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> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US One could make a joke that seagate
by felindev 2y ago
> the company launched an official eBay store that sells refurbished drives. [...] However, this store only sells in the US
One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone.
Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs?
- baobun 2y ago> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? WDs image was IIRC already not the best when the WD Red SMR thing blew up. I recall feeling smug but forget the background. I think they have a strong claim on title of most scandalous HDD maker.
- Hamuko 2y agoDoes any WD model have its own Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 (I had one, it died just after its warranty ended but Seagate did send me a replacement after bitching about it for long enough.)
- knute 2y agoThere's an IBM Deathstar (sold to Hitachi, sold to WD) model that has its own section, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...
- magicalhippo 2y agoLost my first 3 years of programming thanks to a Deathstar... Still miffed about it, as I enjoy going back looking at my earlier code. At least I learned to take backups, which has saved my butt several times since.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- baobun 2y agoI agree it's not an easy call between the two! I guess the conclusion of this episode could tip the scales, if we ever get an explanation. My best guesses right now are some mix of organized crime disrupting their German distribution and/or less publically acknowledged graymarket/OEM channels gone wrong. If it really comes from inside Seagate I don't think a sane person would buy from them again. It gets more nuanced when talking about their responsibility to keep oversight over their supply chains and distribution.
- rasz 2y agoThey both competed for worst drive :) https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-archived/amstrad-loses-us-hard-disk-lawsuit-1999-06/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar... " Western Digital supplied it with faulty disk drives during 1988 and 1989"
- account42 2y agoIt really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.
- diggan 2y ago> One could make a joke that seagate did start selling refurbs in EU, just without telling anyone. Regulators and prosecutors/lawyers would probably be the only ones laughing about that. AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite. > Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? If it isn't Seagate, it's someone else. Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising? Feels like a rite of passage for HDD sellers to somehow defraud consumers sooner or later.
- jerf 2y ago"AFAIK, consumer protections are much worse in the US, so if anything it would be the opposite." Claiming you're selling a new product and then selling a used product is straight-up fraud. This isn't even a warrantee issue, and no, the US legal system wouldn't just shrug and go "Oh well". This is the sort of thing that penetrates any amount of verbiage in a EULA the company may throw at you, including any sort of demand to go through arbitration, and depending on how widespread this is could easily become class-action, which is the corporate nightmare the forced-arbitration clauses are trying to avoid. You can't write yourself an open-ended right to commit basic fraud into any contract, no, not even in the US.
- Capricorn2481 2y agoClass actions are for lawyers. They will lowball how much damage was done and consumers will see $6 once all is said and done. I'm sure Seagate would rather not go through it, but the lesson for other companies will be just to get caught slower.
- jerf 2y agoYou'll note I called it a "corporate nightmare" and didn't describe as anything like the white horse coming to the rescue of the consumer.
- immibis 2y agoOkay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.
- fred_is_fred 2y agoIt's not clear to me that this is Seagate's fault. Sounds like retailers are selling used drives as new. Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do?
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> Or is wiping the SMART data only something Seagate corporate can do? I buy used enterprise drives for large home NAS and some Amazon "refurb" sellers will wipe SMART data, inc drive hours. I avoid them. It's a dumb thing to do for a known, used drive.
- Joker_vD 2y ago> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? Since you can't make an "X-gate" name for a scandal out of the Seagate's name, they can afford more bad publicity than other hard drive manufacturers. Truly an ingenious branding strategy.
- PaulHoule 2y agoCirca 2001 or so I bought about 5 Maxtor drives that all went bad in a year and I wasn't the only one. I never bought another Maxtor drive again. On the other hand, I've owned probably 20 Seagate drives and had maybe 1 fail, so I see them as a partner as much as a aprt.
- kalleboo 2y agoSeagate acquired Maxtor and that's when people started complaining about Seagate reliability
- bluGill 2y agothere are only a handful of companies that make HDD so it will be one of them. WD has a terrible reputation as well. Who else makes HDDs? (Toshiba is the only one I know of and they never seem to come up with someone asks for recommendations so I'm not sure if they are small, so bad nobody would think about them, or just hard to get retail)
- danparsonson 2y agoThe HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.
- mrguyorama 2y ago>My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble. This is, emphatically, not a good data point. You need thousands of drives running for years under normal loads to actually tease out outlier failure rates in a drive SKU. You need to literally do what Backblaze does.
- danparsonson 2y agoI know, that's why I didn't say "you should buy these drives because I've never had any failures". I was just adding some context.
- linsomniac 2y agoI'm a die-hard Ultrastar fan who was disappointed by their eventual sale to WD. But, for a sample size of 8 over a decade, I've been happy with my Toshiba laptop 2TB drives I have running in a small storage server.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- busterarm 2y ago
- toast0 2y ago> Why is it always seagate when there's something wrong with HDDs? It's either Seagate, Western Digital, or the rotating third player in the market, but there haven't really been any other options for scanadals. I can't remember the last time the third player had a big scandal, but WD certainly goes through them from time to time. IBM DeskStar is a name that will live in infamy, but that was from before rotational drives really consolidated.
- teekert 2y agoI avoid WD since the WD Red SMR controversy. Was under the impression Seagate has always been solid. Bummer.