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Seagate to Shut Down One of Its Largest HDD Assembly Plants
- fapjacks 10y agoCouldn't shake that Maxtor curse. Good riddance, I say. I'm involved in the Seagate class action over bad drives, but like many other class actions I've been involved in, I seriously doubt I'll see much of the thousands of dollars I've sunk into drives Seagate sold me knowing they had atrocious failure rates. Perhaps a five or ten dollar consolation check like usual.
- quasse 10y agoI'm glad you mentioned that case, I just filled out the documentation. Luckily I kept receipts, correspondence with Seagate, and still have one of the failed drives. Considering I was a college student at the time, it cost me a lot of money to replace my failed Seagate drives (after RMAing them and having failed replacements). I've never bought another Seagate product and never will, regardless of claims that they've improved.
- lightedman 10y agoDrop out of the class-action, file your own suit, and demand whole remedy.
- iscrewyou 10y agoCan you do that? Can't the judge say that you have to drop the individual suit and join the class action because they are similar complaints? I have no legal experience and I'm thinking completely from the point that the judge would want his job to be easier.
- lightedman 10y agoNope, you can chose to not join the class-action (or remove yourself form it) and pursue your own legal matter in court. The judge might try to fold your case into the class-action, but only if that class-action falls within their circuit's jurisdiction.
- fapjacks 10y agoI would love to know more about this, but I'm completely ignorant about the process. I've put a couple thousand dollars into these specific models of HDD which have all failed within three years of purchase (including the replacement drives which failed during the warranty period). I am really tired of joining class action suits only to find that I get a check for a couple bucks afterwards. Especially because I've lost thousands of dollars in these cases (e.g. Bank of America), and getting a five or ten dollar check is just completely demoralizing. I would be willing to spend out of pocket to sue on my own (within reason), but I have no idea how to start that process or where to go to even research it. Do you know what kind of lawyer should I contact?
- lightedman 10y agoHow many thousands are we talking? Depending on the state, you might be able to just walk this into small claims court. Some have a $5K limit, some have $10K, find out what your state's limit is for small claims. If your lost amount of money falls within that range, you don't need a lawyer and lawyers are not allowed in the courtroom for such cases generally speaking. Walk to the court house, file your paperwork with the court, have someone NOT related to the case serve the person you're suing and have them sign the appropriate proof of service paperwork, which the court clerk should give to you. After that, it's just waiting for the court day to be declared, both parties are notified by the court of that, and then you go into the court room on that date. Usually, big companies don't show up in small claims, so they default, and you can simply file a lien on them and get your money back either by cash or by equipment. You get to literally walk in to their building, with cops by your side, and start taking stuff until the lien is settled. Or you can walk to their bank with the court order, and have it yanked directly from their account. I've done both. It's fun.
- fapjacks 10y agoIt makes perfect sense when you say it, but I hadn't thought of it that way. This does sound like fun. Thanks!
- rincebrain 10y agoSeagate's Linux FW updater still has the string "MaxtorRulesSeagateDrools" baked into it, which rather says a lot about where that particular tool came from. So not everything that came out of Maxtor is terrible, if it means they let you flash HDD FW under Linux now.
- Keyframe 10y agoMaxtor! Now, those were bad drives. I just went on to see the state of the industry. Didn't realise Maxtor bought Quantum (Fireballs were big back then) and then Seagate bought them. It's basically consolidated to Seagate vs WD vs small fishes (Hitachi, who else?). SSDs bring in IC vendors into the game.
- Nullabillity 10y agoHitachi is also WD, as of 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST
- shiftpgdn 10y agoMy day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world. For our next storage expansion it's ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash/SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don't have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.
- qyv 10y agoPerhaps this is old information, but do SSD's from the same batch/model not tend to fail all within the same timeframe? A steady stream of failures is probably preferable to a single mass failure.
- Bombthecat 10y agoThe benefit of ssd is that you can almost exactly predict when a ssd will fail. You know the read and write IPOs. You know when they fail.
- PaulKeeble 10y agoI dont know about that. Every SSD that has failed for me did so quite unexpectedly and prematurely, I haven't yet taken an SSD to its write limit and none of them have survived more than a few years except the very first Intel 80GB gen 1.
- ReverseCold 10y agoI've never had any storage medium fail on me, and I feel like I do a lot of read/writes. Exception is a flash drive I snapped in half once. Oops.
- ams6110 10y ago
- chx 10y agoWhile slightly costly, you can buy a 4TB 2.5" SSD in a normal thickness drive. You can not do that with a HDD, the only 4TB 2.5" HDD I am aware of is a 15mm thick one which does not fit in, well, pretty much anything, not laptops, not most bays, nothing, they are only usable as an external drive (but it's useful that way, I have one). I believe this is the first time the capacity crown goes to an SSD at any given time (at least in the consumer space -- in the server space the 16TB 2.5" Samsung SSD and the 60TB 3.5" Seagate are both out of this world but so are their prices too).
- tw04 10y agoI take it you don't deal with enterprise storage then. 15mm is the size of basically every enterprise 2.5" drive sled. That's the form factor of all 10k RPM 2.5" drives. The only thing the drive you described DOESN'T work with are laptops. Pretty much anything else it's a perfect fit. The laptop drive thickness is the abnormality for the rest of the storage world.
- codebook 10y agoIf you go to enterprise storage, then you can get 16TB SSD though. It is not comparable.
- tw04 10y agoWhat exactly isn't comparable? A 5TB 15mm 2.5" NL-SAS drive is about $250. The "16"TB (it's 15.3TB) SSD you reference is about $10k. The cost per TB of NL-SAS is SIGNIFICANTLY lower, and still absolutely has a place for bulk data storage that doesn't have performance requirements. Ohhh, I get it, you're now modifying your original post to look like you were aware of enterprise storage. Got it.
- mrb 10y agoSelf-contradiction: "[the factory's] closure will significantly reduce the company’s HDD output" ...but a few sentences later: "the plant no longer makes products" How can a plant that no longer makes products would reduce the company's output if closed?
- buzzybee 10y agoStill using a HDD here. Would like to transition, but holding out for better price/capacity ratios. It's really clear that it's the bottleneck for everyday use at this point; I recently went to 16GB RAM which stopped a lot of Windows swapping behavior, and now the major pain points are bootup, storage-intensive tasks, and bloated web sites.
- simooooo 10y agoUse a ram disk for your browser cache
- agumonkey 10y agoRAM cached profile, dns proxy, makes for really smoother browsing on older machines.
- comboy 10y agoI don't know how exactly it works under Windows, but at least under Linux such optimizations usually don't pay off much since most used pages are already kept in the RAM anyway.
- j3097736 10y agoMy HDD on Linux barely has any disk access and is perfectly usable, meanwhile windows just loves trashing it for minutes, even with page file & unneeded services disabled.
- aphextron 10y agoYou should really get at least a 128gb drive for your OS and frequent applications. They're like $30 on Amazon nowadays. The speed difference is phenomenal - it's the single best upgrade you can make to a desktop PC right now.
- happycube 10y agoThis plant should've been closed down when they bought Maxtor - it was a huge part of Seagate's quality drop in the late 0's.
- adamconroy 10y agoNot a surprise to me, their HDDs are junk. I've had two burn out in work machines and one personal external burn out. I never buy their gear anymore
- tracker1 10y agoI had 10 out of 12 go bad on my freenas box a few years ago, will NEVER buy seagate drives again.
- mynewtb 10y agoI've been using seagate drives exclusively for the past 8 years with no unusual failures. I will always buy seagate. </anotherpointlessanecdote>
- mynewtb 10y agoI've been using seagate drives exclusively for the past 8 years with no unusual failures. I will always buy seagate. </anotherpointlessanecdote>
- DanBC 10y agoAll drives fail, catastrophically, at the worst time. More important than "will it fail or not?" (because they all fail) is "how good are the warranties?", "how good is the customer service?", and "have we tested our backups?"
- bogomipz 10y agoI liked the exploded diagram, I wouldn't have guessed a single HDD was the product of 6 different countries.