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I won’t be buying a Seagate product for a long time

I’ve been in the IT business for over 10 years now and for a long time regarded Seagate as brand to be relied on.  They seemed to have a high level of design integrity and quality.  The FreeAgent Pro external drives were fantastic – fast, quiet, reliable.  The 750GB ST3750640NS internal drives were solid and speedy.  But things have changed.

I have never been so singularly disappointed with any IT products as I have with the hard drives Seagate has produced this year.  Apparently they have shifted their production facility to the far east.  Whatever the reason, there is absolutely no excuse for the staggering level of shoddy build quality of their current crop of hard drives.

I would say that in the last year approximately 80% of the PC’s, Servers, and NASes I have re-sold with Seagate hard drives and upgraded with Seagate hard drives have had drive failures.  The figure may even be bigger.

To make matters worse, their RMA policy requires they receive the faulty drive before they ship a replacement.  This invariably leaves the IT consultant in a precarious situation whilst awaiting the replacement – which may well also fail.

I was recently speaking to the a senior engineer in a highly respected data recovery company who confirmed this annoying situation.  His recommendation was to stick to Samsung and Hitachi drives at the present time.  I haven’t had a particularly happy experience with Western Digital hard drives so far this year but Seagate drives just take the biscuit.

Save yourself the hassle, don’t buy a Seagate.  Not for a long time.

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