Seagate continues the tradition of having the highest failure rates of any manufacturer, on average.
Why is that?
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.
As explained at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-..., a large proportion of Backblaze's Seagate inventory are rather old drives for a datacenter (now 5-9 years in service), so a high failure rate is expected.
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.