Every manufacturer has made a product that failed.

My primary storage use-case is physical media backups. I literally don't care how long it takes to store, a bluray is 70GB and I've got around 200 of em to backup.

Yeah, I expected it to level out around $800 after a few years, not out of the gate. 20TB are still $300 ish new.

Use redundancy. Don't be a pleb.

I can certainly understand holding grudges against corporations. I didn’t buy anything from Sony for a very long time after their fuckery with George Hotz and Nintendo's latest horseshit has me staying away from them, but that was a single firmware bug that locked down hard drives (note, the data was still intact) a very long time ago. Seagate even issued a firmware update to prevent the bug from biting users it hadn’t hit yet, but firmware updates at the time weren’t really something people thought to ever do, and operating systems did not check for them automatically back then like they do now.

Seagate fucked up but they also did everything they could to make it right. That matters. Plus, look at their competition. WD famously lied about their red drives not being SMR when they actually were. And I’ve only ever had WD hard drives and sandisk flash drives die on me. And guess who owns sandisk? Western Digital!

I guess if you must go with a another company, there’s the louder and more expensive Toshiba drives but I have never used those before so I know nothing about them aside from their reputation for being loud.

Me who stores important data on seagate external HDD with no backup reading the comments roasting seagate:

but not every manufacturer has had class action lawsuits filed against their continued shitty products.

Especially VR files

So if you have been around long enough you might remember the Hitachi (IBM) deathstars https://wizardprang.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/the-last-deathstar/

I see Hitachi and think no fucking way, where as Seagate I used to see as an always yes. Now I just stick the disks in a zfs array and call it done

What I'm really waiting for is large capacity ssds with sata.

This hard drive is so big, when I tried to weigh it the scale just said “one at a time please”.

Uh oh!!! Uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh

This hard drives so big, that two people can access it at the same time and never meet.

What is the usecase for drives that large?

I 'only' have 12Tb drives and yet my zfs-pool already needs ~two weeks to scrub it all. With something like this it would literally not be done before the next scheduled scrub.

And I’ve only ever had WD hard drives and sandisk flash drives die on me

Maybe it's confirmation bias but almost all memory that failed on me has been sandisk-flash storage. Zhe only exception being a corsair ssd which failed after 3 yrs as the main laptop drive + another 3 as a server boot and log-drive.

Well, it's a Seagate, so it still comes out to about a hundred bucks a month.

they were selling wd red (pro?) drives with smr tech

Didn't they used to have only one "Red" designation? Or maybe I'm hallucinating. I thought "Red Pro" was introduced after that curfuffel to distinguish the SMR from the CMR.

I’ve had my 16TB ironwolf pros spinning for 5 years in my NAS, no issues. People love to trash Seagate but I can’t say I’ve had any issues. I also have 6x10TB barracuda pros and they’re fine too, for about 10 years.

I think refurbished enterprise drives usually have a lot of extra protection hardware that helps them last a very long time. Seagate advertises a mean time to failure on their exos drives of ~200 years with a moderate level of usage. I feel like it would almost always be a better choice to get more refurbished enterprise drives than fewer new consumer drives.

I personally found an 8tb exos on serverpartdeals for ~$100 which seems to be in very good condition after checking the SMART monitoring. I'm just using it as a backup so there isn't any data on it that isn't also somewhere else, so I didn't bother with redundancy.

I'm not an expert, but this is just from the research I did before buying that backup drive.

there was a time i asked this question about 500 megabytes

I too, am old.