Another Failed hard drive

Over the last several years I’ve lost three 500G and the latest a 1TB hard drives, all Seagate. All started making occasional clunking noises that turned into a regular clicking and no access.

The 1TB drive failed within the warranty period. The NZ supplier had disappeared and the cost to ship it back to Seagate for replacement was more than the cost of replacing it, considering the packaging requirements specified by Seagate. The Seagate importer was friendly but would not handle the warranty for me.

So it sat here for a year or more until today I decided to try it again. Applying power, it spun up making a lot of noise and the familiar clunk-clunk….

A look inside a 1TB Seagate hard drive

As it’s now out of warranty I decided to have a look inside. There was a deep groove ground into the top platter and fine black dust throughout.

It spent 2 years in a file server just sitting there and not working very hard at all. It had excellent ventilation, fan cooled and never got much above ambient temperature.

Why did the drive destroy itself? And, what was wrong with the design or assembly that allowed it to destroy itself?

Lets assume data is valuable

I will not be buying any more Seagate drives. Some years ago after the 500G drives failed I began using Western Digital rather than Seagate. All the WD drives are still running.

As drives get bigger the combined value of the data on them increases and backing up becomes more difficult unless you just buy 2 or 3 of everything.

This image shows the small air filter that sits inside the corner of the drive. It is full of very fine black dust; alloy ground off the top platter.

Conclusion – don’t buy Seagate

My suggestion is don’t trust Seagate until they can prove reliability and offer a warranty that is actually worth something.