[Ole]

In May I bought three Seagate 2TB Expansion External Desktop Harddrives from B&H, one for my images for daily use, and two for backup (one on site, one off site):

Seagate 2TB Expansion External Desktop Hard ST320005EXA101-RK -

All three failed in short order. They all got replaced under warranty directly from Seagate. It took forever, but eventually new drives arrived.

Of the three replacements, one was inoperable right out of the box, one is somewhat flaky, one works.

That bad one got replaced under warranty. After about another month the replacement arrived (a refurbished unit). It failed after three minutes of use.

It is about $20 in postage for each return so it is getting somewhat old.

Status as of now: Out of seven drives, one works, I use it daily, one is sort of working but appears somewhat unreliable, and five failed.

Avoid these drives!!!!

[ManuH]

Strange, I would suspect something else is at work. It would seem unbelievable that an experienced company like Seagate would have such problems.

Anyway I wouldn't recommend any USB hard drive at this point. USB 2.0 is simply too slow for modern drives, especially if you need 2TB of storage. Much better to use e-Sata.

[boriscleto]

I had a Western Digital enclosure die on me shortly after the warranty expired. Broke open the case, put it in an Antec enclosure, and it has worked fine until just last month when it developed a bad block.

I wonder if Seagate has started to buy drives from the factory that used to make the Hitachi DeathStars?

[Ole]

Strange, I would suspect something else is at work. It would seem unbelievable that an experienced company like Seagate would have such problems.

Anyway I wouldn't recommend any USB hard drive at this point. USB 2.0 is simply too slow for modern drives, especially if you need 2TB of storage. Much better to use e-Sata.

Well, I have a 2TB La Cie, no problems, and one of the 2TB Seagates work flawlessly. So I can unly suspect the drives.

[ManuH]

Well, I have a 2TB La Cie, no problems, and one of the 2TB Seagates work flawlessly. So I can unly suspect the drives.

Since they are external, it could also be the USB controller. I don't know but it's such a high failure rate that Seagate would be in deep trouble if it affected all this series.

[wlachan]

IMHO, external drives die much more often & faster than internals due to more heat & vibration. It doesn't matter what brand, they just do.

[tuco]

Sounds like a bad batch and QA problems with that model. Seagates were one of the last to offer 5 year warranty on their hard drives when most went down to 3 years. I've used them for years.

[bdery]

Your story sucks, but I have to say Seagate is a well regarded company, so using your personal experience to trash a whole company seems a bit like overreacting.

For the record, I have Seagate and Western Digital drives and they work flawlessly.

[magnum1]

I don't want to question your experience, but something other than a problem with Seagate itself seems to be going on here. I have several, and not one problem.

[photolady95]

Seagate was good, before they bought Maxtor. Now their newer drives are not up to par anymore. Course I don't use external ever so I can't comment on how they work. But I buy WD strictly because they perform well and I have never had a problem with them.

Another computer tech friend has problems with Seagate also and refused to use them anymore.

[ManuH]

This is all anecdotal evidence. I've had problems with all brands, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, WD, IBM, Fujitsu, etc. If I was using my own experience I would have a gripe against WD. They replaced a 400Gb that died again a few months after. They finally sent me a 500Gb enterprise (more reliable) version and all is well now.

StorageReview is doing a reliability survey.

This one is also fascinating. It's about Google experience on hard disk reliability and they use thousands of disks.

And I recommend tools to analyze the drive's health like Speedfan

[photolady95]

That's true, all brands have had problems; however, Seagate has had the most lately and I don't buy them. WD's green drives have had problems when using them as your main drive, but supposedly they are fine if used as a slave drive. Can't explain why this is, it's just been documented, is all I can say.

I'm a computer tech by trade so I see a lot of problems others wouldn't with certain brands.

[tuco]

Well I better run another backup. I have two Seagate 500GB in a risky RAID 0 configuration, gulp, running on my box.

[jeffkrol]

In May I bought three Seagate 2TB Expansion External Desktop Harddrives from B&H, one for my images for daily use, and two for backup (one on site, one off site):

Seagate 2TB Expansion External Desktop Hard ST320005EXA101-RK -

All three failed in short order. They all got replaced under warranty directly from Seagate. It took forever, but eventually new drives arrived.

Of the three replacements, one was inoperable right out of the box, one is somewhat flaky, one works.

That bad one got replaced under warranty. After about another month the replacement arrived (a refurbished unit). It failed after three minutes of use.

It is about $20 in postage for each return so it is getting somewhat old.

Status as of now: Out of seven drives, one works, I use it daily, one is sort of working but appears somewhat unreliable, and five failed.

Avoid these drives!!!!

That may be just a firmware problem and you have been getting "old" units....
Re: Seagate Expansion 2TB - Avoid Unless this Prob... - Seagate Community Forums
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?filter=location&l...20005EXA101-RK
I do have a tendency to suspect the "support hardware/software" then the drives themselves but that's just me.
Seagate has been having issues w/ large drives.
BTW if they "clicked" (always a bad sound in my mind):

Announcement: Clicking Seagate Expansion drives
The clicking sound experienced with some of the Expansion Drives in 1.5TB and 2TB capacities was an issue that has been identified and addressed with a change that was made at the factory in April 2010. If you are still experiencing this issue, please contact support.



Please feel free to PM me with any questions.

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Other-External-products/Announcement-Clicking-S...ves/td-p/68618

[uccemebug]

I swear I've bought my last platter-based HDD. That Google report and a simultaneous one that I think was from Amazon found that most HDD failures aren't actually from moving parts but still .. the speed improvement, smaller size, and general reliability of SSD is very alluring.