I will never buy another Seagate hard drive again.  In the past few months, I have had to replace several of them in my home computer systems.  And these weren’t grizzled veteran drives with years of use under their belt.  No, these were relatively new, yet suddenly developed unrecoverable sector errors and other SMART detected problems.

In the past twenty years I have been building various systems ranging from simple home user desktops to multi-disk multi-CPU severs, Seagate (at least their “desktop” line of drives) ranks up their with the IBM DeskStar (aka DeathStar) and Western Digital Caviar “Green” drives in terms of shittiness.  These drives share a cold place in the Hall of Shame.

Time was a Seagate SCSI drive was a “gotta have” piece of equipment for building a good computer.  I think it started going downhill when they bought out Maxtor, and starting slapping the Seagate label on those drives.

A couple years ago I came across a report by BackBlaze or some other major cloud storage provider.  The paper presents their statistical findings of various brands of hard drives and failure rates.  Based on their experience with tens of thousands of hard drives, the report indicated that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) were the most reliable.

Since then, I have been putting HGST “Ultrastar” SATA and SAS drives in my servers, and have been really pleased.  Even “refurbished” drives with several years of runtime have been more reliable for me than Seagate drives.

Recently, Western Digital acquired HGST.  Last year, they announced they will drop the HGST branding and incorporate those products under the WD product line.  I truly hope they maintain the same (or better) level of quality.  I guess time will tell.  In the meanwhile, I’m stocking up on extra HGST Ultrastar drives where I can from eBay and other vendors.