Seagate announces BarraCuda Consumer SSDs and they're a Timed Exclusive for Amazon Prime Customers

[Drak3]

1 minute ago, SC2Mitch said:

Where did that shit even come from? I've never had a Seagate drive bust on me, only drive that died on me was a WD 3TB drive. 

Years ago, Seagate had a product line of HDDs that had an extremely rough start when it came to reliability, despite most of their other lines being pretty great.

[JoeCoke]

Yawn. After having so many Seagate drives die on me, I'll never give them my business. And besides, the pricing is terrible. You can get a 240gb silicon power on amazon for 49.99$ right now.

[JoeCoke]

16 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

Where did that shit even come from? I've never had a Seagate drive bust on me, only drive that died on me was a WD 3TB drive. 

Well, in my experience, Seagate has been horrible. Over the last almost decade, I've owned many drives from WD and Seagate, Never once had a WD die on me but I've had 7 Seagates die, one of which was a 1TB carrying very valuable data, and yes, I was an idiot who didn't back up back then.

 

Because of my horrible experiences, I never trust them with anything important. I'm sure I'm just being paranoid, but whatever. I have 3 1TB seagate barracudas that are probably perfectly fine, but I'm only ever gonna use them if I get desperate.

[Razor Blade]

14 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Yawn. After having so many Seagate drives die on me, I'll never give them my business. And besides, the pricing is terrible. You can get a 240gb silicon power on amazon for 49.99$ right now.

I used to have that opinion also. I worked in a tech center at a local community college and saw many Seagate drives (mostly the 7200.11 models mentioned earlier) fail due to some sort of firmware problem. There was a fix that someone posted on a different forum which allowed you to repair the issue yourself using a hacked cable and hyperterminal but not without risk. 

 

However it appears that Seagate has really stepped up their consumer hard drive game. I ran a FireCuda on a 24/7 PC for years. I am also 3 months in on six IronWolf drives. Now if you want to talk about personal bad experiences... Even though I've had great experiences with WD black drives, I've had a lot more trouble with WD green drives of the 2009ish time than anything else... (Toshiba, HGHT, or Seagate) but I don't paint WD with the 2009 green brush so to speak.

[Spotty]

19 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

Where did that shit even come from? I've never had a Seagate drive bust on me, only drive that died on me was a WD 3TB drive. 

A few years ago their main line up of drives, the "7200.11" series I believe it was had some flaw in I believe the controller or firmware that led to higher than normal failure rates. It was a known issue that was fixed in later models with the release of the "7200.12".

 

The issue was pretty widespread as it was most prominent on the 1tb model, which at the time (late 2000s) was one of Seagate's most popular models. 

 

Since that bad model almost 10 years ago, as far as I'm aware, their drives have been no more prone to failure than any of the other major manufacturers.

 

All drives from all manufacturers are capable of failure. I've had Seagate's fail on me, including the aforementioned 7200.11 series. I've also had WD and Samsung hard drives fail on me. It happens. That's why you back up your data.

[Bananasplit_00]

Honestly, this is one of the best looking SSDs I have ever seen. Like I want this just because it looks nice almost. Samsung's have always looked a bit odd, and many SSDs have pretty aggressive esthetics one way or another while this is just matt black with a minimal logo. Not that most people would ever see the SSD in your build but I'd want it anyway tbh

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

There was nothing wrong with the Backblaze reports as long as people understood what was being reported. The only problem was people not using them properly. All those reports did was report raw failure data with each report not accounting for HDD age, quality, etc. One had to study several reports over a few years to be able to interpret trends. Instead, people would read just the latest report and draw conclusions from it as though the failures were equally weighted. Seagate showed higher failure numbers simply because Backblaze used a huge number of the cheapest Seagates they could lay their hot little hands on (at one point, they were shucking external drives due to the alleged HDD shortage from the Thai floods). One had to consider the age of the drives at the time of failure, something not accurately tracked by the reports other than an occasional comment at the end of the report.

 

If one would chart failures over several reports, accounting for dive quality and age at the time of failure, and drawing a bottom line as a percentage indicating trends (something the vast majority of people either didn't understand how to do or th

e need to do so, or they just couldn't be bothered to do), then the reports would have been a useful indicator of drive reliability. 

 

Keep in mind the Backblaze reports were (and, as far as I know, still are) the only wide scale ones being made available to people so they are to be commended for them, even if they only had raw, barebones data.

There is a lot wrong with them,  and them being made public only makes it worse. 

 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/

https://insidehpc.com/2015/02/henry-newman-on-why-backblaze-is-still-wrong-about-disk-reliability/

https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html

 

 

 

 

[avg123]

Hitachi apparently makes good hard drives too.

 

The Hitachi hard drive in my laptop works flawlessly after running almost 24/7 for 4 years.

 

.

[Dabombinable]

12 minutes ago, avg123 said:

Hitachi apparently makes good hard drives too.

 

The Hitachi hard drive in my laptop works flawlessly after running almost 24/7 for 4 years.

 

.

My 8 years old 2.5" 500GB 7200RPM Hitatchi to this day is still faster than most laptop HDD.

[Firewrath9]

I got my inland 480gb ssd for 75$ at micro center, 2yeat warranty

[PlayStation 2]

How well does it compete with the WD Blue SSDs?

[Yoinkerman]

Aren't sata ssds all the same at this point and the only competing point is price? 

 

Or did they gain other attributes?

[DKL]

13 hours ago, 2Buck said:

Well, in my experience, Seagate has been horrible. Over the last almost decade, I've owned many drives from WD and Seagate, Never once had a WD die on me but I've had 7 Seagates die, one of which was a 1TB carrying very valuable data, and yes, I was an idiot who didn't back up back then.

 

Because of my horrible experiences, I never trust them with anything important. I'm sure I'm just being paranoid, but whatever. I have 3 1TB seagate barracudas that are probably perfectly fine, but I'm only ever gonna use them if I get desperate.

If you're not going to use them, mind shipping them off to NJ? 
 

As far as these SSDs go, my reaction is just: meh. Unless you're coming out with new technology, faster SSDs, or cheaper SSDs with top speeds, I don't really care about you and you get forgotten in no time.

[AlTech]

37 minutes ago, Yoinkerman said:

Aren't sata ssds all the same at this point and the only competing point is price? 

 

Or did they gain other attributes?

Warranty, Endurance Rating, Write Performance, Random Read and Write Performance

 

Low End Sata SSDs still have worse Endurance ratings, warranty, mediocre random read and write performance, and mediocre write performance.

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

How well does it compete with the WD Blue SSDs?

On Paper the WD Blue SSDs look a tiny bit better although we don't know how the Seagate SSDs performs in real-world usage yet.

[mr moose]

51 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Warranty, Endurance Rating, Write Performance, Random Read and Write Performance

 

Low End Sata SSDs still have worse Endurance ratings, warranty, mediocre random read and write performance, and mediocre write performance.

When you say low endurance, are we talking measurable as an average?  I certainly see the performance spec being measurably lower, but to be honest in real world experience I couldn't tell you which of the 7 pc's in my house has the better quality ssd's and which have the cheapies. 

[Guest]

19 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

My 3 year old OCZ Vertex does slightly better (Crystal disk mark). So for me at least-not worth it.

I think its a bottleneck of SATA3 that these top out at 540/520. Top of the line will be top of the line for a while on SATA, but you can always make a cheaper, worse product. 

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, RorzNZ said:

I think its a bottleneck of SATA3 that these top out at 540/520. Top of the line will be top of the line for a while on SATA, but you can always make a cheaper, worse product. 

*looks at that Kingston SSD* That's for sure.

[DeScruff]

On 7/7/2018 at 6:47 AM, WereCat said:

The price is very close to the Samsung 850 EVO and the Crucial MX500 is even cheaper.

So unless this one can compete with these two I really dont see the appeal unless it becomes cheaper.

Well its a new product, prices will eventually go down, did the 860 EVO launch at those prices or did they eventually fall to those prices?
 

23 hours ago, TheRandomness said:

It’s funny because Seagate being unreliable is a complete myth.

Mmm yeah from my experience they were more or less just as reliable as other brands.
When I worked at a shop, I found their laptop drives however were in a lot of cheaper laptops, and did fail kinda often. Usually it was fairly obvious what killed them. - Fall damage, water damage, Dog treating the computer like a chew toy damage. Stuff that I wouldn't expect any HDD to really survive.

Even then... SSDs are a completely different kind of product. Unless it was that controller boards on their HDDs failed all the time, it shouldn't matter.

[Arika]

geez. about time seagate

[Lady Fitzgerald]

13 hours ago, mr moose said:

There is a lot wrong with them,  and them being made public only makes it worse. 

 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/

https://insidehpc.com/2015/02/henry-newman-on-why-backblaze-is-still-wrong-about-disk-reliability/

https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html

 

 

 

 

Go back and reread the article you linked (assuming you even read it the first time). The author essentially said the same things I did only he drew the wrong conclusion. The reports only contain raw data without details such as the age of the drives, the drive models, etc.

 

One has to compile data from several of the reports over time to draw any actual conclusions. Even then, the conclusions you can draw will only be broad percentages that will be somewhat skewed due to the varying sample sizes between brands and models.

 

What most people can gather without doing a lot of careful charting and tracking of reports from several years is to watch for trends from which broadly generalized conclusions can be drawn. One would also have to take into consideration the age of the drives that fail, someting not reflected in the charts but usually will appear in the footnotes, something most people seem to ignore.

 

A couple of other things the author missed was why Backblaze continues to use drives with high failure rates. First, by the time Backblaze finds out certain drives have high failure rates, they have already bought thousands of them. So what are they going to do? Throw them out without using them? it makes far more sense to go ahead and use them, espeically since they utilize enough redundancy to prevent data loss from the higher failure rates.

 

Second, Backblaze has a unique business plan that employs a proprietary redundancy scheme that allows the use of far less consumer drives that have higher failure rates, the theory being it will be less expensive in the long run to replace less expensive drives more frequently than to use higher priced serve grade drives that would last longer. Backblaze makes its own storage pods using a greater amount of redundancy to ensure protection from data loss due to the higher failure rates rather than use conventional servers that use conventional redundancy, such as RAID, unRAID, etc. I was skeptical when Backblaze first started up but, over time, their bizzare business plan has proven to be very successful.

 

I still maintain that the Backblaze reports are useful as long as people accept that they are just raw, uninterpreted data and treat it accordingly.

[79wjd]

33 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

their bizzare business plan has proven to be very successful.

Their "bizarre" business plan, which is identical to the original idea behind RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks -- a lot of cheap shitty drives > a few expensive enterprise drives).

[Lady Fitzgerald]

23 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Their "bizarre" business plan, which is identical to the original idea behind RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks -- a lot of cheap shitty drives > a few expensive enterprise drives).

RAID can also mean Redundant Array of Individual Disks. RAID isn't the only form of drive redundancy. Besides the umpteen levels of RAID, there is unRAID (which uses parity instead of striping like RAID uses), and others that are unique to server manufacturers. The redundancy scheme Backblaze uses was developed by and is unique to Backblaze. Backblaze is keeping its scheme a secret but it has far more redundancy and is probably far more complex than even the nested RAID levels to compensate for the higher failure rates of the cheaper drives Backblaze uses.

 

Btw, except for Backblaze, most, if not all, commercial servers use the far more expensive server grade drives despite using RAID or some other kind of redundancy rather use the extra redundancy that would be needed to compensate for higher failure rates.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

20 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Basically, what happened was there was 3TB model sold in 2010 that failed by 2013 and it caused a class action lawsuit.  Ever since then people have been acting like anything Seagate makes is unreliable.  To be fair, they had a few other models that had some higher than normal failure rates, but that was like 2 others.  WD and Seagate are the two most people look at, but actually/iirc, it's WD's other brand HGST and Toshiba that have the lowest failure rates.  I'm not really loyal to any brand, but right now I'm mixing Toshiba, Seagate, WD, PNY, and a few others in a couple of systems.  I just get whatever is cheaper that has what I need.  My 3TB Barracuda from 2013 lasted me 5 years before it got the click of death, and my first WD blue was DOA.  Can't hold that against either of them because no line is going to have 100 percent perfect drives.  I'd also like to ask people who actually have experience with Seagate drives that failed is if they got basic consumer ones or far more reliable NAS/Server or big business ones, did they buy them new, or did they buy them from a 3rd party off Amazon, and so on.  Like, don't just tell us "Oh, I got this drive..and that's why it's unreliable!"  No, tell us all the other factors too.  I mean I even wonder if they have experience with the drives, or if they just got one DOA and then said.."Never again!  Fuck Seagate!"   

The 3 TB drive wasn't Seagate's only failure. All sizes of the 7200.11 series had bad firmware that caused early drive failure and Seagate, despite developing corrected firmware, didn't make any effective effort to let people know about it. Seagate was also once notorious for being reluctant to honor warranties, the most recent scandal I recall was when they reduced the warranty length on newer versions of certain models, then tried to apply that to earlier versions that were sold with a longer warranty.

 

In all fairness, Seagate does appear to have cleaned up its act recently.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Other than Nvidia does anyone actually spam people letting them know there's any kinda update?  Not saying it's good or bad, but I don't see most companies going out of their way to let everyone know.  Usually, it's like LTT or another like OC3D going addressing it.   Also, isn't the 7200.11 line like nearly a decade old and kinda irrelevant?  I'm not saying it's a good or bad or whatever, but at the same time, it's not really relevant to newer drives.  The most relevant I remember, in terms of failure, was this...





I'd honestly avoid that 4tb Seagate like the plague.   

Sigh! I give up. The old saying about horses and water come to mind.