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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where are SCANPST.EXE and/or SCANOST.EXE?

-
Image
I sometimes have to deal with customer computers whose Outlook PST or OST files have become corrupted.  Very often the fix is to run SCANPST.EXE on the offending PST/OST file.   However, every time I go to do this I forget where the two executable files are.  Here is where they are on a Vista machine running Office 2007: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 I hope this helps.
Read more

APC PowerChute Network Shutdown - Authentication Phrase

-
Image
​Was installing  APC PowerChute Network Shutdown (PCNS) on a customer’s server and couldn’t find a record of the Authentication Passphrase that I set ages back on their Smart UPSes Network Management 2 Card. So I went to reset it on the card and start anew… it took a lot of digging to find it on their particular release of firmware: Go into the UPS tab, then into “shutdown” inside the “Configuration” category: You may then need to change the passphrase being used on other servers. To do this, open up PCNS in your browser and click into the area shown below:
Read more

WSUS Issues

-
Image
Was configuring WSUS on a Server 2016 VM for a customer recently and found the performance to be very sluggish and most of the time the client PCs would time-out and throw an error message when trying to check for updates. After much digging on different forums I came across a fix that worked nicely: Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and click on Application Pools Then Right-Click on your WsusPool instance and choose Advanced Settings Scroll down to Private Memory Limit (KB) and change it from the default of 1843200 to 0 which means unlimited. Then right-click and stop the WsusPool and then start it again. Hope this works for you.
Read more