Ex-top disk dog down in the revenue dumps

Seagate has announced preliminary third quarter results 11.5 per cent lower than a year ago, with 1.3 million fewer disk drives shipped, but announced it is going to begin making dividend payments. Happy investors have boosted its shares by 9.12 per cent to $16.03. Seagate said for its third fiscal 2011 quarter, ending April 1 …

[Anonymous Coward]

You snooze, you lose!

Seagate has sadly fallen down on the job of improving performance, quality, and value to their customers and shareholders. I have been a Seagate user for 30 years, at times a shareholder, and a consultant to the company. Unfortunately, in the past few years, they have not kept up with the competition (WD) in the hard drive arena. I had been using Seagate drives (500GB to 1.5TB drives) exclusively on my systems since I started consulting again in 2007, yet their drives run hot, generate a lot of bad sectors, and don't have adequate spare sectors to keep the drives from failing. I recently switched from Seagate to WD drives, and at the 2TB level, the WD drives run better than 20 degrees F cooler, have at least double the number of spare sectors, and don't have failed sectors nearly so often. What does that mean to me, as a small business who's systems have to run 24x365? A lot! I've had to return several of my 1.5TB Seagate drives under warranty in the past year, and none of the WD drives.

So, at this time, Western Digital drives appear to run cooler, be more reliable, and are cheaper than Seagate drives. Not a good equation for Seagate, I think... :-( FWIW, I run about 20TB worth of disc on my server/workstation as arrays and individual discs. Most are still Seagate, and I haven't had any problems with the 500GB Seagate drives, but interestinly enough, the 500GB drives (7200rpm Barracuda) have as many spare sectors as the 1.5TB (also 7200rpm Barracuda) drives, and they run 30 degrees F cooler. What's wrong with this math?

[Storage_Person]

Clueless Consultant

As a consultant it might be good to understand the company's product lineup. Barracuda are desktop drives, not server drives. Big difference in duty cycle and perhaps why you're seeing so many failures?

The right tool for the right job...

[Dick Emery]

Lame dog

Seagate has been in the shitter for ages. The last good drive I purchased from them was a 500GB ST2300641AS but although it has not died yet it's a clunker and maxes out at 60MB's.

I initially tried switching to Hitachi but after buying 3 DOA's have gone with Samsung which thus far (touch wood) run fast and quiet without a hiccup.

After Seagate' recent firmware debacle (well recent'ish). I don't see much point in buying thier drives. Their biggest mistake was merging with Maxtor (another HDD manu I fell out of love with).