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Yesterday I had the frustrating experience of building my new rig to find the HDD I'd bought - a Seagate ST3500320AS - was completely fucked. I'm not sure exactly what was wrong with it but it kept randomly shutting down and was making an awful clicking sound from the start. It's getting RMA'd today but I'm not sure whether or not to go for another model of HDD. My flatmate has one of the same kind which has worked perfectly for him but Google's shown me that there have been problems with the drive firmware.

Has anyone had experience with this particular model of drive? Do you think the problems are severe enough to warrant going for another brand of hard disk or was I just unlucky?

Unlucky, I should say. I think I've got the same model HD, if it's the 300 GB one and never had any problems at all.

I've never had an issue with a Seagate drive, with them only being replaced to make way for a roomier drive. I currently have a 7200.10 320GB myself.

I know Seagate generally does have a good reputation and my last HDD is one by them as well. This particular hard disk was a 32mb cache 500GB Barracuda 7200.11. It had all positive reviews on the site I bought from but on checking other review sites it was a mixed bunch with quite a lot of people reporting problems similar to those I did. Of course people are more likely to report a bad experience than a good one so the proportion of people who've had problems is probably much lower than it seems.

The disk is off back to the seller and hopefully I'll have a replacement Monday or Tuesday. Then I can maybe post in the rate my rig thread with my shiny new system and actually enjoy some modern games at something approaching their max settings.

I'd say about 90% of our drive sales at work end up being Seagate these days, and very few of them ever bounce back. It's hard and/or impossible to find a more reliable brand overall, at least in the desktop market.

I'm partial to Western Digital drives, but Seagate typically has a good reputation. As with any harddrive manufacturer, there will always be some DOA drives that make it through testing.

Genii Lodus wrote:Has anyone had experience with this particular model of drive? Do you think the problems are severe enough to warrant going for another brand of hard disk or was I just unlucky?

Anecdotal evidence generally isn't adequate for passing judgment on the reliability of a brand or model of hard drive, and it's rare for even a specific model (for example, the infamous IBM Deskstar series, which suffered from a defective manufacturing run) to become known for reliability or unreliability.

I have a seagate HDD that was been abused with everything short of tossing it into salt water, and it works fine.

Personally I say fuck Seagate, but thats personal opinion arising from them landing a factory in Northern Ireland, sucking up some government grants and fucking off to exploit some other country.

I've always sworn by Maxtor HDDs they never let me down.

You..do know that Seagate owns Maxtor, right Pounder?

Thanks for your advice guys. Will just get a straight replacement this time. Fingers crossed that this one turns out fine and I can finally use the new machine.

I just had the same problem with the 500gb version of that model... the drive was in use for less than a week. seagate didn't even give any hassle other than lack of cross shipping, normally they want you to do some sort of stupid crap to prove that it's dead (it's going clunk, the software's gonna tell you that too).


ugh

White Haven wrote:You..do know that Seagate owns Maxtor, right Pounder?

Oops, gotta rip out all my HDDS on principal now.