Seagate external drives have pretty much disappeared from all the brick-and-mortar stores around here - Office Depot, Staples, Wal-Mart. All you can get is Western Digital and Toshiba. Is everyone else seeing the same thing? (Just curious)
I can still find external Seagate drives here in Southern California; Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, Walmart stores have them.
Ooohh, the pain......
... downhill?
Seriously though, I used to purchase Seagate products exclusively; they were the best. Sometime after 120gb drives became mainstream, their quality control became very sketchy. Nowadays, I won't use a modern Seagate in any system of value. Am I the only one who noticed this over the past ~10 years?
I purchased an external desktop USB 2.0 500gb drive a few years ago, but only because I found it for $25 during a holiday sale. Otherwise, I wouldn't have touched it. So far it still works OK, but I only trust it for holding movies, TV shows, and other non-critical data. Even though it's a full-size non-portable external, the drive inside is actually a 2.5" unit. Very strange, and I don't understand the logic behind that at all.
I agree with you KT7AGuy. I stopped buying their HDDs for my main PC since the 7200.11 fiasco. I owned one of these and it died on me, obviously.
Yeah I avoid Seagate where possible. Way too many dead drives. WD or Hitachi is what I recommend now.
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Used to use Samsung hard drives almost exclusively; after they sold their HDD division to Seagate, I've switched over to WD. IIRC, that was around the time of the firmware fiasco (7200.11 series etc.) that wound up killing a crapton of drives.
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Backups and warranties are the path to happiness with storage devices.
Seagate makes cheap consumer HDDs, but it also makes (good?) corporate drives.
I switched to WD some years ago (even after purchasing one of those crappy green caviar), but it seems that Seagate and Hitachi have a monopoly in storage cabinet drives (SAS, FC and FATA drives).
In my country (Spain) you can buy Seagate and WD everywhere. Hitachi and other brands are rarer.
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I wasn't trying to turn this into *that* kind of thread - but I probably have 10-12 Seagates from the 40-gigabyte error that are still running flawlessly. However it does seem that they have gone down quality wise.
Even if I could find them I would probably not buy - their warranty is not competitive.
The last external drives I got have all been Toshiba. I got three 750-gig models in Wal-Mart on clearance for a ridiculous price of ~ $45 each!!!!!!!!!!!! Have not had any trouble with them. Of course I am not *using* them - they are a backup - load them up, put them in a storage case, and forget them.
