After a decade of buying only Seagate, yesterday I took delivery of a Western-Digital HDD. Personal experience with failed Seagate drives and their [in my opinion] unacceptable customer service, or lack thereof, forced this move.

Seagate has lost the HDD market and W-D appears to me to be the Heir-apparent. I'm sure others have faith in other HDD makers. I'm sure Seagate still has their followers; I'm just no longer one of them.

The layoffs are certainly sad for those affected, but not surprising to those of us who both watch the industry and bought Seagate products.

I recently bought 3 of the 7200.11 500GB (ahem ... 465GB) disks.

1 was made in Thailand, 2 in China.

The two China units were dead within 2 weeks, of differing ailments (one couldn't be seen anymore at all, the other would die during a format around the 50% mark).

Fortunately, the Thailand drives sent back (refurbs) both have 5 year warranties, and appear to be ... surviving. The original Thailand drive is humming along still without issue.

You get what you pay for, Seagate.

You are some sort of geek there Doug... I mean nobody cares about brands in disks do they?

Capacity, speed and price are what are judged, not brand loyalty...

Do you only order Bic biros because of their excellent track record too?

Can't say I've seen any brand of disks not fail, they all fail at some point...

Paris because she doesn't f**k geeks

Seagate, Quantum, WD, HP and Maxtor have all pooped all over the sheets on me. They typically buy similar products from the same factory, so is it any wonder when they all die? Brands are just marketing agreements....

So I'll sit on the chaise with Paris since neither of us like those wrinkly old hard drives, but we will bang with enthusiasm for SSD!

To: AC

capacity, speed and price is what the average (inexperienced) consumer might be looking for, but if you have had more than a few drives with valuable data die, you will value reliability more than anything.

I personally value absence of noise and (lack of) heat more than speed too, at least for drives that will be located anywhere near me (I obviously don't care about noise for datacentre drives).

That's why I just bought 4x 1TB WD-GP (5400rpm) drives to use in a raid5 array, instead of 7200rpm alternatives.

And before you mention backups or RAID, even if all the data is backed up, failed drives are always a risk and certainly a hassle, remember murphy's law.

Every IT professional should learn early in their career it costs far more to replace a defective hard drive for an external customer or internal user than it does to provide a more reliable HDD in the first place. And providing HDDs that often need replacing makes a organization look bad, it costs goodwill.

Knowledgeable IT professionals, experienced administrators, and reputable PC makers consider reliability paramount in selecting hard drives. That is why the customer rebellion against the reduction in warranties from 3 to 5 years down to 1 to 3 years succeeded. Reliability is just far too important in HDD purchasing.

I agree that everything fails sooner or later. Professionals consider the "mean time to between failures" as the measurement to consider.

The real problem is employers who consider one IT person as good as another. Experience is valuable.

Yeah we care if it goes bang, but in my own *humble* experience of 15 years in this game, I've never actually seen one go bang after the MTBF.

It would be nice if life was so easy as reading a manufacturers spec for something.

Paris still doesn't f*ck geeks...

I'm hearing that the layoff numbers could be as high as 12% and that the company will be closing a Pittsburgh research and development center.

More info-

http://idiotinc.com/layoffs/seagate-layoffs-update/