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Seagate Acknowledges Problems With 1.5-TB HDD 239

AnInkle writes "Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda has been available for a couple months from multiple retailers. But shortly after release, reports of random freezes appeared on several sites. The hang apparently occurs in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista when streaming video or transferring files at low speeds. After a couple of weeks of silence, Seagate has finally officially acknowledged the problem. In a response to The Tech Report, they say they're investigating the 'issue' affecting 'a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives.' Acknowledging the 'inconvenience' is a start, but most users expect at least average performance and prompt service from the capacity king of data storage." In a related story, reader Lucas123 plugs a ComputerWorld piece examining the question of Seagate's plans to stay relevant at a time when SSDs increasingly capture OEM mindshare.
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Seagate Acknowledges Problems With 1.5-TB HDD

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  • Half baked (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bjb ( 3050 ) * on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @06:24PM (#25726819) Homepage Journal
    I've been looking to buy a large second drive for my Mac and ALMOST hit the buy button on this drive a week ago. However, I noticed some 1-star comments on Amazon's reviews of the drive and have been watching this ever since.

    The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc. The only reports of success appear to be from people who are using it for an archive disk and thats it. Some people claim the problem can be avoided somewhat by disabling the write cache, but naturally you get a serious performance hit from that (especially since the memory cache is 32MB!)

    Reading the forums, it appears that Seagate has not only thus told people that the drives aren't meant for a RAID environment, but even gone so far as to tell people that RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives". Hmm. Seems that time has changed this definition (FOLDOC and Wikipedia seem to claim the change in name as well).

    I'm rather disappointed since now that I have a taste for a 1.5TB drive, I'm not looking to buy "just" a 1TB. Hopefully one of these companies can resolve this.

    On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?

    • Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)

      by negRo_slim ( 636783 ) <mils_orgen@hotmail.com> on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @06:37PM (#25726967) Homepage

      On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?

      This link [wikipedia.org] might be of use to you in that regard.

      Echoes of Intel... [tomshardware.com]

    • Re: SV35.3 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      thats why i buy only from seagates sv35 line of hard drives optimized for video streams.
      and they arent more expensive than the regulars and come with larger warranties and 1tb capacities.

      • No matter whether a hard drive is made for "streaming" or not, it's ridiculous that it freezes doing it. No other hard drive does so, and I own some SeaGate ones.
    • Slightly off-topic, perhaps, but who in their right mind makes decisions based on the [now wholly predictable] crapflood of 1-star reviews the geek in full mob force posts to Amazon.com?
    • Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @07:57PM (#25727777) Homepage

      I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's. I have had to do data recovery on many drives this past year and over 1/2 were seagates.. Seagate used to be the drives that NEVER failed. and now they are sending low grade refurbs for any warranty replacements and the warranty replaced drives have only 90 days on them so that nice 5 year warranty turns into a 90 day warranty when the drive dies and is replaced.

      I only do HD video editing so I can get away with tiny 750 gig drives, but I dont like having them fail on me like segates have been lately.

      As for the SSD drive remarks.. I cant see SSD drives getting near the capacities and speed I need for HD video editing within the nest 3 years.

      • I only do HD video editing so I can get away with tiny 750 gig drives,

        I have a full-height 20MB hard drive I can smite you with. Get off my lawn!

      • Re:Half baked (Score:5, Informative)

        by blahplusplus ( 757119 ) * on Wednesday November 12, 2008 @12:34AM (#25729893)

        "I stopped buying Segate a few months ago when I bought a set to upgrade my G5 editor. I purchased 5 750gig drives and 2 of the 5 were defective. They are getting as bad as the IBM deathstars were back in the late 90's/ early 00's"

        Your sample is not representative ... "I had x and y fail on me, therefore the maker of x and y is crap". I used to buy western digital, and over %50 of the drives failed before 3 years. Seagate backs their drives with 5 year warranties compared to everyone else, if anything I think that's a statement of confidence in their ability to create drives that outlast the competition. All hard disks are destined to fail at some point due to moving parts and after prolonged use, even flash drives have a limited lifetime (even if it will never see failure during the time it is used). This is just the nature of the beast.

        The biggest improvement's in hard disk life in my experience has been in adding active cooling to the disks themselves. Ever since I've added active cooling, I've noticed a mark decrease in failure before the 3 year mark, and I tend to go through a lot of hard disks.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc.

      Maybe they got their firmware from Comcast...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Just check the reviews of these drives - indeed, most 1TB drives as well as the Seagate 1.5TB drives - on Newegg or TigerDirect. These drives die regularly - they have an astronomical rate of failure, regardless of what the manufacturers claim. Some are DOA from the store (some people blame this on the OEM packaging - but the reviews vary from drive company to drive company, suggesting the packaging is not the culprit.) Of course, I know that negative reviews on such sites tend to outweigh positive reviews

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by pin0chet ( 963774 )
        You make a very valid point. As sites like Newegg start to get hundreds--even thousands--of reviews for products like hard disks, a prospective buyer can look at the percentage of negative reviews as a rough guide to the probability of failure. Compared to the 640GB WD6400AAKS, pretty much all 1TB-plus drives on Newegg have a lot of 1-star reviews. That does suggest these huge drives aren't up to par in terms of reliability.
    • Reliability. I'll take it over speed. I'll take it over capacity. Most of the time.

      Give me a 500 GB drive that's guaranteed for 10 years and I'll be a customer.

    • by syousef ( 465911 )

      I own 8 one TB drives for home use (mostly photo storage. I shoot gigabytes at a time when I have a day out with the camera). I had bought:
      4 x 1TB Samsung (internal on a file and print server I bought in June...lots of fans, temps good, and I don't overclock)
      2 x 1TB Western Digital Mybook (exeternal)
      2 x 1TB Western Digital Mybook home (exeternal)

      Two of the Samsung drives have died already. I had them replaced supposedly under warranty but had to pay $15 per drive for Seagates (which are slower SATA 1 drives

  • Seagate is good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FredFredrickson ( 1177871 ) * on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @06:25PM (#25726823) Homepage Journal
    I've never had too many problems with seagate, and consider them to be a great brand. I also like western digital, but when I have a choice, I go seagate for the 5 year warranty.

    As for SSD drives, I'm not exactly sure what everybody's worried about here. I don't see any affordable SSD drives, let alone any in the 1TB range.
    • I've never had too many problems with seagate, and consider them to be a great brand. I also like western digital, but when I have a choice, I go seagate for the 5 year warranty.

      I've always disciplined myself with the thought, "It's not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, but when...". But oddly enough I have had tremendous success with long term hard disc usage. In fact Maxtor is the only brand that's failed thus far. 7 years of usage was pretty good tho!

      • Re:Seagate is good (Score:4, Informative)

        by mapsjanhere ( 1130359 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @07:10PM (#25727305)
        Guess you never bought any of IBM's Deskstar disaster series. I have a drawer full of these, none made it past 3 years. The drives were so bad, IBM sold the division, to Hitachi I think.
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by networkBoy ( 774728 )

          How many were made in Hungary? I'm betting very few to none. We had a huge lot of 20 gig drives die on us, all from Singapore (or something?) but none of the Hungarian ones died. To me this means it was not a design issue, but rather a quality in production issue.
          -nB

    • Re:Seagate is good (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dhanson865 ( 1134161 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @06:40PM (#25727007)

      I keep reading about people going Seagate over Western Digital "for the 5 year warranty".

      If you think that WD doesn't offer a 5 year warranty on any drives you are wrong. If you think there is only "the" 5 year warranty instead of "those" 5 year warranties then maybe I'm going to be a grammar nazi too.

      http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488 [wdc.com] will get you started on 5 year warranty drives from WD.

      WD1001FALS = 1TB
      WD7501AALS = 750GB
      WD6401AALS = 640GB (I'd recommend this drive)
      WD5001AALS = 500GB

      People are so quick to look to the top end but there is a reliability/speed/power/noise benefit to buying the sweet spot drive. Cost is in the eye of the beholder as the 640GB drive is lower in purchase price but won't be the best price per GB. Myself I'm willing to use the smaller drives, but then I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive without being low on disk space.

      As a single drive or in an array as long as you don't run out of space you gain performance using smaller drives so long as you buy carefully. In RAID more spindles equal more speed. As a single drive you can pick and choose the highest density platters (320/333/334 as the desired platters currently vs the 250GB platters that are still floating around the supply chain in so many drives)

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive "

        That must require pretty awesome balance!

      • by Barny ( 103770 )

        With home server equipment, data density is the biggest requirement, 640GB drives are useless when you need a 4-5TB array and only have 5 drive bays to do it in.

        I have a pair of the seatage 1.5TB drives, neither have caused a problem for me so far, both of course are under windows 2003 Home Server (not on the list of affected OSs), good to see them admitting to a problem though, too many companies these days just wont.

        And no, don't bother questioning the storage requirement I listed, backups (incremental ba

    • Sony Vaio Laptop. Someone in my company almost bought one. Thankfully they came to me for advice before sinking money on their "new" personal machine.

      I pointed out the following: the SSD drive was a mere 32 GB.

      A standard installation (infection?) of Windows Vista (and no XP-downgrade option, Sony won't give you the drivers) eats up a good 12 of that. Office 2007 (yeah yeah I know, I work with what they use), another 6 easily. Miscellaneous preloads, drivers, "service" software, and of course the (ugh) "rest

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jebrew ( 1101907 )
        I call shenanigans on this. I'm running on a 32Gb SSD using XP pro with all the trimmings, VS2005 SP1 (With full MSDN install), Office 2007, VMWare, Firefox, Chrome, Picasa, GIMP, Photoshop CS3, and Cygwin (just to name the largest programs). I've still got 12GB of free space.

        Throw in some external storage in the form of a USB drive and I've got a system that boots in ~10 seconds, restarts in ~15, and cut my compile time by a factor of 10.

        Not to mention all the apps open a lot more quickly. I don't kno

        • Vista uses a few gigs for the install as opposed XP, and the recovery partition for Vista adds another few gigs.

      • by Ost99 ( 101831 )

        whether laptop OR desktop, and the largest commercial SSD currently is a mere 128 GB.

        Wrong

        250GB OCZ SSD [ocztechnology.com]

      • by vux984 ( 928602 )

        I wouldn't use anything less than a 500GB drive for a machine today, whether laptop OR desktop, and the largest commercial SSD currently is a mere 128 GB.

        The 'work' related documents section of my unit, including email comes in well under 30GB. And that includes a selection of ISOs, installers, and other 'large' files I keep around related to work.

        So for me, a 32GB SSD is too small. A 64GB SSD is adequate. And a 128GB SSD will easily last me the life cycle of the laptop, for work. For personal use, yeah, I

      • by Z34107 ( 925136 )

        I, too, call Shenanigans on that.

        Through much trickery and chicanery (most of which involved attending one of Microsoft's developers conference), I got a full copy of Office 2007. They didn't actually print discs, like they did with Visual Studio 2005, they just provided a download link and a password.

        The downloaded Office 2007 Professional installer is 385MB. They installed size is 429MB.

        I also can't believe that Vista eats up 12 GB of hard disk space. My friend and I bought netbooks with 8GB solid stat

    • Seagate appears to have started going downhill after acquiring Maxtor. First there was the infamous AAKS firmware bug that was discussed at length here in /. that made a specific model of Seagate drive underperform. In various web forums, people have also started complaining about more noise when Seagate harddrives perform seek operations, along with other firmware related bugs affecting burst speed performance. Seagate also now appears to be behind Western Digital in terms of performance on its line of des

  • by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @06:27PM (#25726851) Journal

    Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by QuasiEvil ( 74356 )

      I have no idea - wake me up when an affordable SSD can hold 1TB or so. Until then I'll stick to spinning magnetic media everywhere but maybe my laptop.

    • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      Database admins are also showing interest.
      SSDs may well become the standard but when a 1 TB drive is only $100 it really is hard to look longingly at an SSD.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by cheater512 ( 783349 )

        I'd worry about a SSD being destroyed too quickly with certain database loads.

        If its mostly read then yeah the SSD would kick butt but throw in frequent writing and I'd get worried.

        • We've done database servers with SSD and RAID1+0. Amazingly fast, and the power savings aren't bad either.

        • Depends on the SSD, the database, and the usage pattern. I wouldn't want to run a frequently-updated database on MLC flash, that's for sure. But at work we just put out production database on a Fusion-io ioDrive [fusionio.com], which quotes a 24-year lifespan with 5TB of writes a day. The performance is amazing. Of course, now everything is CPU-bound...

          • by afidel ( 530433 )
            For OLTP I prefer to just pin my main tables in SGA, ram is cheap and getting cheaper all the time. For what we spent on 32GB 2.5 years ago you can get 256GB today, you have to be a VERY big shop for your OLTP tables not to fit in that much ram. If you're using the fusion-io for something like you log partition are you using software mirroring?
    • Where are SSDs "capturing mindshare" anywhere other than the portable market?

      Anyone who cares about the performance of the parts in their computers has been thinking of SSDs for some time now, and in a positive light. The same "mindshare" that WD Raptor's [wikipedia.org] built will eventually turnover to one SSD or another.

      • Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper th

        • Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper than platter drives to make them better.

          Thumb drives are cheap and use cheap chips. It's my understanding that SSD's are made with flash that is better made for frequent writes. If it wasn't, i don't even see why they make SSDs, since CompactFlash cards already use a standard IDE interface.
          Anyone have some info on this?
          -Taylor

          • Re:Lifespan... (Score:4, Interesting)

            by mapsjanhere ( 1130359 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @07:15PM (#25727355)
            There are two different technologies for SSDs, single and multicell. The former is used in the $600 for 32 GB enterprise drives, the later in the $100 for 128 GB cheapos. The MC drives are the ones with the low write cycles. But if you use your SSD in a fast read-little write application like a database server it lasts forever and you can take advantage of the blazing read spead (most write performance I've seen isn't much ahead of a good HD array).
          • They have started to use MLC chips in a lot of things to drive the cost per GB down faster, and MLC has a lower rated write lifetime.

        • Swap is a compromise, and ram is cheap now. You don't actually need swap at this point if you get enough ram. The only exception being Linux distros apparent obsession with using the swap file/partition for hibernation by default.

          Get enough RAM and you can make your storage decisions based on the things that actually matter, speed, space and reliability over time.

        • by Whiteox ( 919863 )

          what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS?

          All that depends on the OS and demand.
          I've got 2 linux boxes, one with 1GB ram and another with 2GB and they have never used any swap space.
          Lots of ram + SSD with no swap partition will make linux work ok if you don't open excessive amnts of apps at the same time.

          No hope with WinX however.

    • In my mind, hence the name :D

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rolfwind ( 528248 )

      Give it time, SSDs were nowhere on the consumer market before the last year.

      Also, I notice hard drive capacity just isn't increasing at the rate it used to (early 2000s). I think last year the biggest was 1TB already and now it's just hovering at 1.5TB. OTOH, for about $49 two years ago got you a 1GB usb drive at walmart (micro cruzer). Same brand 8GB/16GB costs $25/$59 respectively. Can get a generic 32GB online. Not a bad rate of increase.

      I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, yo

      • "I suspect once capacity gets within 2/3 of harddrive space, you'll see a jump from mechanical to SSD bigtime. I think it will happen within 5 years."

        I suspect even sooner you'll see hybrid HDD/SSD drives.

  • Put it as my secondary Hard drive. Unless that is your only drive, I would tend to not put such a big hard drive as my main. Then the entire OS wouldn't slow down at once.

    The comments on that page are pretty harsh. I've never had a problem with Seagate and would still put it with WD as my favorites, but I am curious as to what is causing this, more cache needed?
    • Possibly buggy firmware. Its only when reading files slowly so it must fill the read buffer and then forget to refill it when it gets empty?

      My theory anyway from the limited information.

    • Harsh Comments (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MaxwellEdison ( 1368785 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @07:08PM (#25727291)
      HDD manufacturers will always face a large amount of negative press. The reason is simple. If your DVD drive breaks...ho-hum I'm out $XX and need a new one. Guess I'm not watching Kung Fu Panda tonight. If your HDD breaks...OMFG!!!I had 5 years of tax returns, 20000 hours of music, 1000s of irreplaceable pictures!...and I'm out $XX!!!

      Simply put, the cost of failure for a storage manufacturer is an order of magnitude above the rest of the industry. People don't just lose money, they lose memories, they lose costly business information. Of course you and I know that we should back up our data. But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too.
      • "But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too"

        Yeah, I've lost several years of insightful posts from MaxwellEdision. Seriously it's easy to say backup. But when the drives in question are Terabyte drives. What are you going to back them up to, and if it's another Terabyte drive then you are right back to the reliability problem that prompted the backup policy in the first place?

        • That's something I can sympathize with. DVD's hold 4.7GB (unless you go dual layer, but those are still expensive for a still small storage spac). While that was once just plain huge, these days to backup my system I'd need dozens of them.

          LTO3 (or now LTO4) drives are nice - I use them at work for database backups. The problem is the drives (and the controller cards to support them) are insanely expensive. Buying one would cost several times the purchase price of my computer.

          What I've had to resort to i

      • by syousef ( 465911 )

        Of course you and I know that we should back up our data. But its hindsight talking, because we've probably lost data before too.

        I just lost 2 one TB drives last month. By far the largest loss in terms of storage I've ever had. The only things I didn't have backed up were some VMWare Linux images I set up to get a feel for different distros about 6 months ago. I didn't lose a single photo or anything else of consequence.

        If it's worth storing, it's worth backing up to a second drive, and it's also worth peri

  • by sith ( 15384 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @06:33PM (#25726923)

    The real problem with these drives, or the scary problem, is the folks using these in RAID arrays, or things like the Drobo. The drive freaks out, so the array marks it bad. You pop the drive out and put in a new one, or even the same one again, to start a rebuild. But another drive freaks out during that process, array says "oh crap, another bad drive!" and your data goes to /dev/null. Even though no data was ever actually lost... just bad drives.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cheater512 ( 783349 )

      Thats with RAID 5, RAID 6 can reduce the possibility of data loss even further and if your data is critical then RAID 10 would be *extremely* to fail completely.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by dhanson865 ( 1134161 )

        If the rebuild time exceeds the average time of the problem behavior it doesn't matter what RAID level you use or how many drives are involved.

        With Terabytes of data RAID 5 and RAID 6 will take way too long to rebuild and your array will fail during rebuild.

        Even with RAID 10, if the behavior occurs in less time than synching the mirror takes you are screwed.

        • In a raid 10, the other mirrored pair would have to die. In, say, a 12 disk raid 10, this is one disk in 11 that has to fail. In a 12 disk raid 5, any second failed disk will sync you. So yes, it does matter. Raid 10 has a much lower secondary failure rate than raid 5 (or raid 6) especially as the number of disks increases. The rebuild times don't take the same hit that they do on growing raid 5 arrays either. If you are resyncing one failed 1TB disk on a raid 10, you have to resync just that one disk to o
  • by crow ( 16139 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @06:39PM (#25726989) Homepage Journal

    The 1.5TB drive is part of a family of Seagate drives, the 7200.11 drives. Supposedly the only differences between the different drives in the family are the number of platters and the size of the cache. So if there's a bug, I would expect the same issue with the smaller 7200.11 drives. (If not, the the root cause is probably related to the increase in power draw from spinning the fourth platter.)

  • On a large lot.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Fubar420 ( 701126 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @07:23PM (#25727433)

    On a lot of 60, a random subsample of 10:
      - 7 have been nothing but blissful
      - 2 throw random errors enough to stall a raid array
      - 1 just hangs the controller after some amount of time.

    Not saying the percentages bear out over the long haul, but people saying "WFM" are probably telling the truth, as are those complaining of errors.

  • This is a relatively new drive. If you really need stable performance, you probably should buy something more time-tested, like a well-reviewed 1 TB unit.
  • New Firmware Bugs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NeGrusti ( 912384 )
    From 7200.11 series Seagate switched to a completely new firmware, so a new bunch of bugs is not unexpected :)
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Bugs in hard drive firmware are completely unexpected. We aren't talking about a nVidia driver here. Hard drives are expected to perform flawlessly when new.

  • by tivojafa ( 564606 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @08:26PM (#25728041)
    "Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware."

    "We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions."

    "Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18."

    The official statement is slightly misleading...

    1) When the problem occurs all hard drive operations stop until the OS times out the ATA command - typically 30 seconds. This results in the computer freezing for 30 seconds.

    2) The problem can result in data loss if using a RAID system. Depending on the OS/RAID configuration the problem may cause a RAID system to think the drive has died. The RAID system automatically removes the drive and continues to run degraded (as designed). 20 minutes later when another drive exhibits the problem the RAID system drops the second drive and dies.

    3) The problem may be a systematic problem rather than a small number of drives - all drives have I tested running the SD17 firmware have exhibited the problem.
  • Back in July I finally decided to complete my home workstation and purchase my storage array.. So I ended up buying six of the 1TB drives and putting them in raid6.. Then a couple of months later these 1.5TB drives came out at the same price that I paid for the 1TB drives. I was really mad at the time, but apparently they were released too soon and without proper QA. I get amazing performance out of my 1TB drives in RAID, and although I would have liked a 50% bigger array, I would have been really disap
  • SSDs? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Wednesday November 12, 2008 @01:02PM (#25735021)

    Here's what nerds do:

    They go to newegg.
    They go the the hard drives section.
    They pick narrow it down to SATA II.
    They sort by lowest price.
    They middle-click a few Seagates that are around their capacity requirement.
    They double check the 5 year warranty.
    They make sure any bad reviews are from idiots who don't know what they're doing.
    They pick one based on cost and capacity.

    OEMs like SSDs because of the margins they can get, sure. But until DELL stops selling HDDs, Seagate and Western Digital and Hitachi have nothing to worry about in that department.

    Besides, it's not as if Seagate is skipping SSDs.

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