDD's, then they tried to make it big, go crushed by the competition and crawled back into the server market again.

What I would like to know, is whether Seagate HDD's are worth selling to customers. With the limited choice of HDD manufacturers that don't have serious long term problems with drives, I find myself suggesting the only company that hasn't caused a massive amount of RMA work for us, namely Maxtor.

I would like to know if anyone on this board has had long term experience with modern Seagate drives, preferably in a heavy use environment such as gaming, video editing, and other workstation tasks.

 

[Saem]

I went to a store 4-6 months ago, possibly more. They had Maxtor, WD, IBM and Seagate drives.

They claimed that they've had the lowest amount of RMAs with Segate drives by a fair margin. They cost just slightly more than the competition. My buddy asked me if they were any good. I told him they make fast and reliable server drives, I'm not sure about their IDEs. Over hearing this the receptionist remarked, we've had the lowest levels of RMAs with them. So he ended up buying it.

The reason my buddy ended up buying it was because that's the only one they had in stock at the moment and it was that or wait till tomorrow afternoon. It's ran fine and gives him little trouble.

Later on when I told my brother this tid bit, IIRC he said it's not the BEST choice. They can be finiky about certain mobos, something to do with the HDD controllers and/or BIOS.

IIRC, the X-Box HDD contract was awarded to Seagate.

I'd be willing to try them out.

 

[8ender]

Thanks Saem, you replied excellently to both my posts.

We also show the least amount of RMA's with Seagate, mostly due however, to the fact that we have sold very little Seagates to our customers.

What we are looking for is a solid, high performance IDE drive for our mid end video editing workstation lines. We need something that can handle a nice RAID array with no problems when our customers are using and abusing it with VT3 (Videotoaster 3).

edit: spelt abusing wrong. I'll blame my "absuing of alcohol" for that one.

 

[keegdsb]

Just to chime in my $0.02

Seagates are arguably the quietest drives on the market ('Cuda IV & V). I've had several and they all have kept up well for a couple of years. I haven't heard much about them dying often at all.

Their performance is OK, but not really in the same league as WD/Hitachi.

 

[Saem]

How many have you sold? If it's 30 one could consider the data set large enough -- just barely -- to do some statistical analysis on.

As for their performance, you'd be suprised how much that depends on the hard driver controller. I don't know enough and don't feel like doing the research but there is a lot to squeezing out more performance out of drives. Which can have dramatic effects on performance.

If you want a bad ass IDE HDD, Raptors are the way to go. One of those is insanely fast. Throw them in raid and it should tear everything a new one.

 

[mat]

They claimed that they've had the lowest amount of RMAs with Segate drives by a fair margin.

when i got my Seagate 6 Months or so ago, the guy in the store told me the same.

 

[epicstruggle]

heres my 2cents:
-ibm dekstar (45gb)---scratching noises heard, data lost. However under warranty so will get a new one from hitachi.
-maxtor (40gb)---random errors, something wrong with the platter. Nothing doable.
-maxtor (120gb)---works fine and quiet
-wd(80gb)---also fine
-quantum(30gb)---from a tivo. works fine, a bit noise.

no experience with seagate. my next hd will have a sata interface and must be quiet.

later,

 

[8ender]

-quantum(30gb)---from a tivo. works fine, a bit noise.

I believe that Quantum was merged with Maxtor lately.

I'm not looking for the highest performance, just reliability.

 

[Mariner]

Well, Seagate are definitely the quietest drives around, followed by Maxtor, I believe.

I'm currently using a Barracuda IV and it has worked fine over the past couple of years. A computer at my work has been using a 500MB Seagate drive for some years now, as well (7 or 8, maybe?), and we've not had any problems with this, either, although I expect it is now on it's last legs! It is due to be retired in a couple of weeks, though, and the replacement system I'm building is going to have a Seagate Barracuda V in it, I think.

 

[High 5-HIAA]

IIRC, the X-Box HDD contract was awarded to Seagate.

Seagate U5 series and WD200ABs, I believe.

Seagate's newest drive series is actually much more competitive with contemporary drives than their previous Barracuda lines; the 7200.7 with 8MB buffer is pretty quick all around.
The Barracuda V wasnt much better than the IV, which is why it was quickly phased out for the 80GB/platter 7200.7.
All of Seagates recent 7200rpm ATA drives have been very popular among SFF, HTPC and Quiet PC enthusiasts for their quiet operation and low heat dissapation numbers.

My experiences with Seagate drives lead me to believe that they manufacture the most reliable ATA drives of any company out there.
In so doing they are following in the footsteps of Conner, who they bought long ago. Unfortunately, they have decided to offer only 1year warrantees on their "normal" drives (non 8MB buffer), which irks me to no end.

 

[Tahir2]

I work in a computer store.
We do not sell many Seagate drives but do stock them. They ARE the quietest drives and have good solid reliability (never had one back since I started but we sell so few).

IBM drives we sell a lot of because we get them in so cheap but we also had a period last year where the return rate was (apparently) shocking.

Maxtor we hardly ever get any back to be honest and have a good loyal fanbase - if it were possible.

WD got the XBOX contract and they have been the innovators of IDE HDD's ever since they won that contract. We do not stock any yet however so cannot comment from personal experience. There are installation issues with the higher capacity drives but this is more than often user error or motherboard implementation.

If I was in your place I would get the coolest running drive as it is heat that kills most drives. If you are RAIDING your drives you will increase the chance of failure a lot also.

I would go for a SCSI solution if cost was not an issue as there are better reliability and speed guarantees there.

If I were to RAID a drive now I would choose a Maxtor 7200RPM drive for my personal system but I would not expect infallibility.

For a customer I would suggest a Seagate or a slow 5400 drive (compensated by RAID) and make sure the drives got plenty of cooling.

 

[Tahir2]

Right this could be out of date but here is something interesting:
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=80

The idea of RAID is about security of data. The striping used in these tests is not true RAID. If you have set up your hard drives in RAID-0 striping, your data is no more secure than using a single drive on a standard IDE channel. In fact, it may be even less secure. The reason is that when hard drives are in a RAID array, they are in use continuously. They never stop spinning. This places a lot more stress on the hard drives. If you are setting up RAID drives, make sure they are properly cooled, using a hard drive caddie or by placing the hard drives next to case fans. I personally have completely lost all data on a RAID striping array. When it's lost it is a lot more difficult to recover than from standard IDE. RAID-1 (mirroring) on the other hand, although it performs only as fast as standard IDE, provides you with full security for your data, but at the cost of half of the hard drive space. For a PC that you use for day to day work, I would highly recommend only using RAID-1 if you are limited to onboard RAID controllers. If you have a PCI RAID controller with all the RAID options, you are able to stripe and mirror at the same time, with a variety of different combinations. This was what RAID was designed to do. I would personally never use RAID-0 on a work PC but I'd swear by it on a video-editing machine. If I set up a PC for demonstration at a trade show or event, RAID-1 is excellent. I can repair and restore a damaged hard drive or lost data in a matter of minutes without the loss of any information.

I must admit, it has been an interesting experience playing around with RAID. With the amount of boards coming out with onboard RAID I thought it was important to write this article. There are a lot of misconceptions about what RAID can and cannot do. Hopefully the contents of the article have cleared up some details for you the readers.

Also what Dan wrote is a bit confusing, but funny:

Before I get into the set up and write up a guide that you could follow to set up RAID yourself, I should mention that this article took a lot longer than expected to put together. When I purchased the components for this article, I decided to get the latest, greatest and fastest hard drives I could. These were the Seagate Barracuda IV. After I got everything set up using these hard drives, I discovered that I had extremely bad RAID performance. After quite a bit of research, I discovered that the Seagate Barracuda IV do not officially support IDE RAID. I found this in the forums at Storage Review:

"Chris, The Barracuda ATA IV has the fastest internal transfer rate of any of its competitors. This is why it is the highest performance drive in its class in certain applications when used by itself. Evidently, when the drive is used in some RAID 0 environments, it can supply data to the interface faster than the host system can request it. Under some circumstances, such as reading sequential data, this can cause the drive to incur a latency. This means when the host request comes too late -- after the data's initial immediate availability -- the drive must wait for the disc to rotate up to one revolution for the requested data to be available again. Under these circumstances, the drive appears to be slow in performance when actually it is too fast. This is not a new phenomenon. Because Seagate is the leader in new technologies and products, and the increased performance they bring, we sometimes have to wait for the rest of the industry to catch up. When Seagate introduced the Cheetah X15, over one million drives ago, there was a similar issue with a few SCSI RAID controllers. Like the SCSI RAID environment, we anticipate optimized controllers will become available. In the meanwhile, it appears some 2-drive ATA RAID 0s can't keep up with the Barracuda ATA IV. There is no alternate slower firmware available to accommodate the problem. Best Regards, Ron Stacy Seagate Product Support"

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=80

(I will say thought that as a computer company for various reasons we do NOT support RAID-0 either

 

[High 5-HIAA]

Yeah, RAID 0 isn't "really RAID" since there is no redundancy.