I Think Seagate Doesn’t Like Me
Yet another Seagate HDD decides to trouble me. The exact model is ST3500320NS, though on that page it says it has 16 Mb of cache and mine has 32 Mb, or at least that’s what it says. I really bought it thinking it’d be very reliable, seeing as it’s supposedly built specifically for reliability, but it would appear that I was very wrong. I checked two shops from here, one being the one I bought it from and the other being the one I bought most other components from lately, and there is a flood of negative comments about this specific model, the first one being posted just two weeks after I bought it. People seem to agree that it comes from a bad production lot, or at least it did at some point, and that it will fail no matter what.
The problem is that I had another Seagate HDD fail on me before, two if I add the one from Andra’s old computer, and I noticed some issues with yet another one. That makes it no longer appear to be a problem with a certain production lot or even a specific model, but with their products in general… Or is it just me? I’ll admit that they always recover enough to allow me to save what was on them elsewhere, or at least I could have saved everything if I only knew exactly what to do when Andra’s crashed and if I had enough room when the previous one I had crashed as well. But, while that is a detail of crucial importance, the fact that they keep crashing in the first place is a huge problem!
Meant to write much more about this, but it has already failed once and now it’s making strange noises, so I’d rather not risk it. Managed to get it to work again by disconnecting it, knocking on it a few times, connecting it again and then, well, praying a lot. Then I checked my backup and added pretty much everything I could get to without accessing the partitions where I believe the main problem is located, and now I wait. There’s nothing I won’t be able to get back rather quickly on those partitions anyway, but if it’ll keep working long enough and then also start again after I’ll need to turn off the computer in order to connect another HDD to it, I’ll really save everything since now I have more than enough room available. Once that’s done, I guess I’ll wait for it to be replaced, since I only bought it a year and a half ago.
