[felindev]

> 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?

[Joker_vD]

> 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]

Circa 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.

[diggan]

> 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]

"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.

[alias_neo]

> Wasn't Western Digital caught selling NAS drives with some shittier technology than they were advertising

WD switched their (larger; over 4TB iirc) WD Red drives from CMR to SMR without changing the model number at all, this is why I switched to buying Seagate.

The SMR problem became particularly apparent when NAS users (like myself) switched out a failed drive with one of the same model in their ZFS pools, and resilvering would fail.

Interestingly, the Seagate drives I switched them with just a couple of years ago have now started failing (one of them at least) so that didn't work out.

Does anyone know if it's possible to check this runtime data on the drives? According to the article it's not in the SMART data which has been reset in the case of the drives they're talking about.

I'm thinking of switching my NAS to solid-state as I've never had an SSD fail yet I'm replacing disks in my RAID1 ever couple of years on a home NAS that sees fairly light load other than some VMs and Kubernetes clusters writing logs etc since I'm not actively using much of it for 90% of the time it's on.

[rendaw]

Toshiba (and Seagate) were mislabeling SMR drives at a premium too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959

[immibis]

Okay, almost always Seagate. Their drives fail at over an order of magnitude higher rates, too.

[baobun]

> 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]

Does any WD model have its own Wikipedia page?

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.)

[account42]

It really is a shame that WD bought up HGST.

[toast0]

> 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]

I avoid WD since the WD Red SMR controversy. Was under the impression Seagate has always been solid. Bummer.

[fred_is_fred]

It'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]

> 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.

[bluGill]

there 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]

The 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.

[3np]

I'm suspecting Toshiba might just be "a well-kept open secret" and people want to keep them for themselves. That's my only explanation for their absence in recommendations. Perhaps combined with that probably the other manufacturers actively market in ways that Toshiba doesn't care for.

Gone through a bunch of their MG/MN series drives over 5+y, and the 3/5y warranty was honored without BS on the one RMA case. You can also see them track well in Backblaze rankings.

Their N series are supposedly also great but never saw the point in paying the premium.

I have no idea why you would pay more or the same for same-sized drives from either Seagate or WD if you have the option.

[busterarm]

When I built my 48TB NAS a few years back I went with Toshiba MG Helium-sealed drives because of so many bad experiences with the remaining alternatives.

It was a revelation. These drives have been so good to me.

[linsomniac]

I'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.