back to article Seagate fires NASty volley of 12TB spinners with lifebelt for fried data

Seagate has fired out three 12TB drives, punting one at the desktop, two at the NAS market, and clobbering WDC on capacity in both areas. The desktop BarraCuda Pro comes in 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12TB versions, previously maxing out at 10TB. Seagate says it has double the space of its nearest competitor, the 6TB WDC Blue. We …

  1. earl grey
    FAIL

    gave up on seagate a long time ago

    Hope they actually got their act together and these hold up better than their old drives.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't buy Seagate

    Purchased a Seagate 10TB IronWolf Pro in February 2017. The drive died in August 2017 under a 40TB in six months load. As warranty replacement, Seagate sent a refurbished drive. If the new drive lasted 6 months, the longevity of the refurbished drive remains to be seen. Buy at your own risk.

    1. Graham Cobb Silver badge

      Re: Don't buy Seagate

      On the other hand, I bought a Seagate 10TB IronWolf in July 2016, run continuously since, with well over 100TB of writes in that time and have had no problems with it at all. No reallocated sectors or uncorrectable errors at all. I am just replacing it with a 12TB drive and will move it to being a backup disk in my NAS.

      I have several other Seagates with no problems with any. I don't believe they are any better, or any worse, than any other major manufacturer nowadays.

      So, don't believe the anecdotes about one drive being more reliable than another. With current technology they all seem to be very close in reliability. Any drive can fail at any time; most will not fail until well after you have stopped using them; and no ordinary user will see any measurable difference between manufacturers.

      1. Matt_payne666

        Re: Don't buy Seagate

        Generally I would agree with you, but my own anecdotal evidence has moved me away from Seagate as my preferred Hard drive supplier with about a dozen 3TB drives failing from about 10 being bought - yes, the warranty replacements all failed too... I think I have two working drives...

        Back blaze backup the Seagate story well, with their own stats... of course everything is relative, but they have a large turn over of drives, so its fairly representative.... but Seagate comes out as the least reliable...

        https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

        https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

        as much as I would love some 12TB drives to thin out the pile of 3TB reds, I just cant bring myself to trust them...

      2. seagate_surfer

        Re: Don't buy Seagate

        Hi Graham, thank you for your insight and support.

        "Any drive can fail at any time; most will not fail until well after you have stopped using them"

        While HDD's are incredible collections of raw materials, technology, and programming, they are subject to a multitude of conditions in the field. We advocate two rules:

        1. Use the right drive for the job.

        2. Always back up your data.

    2. seagate_surfer

      Re: Don't buy Seagate

      Hi there. We appreciate your business. And we're sorry to hear you had issues with your drive. Any time that things don't work as expected can be disappointing. For that reason, we offer warranty and replacement services, including advanced RMA in select regions for data transfer convenience.

      We stand by the reliability of our products and always recommend to back up your data. If for any reason you run into any issues, please contact our support team and we will do everything possible to assist you. They can be contacted at http://www.seagate.com/support-home/

      1. Matt_payne666

        Re: Don't buy Seagate

        Thanks Seagate surfer, but the drives are all outside their warranties, the replacement refurbished drive managed about 6 months before it keeled over, the warranty on that only being the remainder of the original drives warranty... the WD Reds that replaces the Seagates have had 0%failure over a longer service period in the same useage scenario - that is enough to keep my money heading to WD and it will take something special to change that!

        Yes, warranties are a fixed period of time, and nothing lasts forever, but one should realistically expect a hard drive to last longer than a year...

        some people will have better experiences than others... i may have been unucky to have a 110% failure rate, but back to mentioning backblaze...

        Only 251 of the 4,190 ST3000DM001 hard drives placed in service in 2012 were still in service as of 31 March 201"5" - thats about a 90% failure rate in less than 3 years! coincidentally, seagate reduced the warranty on that series of drive to only 1 year partway through its lifecycle, hardly confidence inspiring!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yep Western Digital for me for mass storage (and Samsung for SSD) until Seagate have proven the new range to be reliable. Too many bad experiences in the past!

    (On that subject for anyone it helps. I deployed well over 100 Samsung Evo Pro 840 SSDs in a trading environment where PCs are on 24 x 7 over a year ago and we have yet to see a single failure...)

  4. Nick Ryan Silver badge

    Interesting to see similar thoughts to mine... as in "wow, that's a nice, large HDD. Damn, it's a seagate."

  5. seagate_surfer

    Hi all- our first time posting here so here is a quick introduction. We are the Seagate Official Forums team, and we do our best to engage, support and provide value to online communities and forums with an interest in storage. We appreciate Chris Mellor and The Register for the coverage of our recent 12TB announcements, as well as the conversation around them.

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