I have quantum fireball from 2000, so 26 years old, still going strong.
5 years doesn't seem that long for a drive that cost hundreds of dollars! Persistence is the point.
Just wondering why Seagate seems like the bottom of the barrel in the longevity department. Western Digital drives seem to fail a lot less frequently on average in this dataset and in my life experience.
To Seagate's credit, I do have 8x24TB drives that have been working fine for the past 4 years. Hopefully can last a few more until the compute hardware shortages pass.
I have two particularly notorious Seagate periods:
Seagate bought Conner when Conner had released several models w/
leaky seals. Bad sectors started at the outer edge of the
platters and grew inward. We had a lot of these drives
out there and Seagate refused to honor Conner's drive
warranties.
The 7200.10 series had super high failure rates. I wound up
replacing every one in my care, within 2 years. The 7200.11
drives weren't much better.
I think the last Seagate lines I truly trusted were the ST series of MFM and RLL drives.
I do not know, but the last time when I have bought a Seagate HDD, I had a very nasty and unpleasant surprise.
Last year I have bought a 22 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external HDD, because it was cheaper than the other 22 or 24 TB HDDs available at that time.
I had read carefully its datasheet before buying and there was nothing suspicious there, so I assumed that it must be cheaper just because it is a slow HDD. I did not care about the speed, it was for storing data archives infrequently accessed.
Only after receiving it I discovered what was not said in the datasheet, that this Seagate HDD does not support S.M.A.R.T., so there is no way to test it to see if it works OK and there is no way to discover when errors have happened, e.g. to see when the HDD becomes too old, so you need to migrate your data.
I have never imagined that in 2025 it is possible to buy a HDD that does not support S.M.A.R.T., especially in HDDs with a capacity over 20 TB, and moreover without giving a prominent notice about such a misfeature in the datasheet.
Before this, in 2024 I had bought a 24 TB Seagate SkyHawk, which had S.M.A.R.T., as expected. Since then, after the Seagate Expansion fiasco, I have bought a 22 TB external WD HDD, at the same price with the Seagate, and which has S.M.A.R.T., as it is normal.
I cannot see how removing S.M.A.R.T. support can reduce costs, as it is just a firmware feature. I any case a manufacturer that removes testing and error reporting features from its products clearly does not give a s*t about data corruption and HDD failure rates.
With an external drive the SMART info might be hidden behind the USB-to-SATA bridge, smartctl has support for some of those but sometimes needs to be told with an extra argument.
Doesnt surprise me, Seagate is marching to its own drum. My experience defiantly mirrors others' higher than average failure rate as well.
My latest 'fun' experience with them, also, came in the form of an Ironwolf drive which is 'detected' on usb-to-sata interface when plugged in, around %15 of the time. While it starts up consistently on a plain SATA interface. This makes it unusable for what I need. Again, no other drive or MFG ever fails on this usbSata, just the new ironwolf, which it appears is actually for the chineese market, but was sold on newegg, but this is not necessarily seagate's fault, nevertheless.
It's regrettable that you would spread misinformation, and easily explained/debunked information at that. This is a reasonably well-known issue and even with the extremely bad and limited information you provided (no model numbers or other info), I already know exactly what your problem is.
lycan1917|15 days ago
metadat|15 days ago
5 years doesn't seem that long for a drive that cost hundreds of dollars! Persistence is the point.
Just wondering why Seagate seems like the bottom of the barrel in the longevity department. Western Digital drives seem to fail a lot less frequently on average in this dataset and in my life experience.
To Seagate's credit, I do have 8x24TB drives that have been working fine for the past 4 years. Hopefully can last a few more until the compute hardware shortages pass.
rasz|15 days ago
WarOnPrivacy|15 days ago
adrian_b|15 days ago
Last year I have bought a 22 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external HDD, because it was cheaper than the other 22 or 24 TB HDDs available at that time.
I had read carefully its datasheet before buying and there was nothing suspicious there, so I assumed that it must be cheaper just because it is a slow HDD. I did not care about the speed, it was for storing data archives infrequently accessed.
Only after receiving it I discovered what was not said in the datasheet, that this Seagate HDD does not support S.M.A.R.T., so there is no way to test it to see if it works OK and there is no way to discover when errors have happened, e.g. to see when the HDD becomes too old, so you need to migrate your data.
I have never imagined that in 2025 it is possible to buy a HDD that does not support S.M.A.R.T., especially in HDDs with a capacity over 20 TB, and moreover without giving a prominent notice about such a misfeature in the datasheet.
Before this, in 2024 I had bought a 24 TB Seagate SkyHawk, which had S.M.A.R.T., as expected. Since then, after the Seagate Expansion fiasco, I have bought a 22 TB external WD HDD, at the same price with the Seagate, and which has S.M.A.R.T., as it is normal.
I cannot see how removing S.M.A.R.T. support can reduce costs, as it is just a firmware feature. I any case a manufacturer that removes testing and error reporting features from its products clearly does not give a s*t about data corruption and HDD failure rates.
the8472|15 days ago
jofla_net|15 days ago
My latest 'fun' experience with them, also, came in the form of an Ironwolf drive which is 'detected' on usb-to-sata interface when plugged in, around %15 of the time. While it starts up consistently on a plain SATA interface. This makes it unusable for what I need. Again, no other drive or MFG ever fails on this usbSata, just the new ironwolf, which it appears is actually for the chineese market, but was sold on newegg, but this is not necessarily seagate's fault, nevertheless.
rdschouw|15 days ago
MacOS does not support S.M.A.R.T over USB.
1over137|15 days ago
There is: use ZFS and scrub.
But yeah, crazy that it doesn't support SMART!
TwoNineFive|15 days ago
eqvinox|15 days ago
gethly|15 days ago
burnt-resistor|15 days ago