Is Perpendicular Magnetic Recording at the End of its Road?

[Rob Williams]

Last month, Seagate unveiled the world's first 3TB consumer hard drive - albeit an external one. The launch was rather impressive, though, because months earlier, it sounded like it was going to be quite a while before a 2TB+ drive would become a reality. But thanks to Seagate's clever thinking (or tricks as some would call them), the drive was a possibility, and is currently being sold for about $200.

Read the rest of our post and discuss it here!

 

[ashechtm]

Seagate and end of vertical data storage

I am surprised that seagate is still in business. Their newest response to data storage failure is "you should back it up". Except most of these large drives are already back-ups of existing data. Its a great way to sell more drives without having to maintain any significant qc in production. I recently had a 750gb FreeAgent pro, which was purchased new only a year ago, fail- or maybe fail. It took me almost an hour on their inanely secure website to find anything on the drive, as they seem to keep changing model numbers by one letter. I finally got through to a live person, which I have to admit was the most positive thing about the site, however he was unable to provide answers other than to say replace the drive, and you should back it up. So now with the 3tb drive coming on line, i can put all of my eggs in one basket- so to speak- and then buy another drive to back the first up, and probably a third to back the second one up!
I requested schematics as I want to see what i can do before giving up all hope and returning it - but they dont have any info - or at least they dont provide any info. Maybe these items are made by trial and error, without any diagrams or plans.
If anyone has any info in a ST307504FPB1E2-RK 750gb Free Agent Pro drive, like can i get a replacement SATA/USB connector, and will other power supplys work, and how can i see what else i can check, i would really appreciate your help..
PS The packaging was nice however.

 

[Rob Williams]

Welcome to the forums

From and end-user perspective, I can't comment too much on whether one vendor is building less reliable drives than others, and from personal experience, I find that most of them die at around the same time (which for the record is always too quickly). The problem with Seagate's FreeAgent is real though, and is evidenced by another thread in our forums. I contacted Seagate multiple times about that thread, and these issues, and I've never heard back anything except for "Thanks for the heads up!" or something to that effect. The company just never seemed to want to admit the issues. I'm going to have to get in a recent FreeAgent and see if I experience the same issue over time.

You might want to read through that thread and see if you can garner any help there. Unfortunately, if Seagate isn't willing to simply swap the drive, I'm not sure what to recommend. You CAN get the drive out of its enclosure, but it's tough.

Regarding the "backup of a backup"... it's sad, isn't it? For important documents, I back them up to a second drive in my PC, and then back them up again to the NAS box. It's inconvenient, but I don't trust hard drives at all, and it's a day-ruiner if you lose your only copy of a file or files, that's for sure.

 

[Kougar]

I can't comment as to WD's external drives, but overall external drives so suffer quicker failure rates, it's just the nature of the device combined with more components to possibly fail. Even before the Seagate FreeAgent series came about, all the major drive manufacturers had problematic external drives. This is further evidenced by the single year warranties offered on these devices. In many instances the PCB controller attached to the drive fails before the drive itself does.

The only true way to truly secure data is to ensure it is always in two places at once. Or to ensure it is housed on a redundant RAID array that can rebuild the array when a drive fails. Which means using a discrete RAID card/controller and keeping the system at stock specs. Or simply building/buying a dedicated NAS/Home fileserver. Intel's Matrix RAID just isn't fully safe to rely upon if you want absolute data security.

 

[DarkStarr]

Its because external drives suck on cooling, they are basically shoved into a metal box with little to no cooling and sold $30-$50 higher than an internal drive that for me sees temps of 32-35 C vs 90+.