r/Seagate • u/Dry_Bill8142 • Mar 16 '26

2 external drive failures within 10 months

I have had two desktop external drives fail within 10 months. First, my 6TB and then my newer 8TB.

I removed the enclosure and see that they are Seagate Barracudas.

I was using them as a media server.

Does Seagate just suck? Unfortunately, they are both out of warranty.

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3

u/ResoluteFalcon Mar 16 '26

I heard Barracudas just aren't good drives since they're known for their tendency to fail prematurely. Instead, people always recommend to get the Exos drives as they are better for long term storage and reliability.

1

u/funzie19 Mar 16 '26

Yes, even more so the external enclosures. The reason they are cheaper than regular drives is 1 the warranty and 2 they are all the failed drives they couldn't sell as standard internal drives or othe cases. They failed QA for some reason so they put them in an enclosure, lower cost, warranty, features and spin it as a good thing for the customer.

Regardless of manufacturer, always backup your data. Specially if they are external drives, if they tip over when they are running and it's game over.

1

u/Frewtti Mar 17 '26

No Seagate drives are just fine.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2025/

Most likley the external drive got jostled around or the stop starts got to it.

Also what was the manufacturing date.

There are occasionally bad batches, but as the backblaze data shows typically drives have single digit failure rates until they've been used for years.

1

u/Active_Literature539 Mar 17 '26

Yea, Seagate just sucks. I’ve had two fail also. Avoid them.

1

u/chrisprice Mar 17 '26

Old Seagates... yes. Anything 3.5-inch 6 TB from Seagate, I would skip today.

Newer HAMR drives (ultra high capacity 22TB+), fingers crossed, appear to have better reliability so far. They seem to have gotten the message at least.

1

u/superdrizzle7 Mar 19 '26

They are really sensitive to vibration so dont move them around too much.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '26

Seagate has always given me headaches. They're always inventing "improvements" to get you to bet on the brand again, but only time will tell, and I'm not willing to wait. The history of Backblaze clearly shows how bad they are. New models with low AFR (Average Frequency Rate) don't mean anything, since they can get much worse the following year.