We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
So how many more stories of these drives being absolute garbage do we all have?
Of all the drives I've ever owned. From Hitachi, Maxxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and others...this is the only one I've had that died. Apparently this is a trend with these particular drives?
This one is currently a paperweight
I am always so blown away by the ridiculous failure rate of the 3TB Barracuda when Seagate also made the 3TB Constellation I've been using without a hitch for so many years.
Never owned a Barracuda because the Backblaze report on their failure rates that showed the Barracuda as the worst of the worst came out before I started shopping for "big" hard drives.
Jeejus key riced as an absolute noob few years back was so happy to be able to shuch these and then tragedy struck.
They had similar 4tb drives.
I lost 2 of them. Both died. Plink plink plink dead.
It was lightly used
I've had 3 or 4 fail
Got loads of 2TB models and they’ve been solid for ever. If I recall there were issues with this and maybe also the 5TB
same here.
I've lost about 15 of these due to drive failures over the last 8 or so years.. Mostly just started the death click click, click click. These models of 3tb were reported as crap.
Seagate drives are unreliable, avoid them!
I've still got 8 of these running. They were pulls from external hard drives, still running strong after 6 years.
Avoid Seagate at all costs!
Stay away from Seagate, trust me.
I've had a lot of other Barracuda drives (the ones with the green stickers) and they've been fine. 2/4/8TB. It seems to be this one particular 3TB drive that people have had issues with.
I’ve owned at least 4 of these and dozens of other makes and sizes. Every one of the Seagates died completely and suddenly. All my other retired drives (< 5) were due to increasing smart errors and never actually ceased working
Garbage
Barracudas, the B is for bin.
I got one of these for very cheap and put a bunch of data on it, thinking I’d lucked out. Then I learned about the lawsuit, thought “oh fuck” and immediately ordered a different one to replace it.
I decided since I already loaded data on it, I’d keep it around as a redundant backup. What else am I going to do with it?
The reason I'll never buy Seagate drives again...
Well to be fair that drive is over 10 years old based on the date code
It died about a year after I bought it. It's been a paperweight ever since
I looked at one once and it died.
In fact I tend to kill Seagate's a lot lol, I generally avoid the brand.
To be fair to them. I've had a lot of Seagate drives and they're all still kicking (touch wood). It's just this 3TB version a lot of people seem to have had an issue with.
Mine died about a year into use after shucking from an external enclosure.
I found that there are at least 3 types of HDD user.
Seagate got a reputation for that series of high failure rates after a batch of drives were made using parts salvaged from a flood in China. In the grant scheme of total drives made, it was less than 5% that failed. Unfortunately for Seagate, the drives all failed within a few months of each other, giving the impression that the drives were extremely unreliable.
I got once very old 120gb Seagate drive which I took out from Thermaltake case my father had long ago and it's still doing fine till today
It is over a decade old.
How long should a hard drive last, do you suppose?
More than the year it did. It's been used as a paperweight for close to a decade.
It depends on the kind of use they are used for computing, gaming etc. For storage of just the data they won't get much wear and tear and last long. The optimum power supply, data usage, read/write operations are markers for these drives, the more in use, lower voltage supply makes them die faster.
3tb was a bad time for both WD and Seagate.
To the point it scared me that I don't buy drives with an odd number in capacity lol
Seems to me that must have been a great drive. Lasted 10 years, despite the warranty being only three years. I would be happy if all my drives lasted that long.
Thanks for letting us know about your great experience with this drive.
10 years! Amazing!
I got 7 years out of my old zpool using them. The second I got a failure I got a load of new drives. I still have 3 drives out of that array I use in a raidz2 tripple that I keep as a cold backup. They are not showing a single issue, 9 years later at this point. I did have two failures though. The original array was 5 drives, and I purchased them in a couple staggered sets. The two that failed were the same later released sub-model that was different from the others, and purchased together, so probably the same bach.
I have mine still collecting dust somewhere. Died after 2 years and I got no compensation at all. Went fully SSD for my non storage systems after that.
idk ive never had good luck with seagate drives.
i have 10 Ultrastar helium drives and man, those things are bulletproof i love them
Just to add, I personally also have a really high failure rate on the SMR variant of the 8TB barracuda. 3/8 failed over 2,5y which is 37,5%.
While knocking on wood, I've had really good experiences with the 10 and 20TB Exos drives. These are younger but none have failed after extended use.
I've got a 16TB Iron Wolf Pro (which was listed as an Exos on Amazon but that's another issue). And apart from the noise, which is to be expected as higher capacity is intended for servers so can't blame them too much for that, and so far it's doing ok. This 3TB White Label Barracuda is the only drive I've had die in 20 years. I still think I've got some old IDE Maxxtor drives which still work.
I've got six 2tb barracudas with 200k+ hrs and three with 80k+ I've only lost one barracuda over the years.
My 4tb barracuda just maxed out at 5MB/s for some reason. It only lasted a year.
I transferred some data from one PC (Nvme SSD) to another PC over the internet last night which was a 4TB Barracuda drive and managed to get sustained speeds of 100mbit/s. Made short work of I think about 50GB of data.
Would've killed for those speeds in the Limewire days 😂
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
ST3000DM001 is bad, even backblaze documented over 30% failure rate in their datacenter workload.
I installed cctv DVRs and NVRs for 15 years featuring hard drives from multiple manufacturers.
Out of hundreds, a single WD drive has failed (a 4tb WD red that spun for 7 years before failure) and nearly every of multiple dozens of Seagate drives failed. The NVRs/DVRs that I used these Seagate 3tb drives in all failed within 12 months of deployment and cost our company tens of thousands of dollars in service calls to replace them, all at our own cost due to being in the warranty period.
Never again. WD for life.
iirc I bought 6 of them and all 6 failed in the first 3 years lol
I got burned by some Seagate drives... about 25 years ago. And never bought another. Western Digital for me...
i'm a desktop user and i had 2 of those fail
I've heard these are so bad that some people get PTSD just looking at this label.
Mine still works after being on for near 10 years now no issue only now starting to get some bad sectors
They're not that bad. WD/HGST is just a lot better.
I use the Backblaze HD data when I teach workshops in survival analysis to data scientists (I'm a statistician) and indeed according to the data this is by far the worst HD among all the consumer HD they use. This is true even after adjusting for numbers of cycles and power-on hours.
The hazard ratio, a conventional measure of risk if you will, for this drive is approximately 25 times worse than that of the reference drive (another Seagate). That means they die at a rate that is 25 times worse (everything else being equal).
The other interesting part that emerged from the data is that Seagate both produced the worst and also one of the best drives in terms of survival (yet the damage was done by that model).
I bought 12 of these back in 2012 for my first RAID-based NAS. Had 7 of them fail with bad sectors within 6 months, usually one every 4-ish weeks. All warranty replacement drives came with 6-month warranties, so I lost out on the remaining 2+ years of the original warranties.
In 2013 I upgraded to 4TB WD Reds and never had a single problem for nearly 6 years until I upgraded to larger drives.
I used a bunch of them for quite a few years. A handful of them did die less then a year after putting them in an mdadm raid5, but I never had any issues RMA'ing them so it never bothered me very much. At some point the replacements + remaining ones stopped failing so often, and I still have a few that were in recent use up until I retired the server they were in a few months ago -- at least one or two of said drives were in operation since they were new drives / 3TB was a good price point.
But yeah, they weren't great. Honestly I don't remember any brand's 3TB drives being all that great, and really it made more sense to buy based on the RMA process of the company then expecting any sort of actual reliability.
The 3tb capacity drives- nearly all of the various models and brands- had huge issues- but these were among the worst drives I've ever seen. 2011 was a rough year- at the time I was helping fill in building white boxes and we used to order hard drives by the pallet from our VAR- the flooding in Thailand really screwed with our supply line for hard drives and jacked the prices wayyy up. I remember the day we opened the first full case of these (~20 drives iirc) and only 4 passed initial burn in testing. Well over half didn't even survive the initial clone. It was bad enough that our sales rep drove over with a UHAUL and a pallet of WD replacements later that week. Seagate also dropped the typical 3 year warranty to only 1 year about that same time. Needless to say we switched to WD and didn't look back. The big joke at the time was they had white labeled a new 'death star' hard drive (IBM/Hitachi Deskstar drives were notoriously bad) that had more storage than the old ones. At one point there was a class action lawsuit or two but I don't think they went anywhere. Huge mess. I will say the ones that survived burn in may have been fine long term, but we just did a full blanket swap with WD drives as it wasn't worth the risk.
My first NAS had external USB drives. Never again. Now I only buy the Seagate Exos drives. Working great so far and they are cheap.
Seagate Barracuda was so bad it literally became an inside joke in our school.
One of the classrooms had like around 10 computers, every single one of them had Barracuda on board.
I remember the PC I was working on started malfunctioning, so I jokingly slammed my desk with a fist, and to my surprise, the PC spit out a bluescreen, soon it turned out to be a HDD failure. I knew I wasn't in any trouble, I didn't even hit the table that hard.
The very next day, the PC on a completely different side of the room failed to boot. Yep, another Barracuda bit the dust that day.
Fast forward the next six or so days, all HDDs were dead. Literally all of the Barracudas we had died within a week.
It was so funny, because one of my classmates even said that mounting these Barracudas on school PC's was a bad idea, because he had one at home before and it died on him, but we all thought that he was just talking shit.
Possibly the most unreliable drive there's ever been.
I had one of these, didn't last too long before problems started showing. Got rid of it before it died.