Why I won't buy Seagate or Samsung hard drives

[andcorptech]

Since my warranty stipulates replacements will be "of like kind and quality," I don't even feel the need to make customers aware of any difficulties in the RMA process. Just pull a drive off the shelf that is the same size and speed or better, and away they go. The replacement, when and if it arrives, gets used for something else.

The problem for this is often the manufacturers send refurbished drives back to you as replacements. I don't know about anywhere else in the world, but recent changes to consumer law in Australia now require me to put a nice and ugly " This item contains refurbished parts" sticker on any computer I sell the RA drive in.

I could use it for myself but that would be an expensive waste if I had alot.

Our preferred brand is Western Digital, but since the floods we have had a very very big increase in dead drives. We are currently using a mix of WD/Hitachi drives but are considering dropping WD all together if the RAs get worse

 

[pc-quebec]

I havent gotten to the other posts yet. But

-= NO You would not =-

Because of the hard drive shortage WD is not doing the advanced sending of drives right now. I know this because I just got a laptop drive back and it took awhile to get it. They told me they could not do the credit card ship quick (or whatever).

They are reserving stuff like that for their raid customers.

It's call advance RMA, I did 2 blacks 10 days ago and receive the drives last Tuesday. Even better it was 650 GB drive ,, they replace it with 750 GB one. WDC are now back in business, they just get an agreement with Seagate to keep the drives at higher price.

 

[crashtech]

The problem for this is often the manufacturers send refurbished drives back to you as replacements. I don't know about anywhere else in the world, but recent changes to consumer law in Australia now require me to put a nice and ugly " This item contains refurbished parts" sticker on any computer I sell the RA drive in.

I could use it for myself but that would be an expensive waste if I had alot.

Our preferred brand is Western Digital, but since the floods we have had a very very big increase in dead drives. We are currently using a mix of WD/Hitachi drives but are considering dropping WD all together if the RAs get worse

I can see how that would be a problem for a large business with a large influx of dead drives, fortunately I've never had more than a couple refurb drives on hand at any one time, and have always been able to either sell them at a discount or use them in a build, which isn't a problem when the machine is simply labelled "refurbished."

 

[PCX]

I just wanted to confirm that you can still do the advanced RMA for WD. I just got doing it for a customer of mine. The only exception that was listed on the RMA page was SSDs.

 

[coffee]

I just wanted to confirm that you can still do the advanced RMA for WD. I just got doing it for a customer of mine. The only exception that was listed on the RMA page was SSDs.

Now thats interesting. I was told a few weeks ago that I could not do that. They did tell me that the one exception was businesses with raid replacements.

Was this a business replacement of some sort? Mine was a residential customer, Single drive replacement.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I love both Seagate and WD drives. We've seen higher failure rates since last autumn..when the flood took out factories and 3rd party suppliers were probably being called on to fill orders...thus a huge drop in quality. Until this past winter I had been leaning more towards WD drives...but we've had a TON of their Blue drives come back. None of the black editions though..which we tend to focus more on. We try to stick with Seagate ES and WD RE series (both of them the enterprise grade models)

 

[joydivision]

I am not sure if anybody has noticed but in the past couple of weeks the prices of SDRAM has really plumited. This means the price of solid state chips is also much lower. I am getting inboxed for offers like 32gb USB sticks for £12!!!.

If the prices to continue to fall at this rate, I reckon a 128GB SSD will be £60 by the end of the year, and 128GB is plenty for many laptop users.

I have had three returns on HD in the past month, and I am now dreading my liabilities. Thankfully the last one the HD wasn't too bad so I was able to CHKDSK and clone (much easier than a full reinstall).

Edit the three failures I have this month have been:-
1) 1TB WD Blue - failed suddenly without warning.
2) A Samsung 160GB 2.5" IDE, failed without warning but was still able to recover some data.
3) A Samsung 500GB 2.5" - system had a lot file system errors, CHKDSK fixed them but surface scan revealed lots of bad sectors - cloned and replaced.

Also diagnosed a few faulty HDs I have not supplied.

Either way I have a feeling when the these new laptops start failing out of warranty we are going to be very busy this time next year replacing their HDs with hopefully SSDs!.

Of course SSDs are not always reliable for suitable I would like the solution to for being the OS stored on the SSD and all the data stored online, but we are not quite there yet.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

It seems SSD's have also plummeted in reliability. When they started coming out, I figured they'd be quite reliable. Time and working with larger numbers of them has now shown that SSDs are not being as reliable as initially thought.

Even the vendor of the x86 hardware appliances that we use for edge firewalls...they were initially starting to do lots more SSDs instead of spindle drives, and they stopped using SSDs because of a >20% failure rate. Matter of fact, just 2 days ago we had a clients SSD that we just got 1 month ago fail.

 

[joydivision]

My research on SSDs suggest that Intel and Crucial are more reliable than Corsair and OCZ.

The other solution is to just supply enterprise drives only, or at least give the the option to the customer. I am actually changing my warranty terms for hard drive replacements otherwise I can see myself going bust doing lots of labour for nothing.

 

[Tekguy]

It seems SSD's have also plummeted in reliability. When they started coming out, I figured they'd be quite reliable. Time and working with larger numbers of them has now shown that SSDs are not being as reliable as initially thought.

Even the vendor of the x86 hardware appliances that we use for edge firewalls...they were initially starting to do lots more SSDs instead of spindle drives, and they stopped using SSDs because of a >20% failure rate. Matter of fact, just 2 days ago we had a clients SSD that we just got 1 month ago fail.

Any particular brands that are more problematic than others? Do you have any experience with Intel SSDs? They offer a 5 yr warranty & are supposed to be the most reliable SSD. If you're experiencing drive failures with Intel then my confidence in SSDs has taken a hit.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Reply to the above two....we have not seen Intel or Crucial failures...although haven't seen numbers of those either. If I were to purchase one for my own self...I would get an Intel or Crucial drive...both are great brands. (and Crucial just has some insanely good sale prices going on) The brands that have been causing failures are lesser brands that we're seeing installed by the OEM of the appliances. I can't believe the brand name is escaping me now...as we just has a replacement box from their warranty come in yesterday or the day before.

 

[Rob_NNCC]

From what I have seen on the web, Crucial has one of the highest failure rates.

"When it comes to enthusiasts, we really can't make the assumption that an SSD is more reliable than a hard drive. If anything, the recent flurry of recalls and firmware bugs should be proof enough that write endurance isn't our biggest enemy in the battle to demonstrate the maturity of solid-state technology"
Source:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-9.html

With that being said, Crucial drives have a very bad rep on reliability.

 

[angry_geek]

For the limited scenarios we implement SSD drives, we've only used Intel, Samsung, and Crucial. I have a Crucial 128 GB drive in my 13" Vostro, and it has performed beautifully. Now, I've only had that laptop since January, so we'll see how it handles in the long run.

I've only used SSD in one enterprise environment so far, and that was against my recommendation. It's in a Dell R710 in a raid 10 for database. It's very fast, but I can't see a difference over 15k SAS arrays to make the cost worth while. My other concern is longevity and reliability. The storage choice for this server was about $5k over SAS, and we had to sacrifice some space.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Popped into my office to grab some things...just noticed the empty box from the SSD that was warranty replaced in the firewall appliance, brand name was "Transcend"...certainly not a brand I would have selected by choice for an SSD...although there are quite a big and solid brand in CF cards.