I do not know, but the last time when I have bought a Seagate HDD, I had a very nasty and unpleasant surprise.
Last year I have bought a 22 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external HDD, because it was cheaper than the other 22 or 24 TB HDDs available at that time.
I had read carefully its datasheet before buying and there was nothing suspicious there, so I assumed that it must be cheaper just because it is a slow HDD. I did not care about the speed, it was for storing data archives infrequently accessed.
Only after receiving it I discovered what was not said in the datasheet, that this Seagate HDD does not support S.M.A.R.T., so there is no way to test it to see if it works OK and there is no way to discover when errors have happened, e.g. to see when the HDD becomes too old, so you need to migrate your data.
I have never imagined that in 2025 it is possible to buy a HDD that does not support S.M.A.R.T., especially in HDDs with a capacity over 20 TB, and moreover without giving a prominent notice about such a misfeature in the datasheet.
Before this, in 2024 I had bought a 24 TB Seagate SkyHawk, which had S.M.A.R.T., as expected. Since then, after the Seagate Expansion fiasco, I have bought a 22 TB external WD HDD, at the same price with the Seagate, and which has S.M.A.R.T., as it is normal.
I cannot see how removing S.M.A.R.T. support can reduce costs, as it is just a firmware feature. I any case a manufacturer that removes testing and error reporting features from its products clearly does not give a s*t about data corruption and HDD failure rates.
With an external drive the SMART info might be hidden behind the USB-to-SATA bridge, smartctl has support for some of those but sometimes needs to be told with an extra argument.
Doesnt surprise me, Seagate is marching to its own drum. My experience defiantly mirrors others' higher than average failure rate as well.
My latest 'fun' experience with them, also, came in the form of an Ironwolf drive which is 'detected' on usb-to-sata interface when plugged in, around %15 of the time. While it starts up consistently on a plain SATA interface. This makes it unusable for what I need. Again, no other drive or MFG ever fails on this usbSata, just the new ironwolf, which it appears is actually for the chineese market, but was sold on newegg, but this is not necessarily seagate's fault, nevertheless.
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.
I think the last Seagate lines I truly trusted were the ST series of MFM and RLL drives.
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.
That's a brand I haven't heard of in a long time. I had a 8gb HDD from the brand in 2000 until my sister kicked the computer case out of frustration which ended up shorting some chips on the drive. I mourned the loss of my music collection for quite a long time.
Pretty sure that's cos every AI company wants to have a copy of all the worlds information stored in each of their data centers, and hard drives are the best storage medium for that.
Design your training strategy carefully and you can do streaming rather than random reads from the drives and get enough performance.
Same with DRAM, old-node chips during the Post-COVID chip shortage, and toilet paper during COVID. Lots of things are commodities until the demand spikes.
I'm still running ~40 WUH721414ALE6L4 purchased ~2020 for $110 ea. They're $320 ea now, used.
I never thought I would own commodity hardware that would increase in value over time. When this AI bubble pops like dotcom 1.0, the definancialization is going to be painful.
Seagate continues the tradition of having the highest failure rates of any manufacturer, on average.
Why is that?
I do not know, but the last time when I have bought a Seagate HDD, I had a very nasty and unpleasant surprise.
Last year I have bought a 22 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external HDD, because it was cheaper than the other 22 or 24 TB HDDs available at that time.
I had read carefully its datasheet before buying and there was nothing suspicious there, so I assumed that it must be cheaper just because it is a slow HDD. I did not care about the speed, it was for storing data archives infrequently accessed.
Only after receiving it I discovered what was not said in the datasheet, that this Seagate HDD does not support S.M.A.R.T., so there is no way to test it to see if it works OK and there is no way to discover when errors have happened, e.g. to see when the HDD becomes too old, so you need to migrate your data.
I have never imagined that in 2025 it is possible to buy a HDD that does not support S.M.A.R.T., especially in HDDs with a capacity over 20 TB, and moreover without giving a prominent notice about such a misfeature in the datasheet.
Before this, in 2024 I had bought a 24 TB Seagate SkyHawk, which had S.M.A.R.T., as expected. Since then, after the Seagate Expansion fiasco, I have bought a 22 TB external WD HDD, at the same price with the Seagate, and which has S.M.A.R.T., as it is normal.
I cannot see how removing S.M.A.R.T. support can reduce costs, as it is just a firmware feature. I any case a manufacturer that removes testing and error reporting features from its products clearly does not give a s*t about data corruption and HDD failure rates.
With an external drive the SMART info might be hidden behind the USB-to-SATA bridge, smartctl has support for some of those but sometimes needs to be told with an extra argument.
Doesnt surprise me, Seagate is marching to its own drum. My experience defiantly mirrors others' higher than average failure rate as well.
My latest 'fun' experience with them, also, came in the form of an Ironwolf drive which is 'detected' on usb-to-sata interface when plugged in, around %15 of the time. While it starts up consistently on a plain SATA interface. This makes it unusable for what I need. Again, no other drive or MFG ever fails on this usbSata, just the new ironwolf, which it appears is actually for the chineese market, but was sold on newegg, but this is not necessarily seagate's fault, nevertheless.
Do you have MacOS by any chance?
MacOS does not support S.M.A.R.T over USB.
>there is no way to discover when errors have happened
There is: use ZFS and scrub.
But yeah, crazy that it doesn't support SMART!
I have two particularly notorious Seagate periods:
I think the last Seagate lines I truly trusted were the ST series of MFM and RLL drives.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.
That's a brand I haven't heard of in a long time. I had a 8gb HDD from the brand in 2000 until my sister kicked the computer case out of frustration which ended up shorting some chips on the drive. I mourned the loss of my music collection for quite a long time.
I used a 1.2gb Fireball for my main drive around that era — it is so comically loud!.
Well, I have a 200mb maxtor IDE works just fine to this day.
The classic Deathstars™ ["Deskstar"]
Only expected if its Seagate. Backblaze Hitachi drives had miniscule failure rates thru their whole life cycle.
It actually looks like they're getting better, if the changes from last year to this year are any indication.
"back in my day", seagate was "the shit". only much later, hitachi drives came to be popular and wd, sort of.
By Hitachi, you mean IBM Ultrastar. IBM drives tended to be the best.
Flash storage costs have gone way up.
I wonder if backblaze's business has seen any changes given that their assets are platter drives
Retail HDD prices have also gone up ~50% over the past couple of months.
Pretty sure that's cos every AI company wants to have a copy of all the worlds information stored in each of their data centers, and hard drives are the best storage medium for that.
Design your training strategy carefully and you can do streaming rather than random reads from the drives and get enough performance.
Interesting, SSD have kind doubled.. storage used to be such a commodity item and now it's a gold rush
Same with DRAM, old-node chips during the Post-COVID chip shortage, and toilet paper during COVID. Lots of things are commodities until the demand spikes.
My drives have an AFR of 0.41
It looks like I picked a good vintage which is good because the same drives are approaching 2x the price today.
I'm still running ~40 WUH721414ALE6L4 purchased ~2020 for $110 ea. They're $320 ea now, used.
I never thought I would own commodity hardware that would increase in value over time. When this AI bubble pops like dotcom 1.0, the definancialization is going to be painful.