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Seagate hard drive controversy persists as scammers discover methods to alter reliability metrics
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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As someone who's always disliked Seagate based more on vibes than actual facts, I feel so vindicated right now
I've never owned a hard drive that failed on me that wasn't made by Seagate. I have 20+ year old WD IDE drives that still work fine to this day.
It wasn't them as a company right? it was a few resellers that decided to buy a shady lot of drives for resale. As in not buy from Sagate, but buy from somebody saying hey I got a ton of drives for cheap you can unload
If Ford is the only company with an odometer rollback problem, blame Ford, not the used car dealers.
Well if Is seagate reacts by locking down firmware, and deleting the resellers that knew they were getting non factory shipped equipment then this is fine. Part of the issue is the scale was so large some resellers didn't know, because they purchase from another larger stock company and rightly assume everything is factory original when ordering.
The fault is the manufacturer selling tamper-friendly products.
There are always going to be shady resellers but there is no reason a manufacturer should allow them to reset the counter for power on hours.
The issue is exploits exist in every hardware and software, just takes a person looking for vulners
I commented before reading, as is tradition. I expected these tools to be hard to temper with though, do the other manufacturers have the same "vulnerability" ?
Not sure, someone went to great lengths to pull off a large scam. A smaller scale one was an amazon purchased Xbox drive that did the bait and switch. They put a newer controller board on an ancient drive, wiped SMART in some way, and put it into the Xbox drive caddy with a Void if remove sticker across the seam. Curious at some point, I opened the caddy, to find what I thought was a new drive, was on old board but with an ancient drive covered in dirt and oil all over it. Like they didn't bother to wipe the grime off since it was covered in the plastic caddy. Scammers going to scam.
I'm at work so I'm sorry for not being able to provide a source, but there's a website that tracks hard drive failure rates and Seagate is consistently one of the worst brands. So there's some extra facts for you.
Would love to see that site if you can post it later!
Hi! I found it on my lunch. it's definitely not a perfect comparison but I personally think there's enough data to make some useful generalizations.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2024/
Has that always been the case, or did they just start going downhill somewhat recently? I feel like I remember Seagate being the higher end drives back in the day, the next step up from WD. Definitely doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
My understanding is that it's a relatively recent issue, maybe last 5 or so years? WD is currently leading the pack if I remember correctly.
This is the website im referring to btw. You happened to catch me on my lunch so I could go find it. They have lots of stats, and it's not like it covers 100% of drives but personally I still think it's useful and you can draw some general conclusions from it.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2024/
It depends heavily on the drive the data always shows. I have a 12TB Exos drive that I got almost 2 years ago with no issues. that specific drive has a 1.3% failure rate for 2024, more along the lines of WD so gotta use the data to your advantage
While it has been quite a while now, I would have a hard time getting over the fact that I have never encountered a WD HDD that did NOT fail. Between prebuilts when I was younger, and friends/family computers I helped with. It was astonishing how pathetic the WD's were.
Disappointing years ago when I read they acquired Seagate.
I've seen this claim twice now in this thread that WD bought Seagate; and I'm not saying you're wrong, bit I legitimately don't see this info anywhere online and I'm pretty sure neither owns the other.
Mind, I'm on mobile so it's hard to verify things but, I suspect there's some confusion here.
Seagate and Western digital are two seperate companies. You're correct in that neither own or are affiliated with the other.
There were talks of a merger for years starting back in ~2014, but that fell through.
I did just find out that Seagate is the parent company to LaCie though. They used to (probably still do) make some decently tough external haard drives.
Huh. I have literally never seen a WD drive fail. I had one that started making some unsettling noises after 10+ years of use but I didn't notice any failure until I ultimately removed it a few years later. A friend even bought a second hand Raptor once, which I thought was a terrible idea, but he had no issues with it for several years until he replaced it with an SSD.
Of course I know this is probably a very biased experience because I have never encountered WDs in a professional setting where the drives are a lot more solicited and thus more likely to fail.
Edit : also I only ever bought WD blacks which are higher end IIRC, and so did most of my acquaintances. Can't speak for blue/reds etc
Seagate was acquired by WD back in 2014.
There were talks about a merge around 2014, but it ultimately fell through. WD and Seagate are seperate companies.
Didn't Toshiba's hard drive division get bought by someone?
No, but Hitachi's was bought by WD back in 2011-2012. IIRC, they sold a part of it to Toshiba though.