How Reliable Are Seagate Portable Hard Drives?

[RB (Andrew)]

LOL Lewis, touché

BTW, to add my opinion, I always use Toshiba, be it portable drives or laptops.
Very happy with their reliability.

[RKenning (Robert)]

For any of the Mac users out there you may like to consider the Seagate GoFlex adapter with the Thunderbolt connection. I have used these for quite some time. It allows you to use barebone 2.5" HDDs. I have 7 x 1Tb drives(cost around $99 ea) and I rotate them around when backing up all my data. They work very well. I haven't had any failed drives and I use a mix of Samsung, WD and Seagate.
Rob

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by RB

LOL Lewis, touché

BTW, to add my opinion, I always use Toshiba, be it portable drives or laptops.
Very happy with their reliability.

I'm typing this on a 12 or 13 year old Toshiba Tecra laptop - that my wife got when the Uni she was working at was getting rid of them for $65 each. I added some RAM to it.

I remember back in 2000 when I asked the IT guy at work, he said to not waste my money and to just buy a Toshiba. I wish I had followed his advice more rigorously.
Regards,
Renato

[RB (Andrew)]

Renato.
All my children have Toshiba Laptops.

[Neutronstar (T)]

I work in and have worked in IT since 1981. During this time I have done a lot of repairs and attempted both successful and unsuccessful recoveries of floppy discs and Hard drives.

In my experience the Seagate drives that I have come across from users failed "slowly", usually a bad block or two surfaces, highlighting an issue and has given enough time to clone it with virtually no loss of data. Other brands that I have had to deal with have rarely failed like this, usually its been a fried IC on the controller or a catastrophic head crash.

Now even though Seagate drives have proven to me the be the better brand they are not without issues. The Seagate 7200.11 series had a serious firmware flaw. Google it. I had to go to extreme lengths to get my data back from the 1Tb version of this that I had.

Currently my personal photo and video store is backup up onto a Seagate 1Tb 2.5 AND ALSO a WD 1Tb 2.5 AND ALSO I have offsite a 500Gb (Samsung)+750Gb Seagate. I hedge my bets on more than one brand/model.

So in my limited experience Seagate has by far been the least troublesome. As for floppy discs I recovered more Verbatim that any other brand but perhaps they sold more that any other tilting the statistics?

There is one main program that is my go to for HD recovery, its worked where dozens of others failed.

In the end if the data is valuable consider a professional recovery service.

[MickS (Michael)]

My Seagate hard drive recently failed, spewin!

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by MickS

My Seagate hard drive recently failed, spewin!

Was it a 2.5" or 3.5" one?
Regards,
Renato

[Neutronstar (T)]

Originally Posted by MickS

My Seagate hard drive recently failed, spewin!

I will put it on top of the pile of dead WD drives I have here for you.