Another seagate HD bites the dust.

[Ray]

I decided to use a spare 250Gb Seagate disk that I had in a USB enclosure to use as an  Image backup disk for my standby desktop PC. I decided to create the first image on it yesterday only to find when it had finished an error message that the backup had failed.  On checking the Event Viewer logs I'm seeing loads of entries for bad blocks on this particular disk, so I then check it out with Seatools and it fails every test I try  knowing I've had the disk for a while and thinking it was out of warranty I was on the point of wiping it with a lump hammer.

Fortunately I didn't before doing a warranty check on the Seagate website and finding out it's still under warranty until 29th June 2010. So it's now packed up ready to wing it's way back to Seagate tomorrow for replacement. 

[Rik]

Nice timing, Ray, but Seagate don't seem to be doing so well lately, do they.

[Ray]

They don't, Rik, I always used to find them to be among the best a few years ago, but they're certainly not now. 

[Rik]

No, at the moment, I'd rate Samsung much higher.

[Glenn]

Good timing Ray.

Western Digital are rumoured to be buying Seagate in more consolidation of the HDU market.

[Niall]

Seagate have major ups and downs. I used to use them about 10 years ago over all other companies, then they started failing at a scary rate. I switched to Maxtor after a brief foray into the nightmare world of the deskstar drives (god they were awful), and haven't looked back. I always use Maxtor drives and haven't had a single issue with them apart from snapping off the sata power connector once

[Glenn]

Maxtor are owned by Seagate, I believe.

[Niall]

How strange. Maybe they deliberately wreck one product to make the other do better

Nvidia did that with Voodoo cards & 3dfx. It took them nearly 10 years to start using the technology 3Dfx got them!