Are the Seagate firecuda HDD any good?

[The Nefarious Nipplemancer]

I've been looking to replace an old hard drive in my computer and I've been looking at the 8 TB firecuda drive. Are these drives good or is there any other HDD I should be looking at? It will mainly be used for storing games and videos.

[da na]

Welcome to the forums!

Personally I'd go with a WD drive, consumer grade Seagate drives have been very poorly built for the past few years.

For games, a WD Black might be good.

[The Nefarious Nipplemancer]

I'll try out the WD Black, its already a better deal with the price alone. Also looked around and saw others saying Seagate drives are more prone to breaking. Thanks for helping me out

[Pickles von Brine]

On 7/29/2022 at 8:22 AM, Mel0n. said:

Welcome to the forums!

Personally I'd go with a WD drive, consumer grade Seagate drives have been very poorly built for the past few years.

For games, a WD Black might be good.

I second this unless it is the ultra slim WD drives. Those are just as bad. 
If I had to go with a drive I go WD black as the above poster mentioned. 

[da na]

2 hours ago, Pickles von Brine said:

I second this unless it is the ultra slim WD drives. Those are just as bad. 
If I had to go with a drive I go WD black as the above poster mentioned. 

What even is the point of slim drives... heck, there are far more places where they fit worse than a normal drive would! And they're slower/less reliable...

[Pickles von Brine]

17 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

What even is the point of slim drives... heck, there are far more places where they fit worse than a normal drive would! And they're slower/less reliable...

Yeah but I still see them. I also wish seagate would stop producing rosewood drives. 

WD has one similar. The label seals the drive. They are hot garbage. 

[da na]

2 hours ago, Pickles von Brine said:

Yeah but I still see them. I also wish seagate would stop producing rosewood drives. 

WD has one similar. The label seals the drive. They are hot garbage. 

Are we getting mad at the 3.5" slim or 2.5" slim? 
But yes, I've seen several of the models in that case fail. Usually from bad sectors, since they're built so poorly. Newer 2.5" Firecudas use that design - using one in my laptop right now as my third 2.5" drive because I got it for free and all it has is applications I can reinstall. 3000 bad sectors, only 3 years old, only 1yr of flying hours...

(And they decide to park every 2mins or so, regardless of what you set in software, so they accumulate load/unload quite fast and it makes them feel sluggish.

My school's IT dept deployed probably 50 or so of these 1tb Firecudas in old laptops and it's still their second most regretted deployment (beat by the IBM "DeathStars" as they like to say. I have one they wrote "Death Meth" on, the notoriously unreliable Deskstar series before Hitachi bought the line out. Ironic how those are some of the best now...

[Pickles von Brine]

Just now, Mel0n. said:

Are we getting mad at the 3.5" slim or 2.5" slim? 
But yes, I've seen several of the models in that case fail. Usually from bad sectors, since they're built so poorly. Newer 2.5" Firecudas use that design - using one in my laptop right now as my third 2.5" drive because I got it for free and all it has is applications I can reinstall. 3000 bad sectors, only 3 years old, only 1yr of flying hours...

(And they decide to park every 2mins or so, regardless of what you set in software, so they accumulate load/unload quite fast and it makes them feel sluggish.

My school's IT dept deployed probably 50 or so of these 1tb Firecudas in old laptops and it's still their second most regretted deployment (beat by the IBM "DeathStars" as they like to say. I have one they wrote "Death Meth" on, the notoriously unreliable Deskstar series before Hitachi bought the line out. Ironic how those are some of the best now...

I havent seen the slim 3.5 incher you are talking about. But yeah at my computer repair shop unless I have to use a slim drive I activily tried to avoid them. Honestly, I just tried to get customers on SSDs anyways. They were always happier with the results. Plus, gave me piece of mind a drop wouldnt kill a drive. 

[da na]

2 hours ago, Pickles von Brine said:

I havent seen the slim 3.5 incher you are talking about. But yeah at my computer repair shop unless I have to use a slim drive I activily tried to avoid them. Honestly, I just tried to get customers on SSDs anyways. They were always happier with the results. Plus, gave me piece of mind a drop wouldnt kill a drive. 

Tried to show here. Hard without seeing them in person but, here's a 500gb Barracuda 7200.12 and 40gb Spinpoint (before Toshiba and Samsung merged) HDD in shorter heights than a normal 3.5", left. 

They're 1/4-1/3 shorter than a normal drive. Probably just for lower manufacturing cost, since these don't need the whole 3.5 space to fit their 1 platter. 

 

[Pickles von Brine]

Just now, Mel0n. said:

Tried to show here. Hard without seeing them in person but, here's a 500gb Barracuda 7200.12 and 40gb Spinpoint (before Toshiba and Samsung merged) HDD in shorter heights than a normal 3.5", left. 

They're 1/4-1/3 shorter than a normal drive. Probably just for lower manufacturing cost, since these don't need the whole 3.5 space to fit their 1 platter. 

 

Oh those? I haven't had a lot of issues with them. Though sometimes these drives only had one head and one surface. Was fun times for certain recoveries.

[Rysters Tech]

On 7/29/2022 at 6:22 AM, Mel0n. said:

Welcome to the forums!

Personally I'd go with a WD drive, consumer grade Seagate drives have been very poorly built for the past few years.

For games, a WD Black might be good.

WD Gold enterprise drives are actually identical to black drive sharing the ultrastar chassis and are cheaper at least on amazon brand new.

[Rysters Tech]

my last few drive purchases have been toshiba x300 and l200 drives. the 4tb x300 has 395 power on days, not hours, but 395 days of operation since i got it earlier last year. seems to be a bulletproof 7200rpm drive although i would recommend rubber mounts for it as these things can be quite noisy.