[katana]

alrighty, first off, my story.
about a month ago i bought my nice shiney new PC, everything intially went together fine, XP and Vista installed perfectly. then about a week after i built it the PC would'nt boot up with HDD SMART capability enabled, after two weeks "my network places" in xp stopped opening up and the OS was generally being slow, i upgraded to SP3, nothing changed. in vista however, a message kept popping up saying my disk was stuffed and vista was shocking slow. it was so shockingly slow that a P3 900 mhz with 512mb RAM was fater than my Q6600, 4gb RAM PC, i couldnt have more than one program open at a time or everything would go balls up. rather annoying.

At this point, i was starting to suspect either dud RAM, or dud HDD. i did basic diagnostics on the RAM (trying one stick at a time, trying them in a friends PC) they came out fine, then just this afternoon i turn on my PC, and i got a screen saying Asus Express Gate wasnt installed, or the install was incomplete. i continued the bootup, got the the OS loader screen, and there was that lovely message that everyone wants to see: operating system(s) missing. reboot, same thing,

so my question, are seagate drives normally as unreliable, overpriced, slow and all round shocking as mine was?

never again will i buy seagate (or even get them out of the hard waste :P)

[Hybr!d]

Originally Posted by katana

so my question, are seagate drives normally as unreliable, overpriced, slow and all round shocking as mine was?

Yes, they are the worst drives you can buy imo, Maxtor are made by them too and are just as bad.

I refuse to buy them and stick to WD and Samsung, they are much better.

[cheesepuff]

i second that's

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

Oh bugger.

I've bought 1.25TB in total of seagate HDD.. And was about to purchase another 250GB..

Just how unreliable are they? ie. How long would 1TB of data storage last? Am I safe for at least a year?

Quite difficult to backup 1TB to be honest, personally anyway. Am I best off replacing it with a WD HDD soon as and transferring, then selling the Seagate on eBay?

[cheesepuff]

as much as i wish there was a way to tell how long, no one can be sure. if u are as unlucky as me, u got a week, or a month tops. then again i was really unlucky for both of my hdds from them. their rma service sux...

[sjb007]

I had a seagate which let me down but it was quite a while back, think it was bundled in a system as OEM, if I remember right it lasted about a year before it gave up the ghost. Now I stick to Western Digital as already suggested above, had one in my last system and now got 2 in my current system. Not tried Samsung but I hear the spinpoint series are supposed to be good

[4D(Fordy(Ford) Ollie]

I just had a google to see how much more it would cost me,

A Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB for £80 on Amazon?! that's less than I payed for my 1TB Seagate.

I thought Seagate were bought because they were cheap, but are actually unreliable..

So you can see why I'm suspicious of this Samsung supposedly more reliable for less but same size?

[cheesepuff]

oh wait. my bad, the 2 drives that failed on my was Samsung! not seagate. but both suck. WD all teh way.

[Carbon]

I don't know if Seagate is really that bad, their Barracuda drives tend to be alright as far as heat goes and many actually say they're the best after WD.

[katana]

my hdd was a barracuda drive, and that lasted 4 weeks.

on the other hand there is a 120gb maxtor sata drive in the main pc thats lasted over 4 years.

and my old IBM has a hdd thats lasted 21 years!!

i thought that hard drives were supposed to be getting more reliable...

I am going to see if i can get a warranty claim on the HDD today, it will go well with my brand new 23'' moniter.