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I can only offer my own anecdotes, and I realize other people have had no problem with them. To me, Seagate is like Sony: I won't (directly) tell others not to buy them if that's what they want, but I will relate my personal experience, and I don't have any praise with them. I didn't start with such prejudice either; I used to be a fan.
I'm always on the lookout for good deals on large hard drives. While I've seen better prices on Seagate drives than some of their competition (especially the cutting edge just-out-this-month models), I always move on as soon as I see the name.
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Seagate used to be good. But lately they come up short in the reliability department. I've gone to all WD Black with my new purchases.
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I had a very similar experience with 2 Seagate NAS drives. One lasted almost 1 year, the replacement ("free" under warranty) lasted 2 months. Major headache.
"A scalded cat is even afraid of cold water" -- I won't be back to SG in a long time.
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Personally I haven't had the bad experience of Seagate, the opposite actually.
Their average fail rate is about the same as any other manufacturer. According to (some fairly old) statistics from google, who buys a lot of hard drives from all manufacturers.
But what all manufacturers have in common is that they very often have systematic errors, so if one drive fails, usually most drives from the same batch or even model fails at the same time.
Therefore my recommendation is to buy a Synology diskstation or a Qnap or something similar, and fill it up with disks from different manufacturers.
That said, one should still check out current statistics[^], and you should NOT buy Seagate ST4000DMxxx, and the stats for certain Western digital disks doesn't look to shiny either.
At the moment it looks like Hitachi is the way to go. (which I personally have had extremely bad experience with  )
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That one seems an unbiased recommendation...
I'll read about those stats.
Thank you!
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It may also depend on your NAS too...
had one client with a Synology box (admittedly low end) stacked with 2 mirrored WD drives,
less than a year in started reporting SMART fails on both drives. Went through the return/replace of drives, but problems kept coming back. I took a look at the forums on Synology's own website, seemed others with sometimes even days old new WD's having problems. Of course Synology's reply "update the software, rebuild the RAID, if that fails change the drives" (just like MS, if the upgrade fails, reinstall). WD - drives are fine but we'll give you another [often refirbished] just to be sure.
To save the client spending on more drives (now after warranty) I took the supposed worst of the current 2 drives and threw it in a desktop PC, full reformatted it (many hours), and had it duplicate what they were putting on the NAS (from original sources of course) - been flawless in both work and regular SMART tests while the 2nd (now single drive) still in the NAS is picking up more errors. (Moving that 2nd drive a job for another day.)
Summary:
1. check compatibility NAS to drives beyond what manufacturer claims - check forums etc
2. For sure: if it's Synology NAS avoid WD drives, not sure whos fault but it's not a happy mix.
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
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Synology + WD...
And it works perfectly... at least till today I've not seen a failure/problem...
I got a couple of the recommended/compatible drives.
Now I'm searching for an use external drive to store the backups from what is stored in the NAS...
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I have the same. Actually love my synology.
And I setup (a long time ago) the USB Backup device. Easy to setup, and configure the internal backup software to run on a schedule. I barely think about it.
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The only thing that scares me is the ransomware...
If you get the nas encrypted... then probably the backup disk will suffer the same fate...
Then having two of them... and switching from one to the other one each day/week or month...
But then it appears the problem with the disk rotation for the backup... it is simply impossible to achieve.
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Funny you mention this.
The first thing I did was mounted the backup USB in a way that ONLY the NAS sees it, and has access to it. So something running on a PC Cannot naturally see the extra drive out there!
The next step, and I am just starting this... I attached the second network adapter with a different IP Address... In my hosts file, I have given it a completely unique name. My goal is a startup/shutdown script for my backup software that establishes the connection, then the backup runs, and then I disconnect. In this case, using "More secure" Credentials.
This creates a WINDOW in which the files can be accessed by ransom ware.
I am also looking at an S3 copy to run after my backups, so it is offsite and it won't overwrite existing files.
I have, like many people, heard horror stories...
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I also have a Synology 4-bay running WD HDD's with no problems for over a year so far. In addition to backup to local drive, I would really look into also using an offsite cloud backup service for the NAS as well. To be protected from theft/local disasters. I currently use CrashPlan, but with them ditching their personal accounts, I'm moving over to iDrive.
What ever your cloud backup provider is, make sure it does file revisions. This will prevent ransomware from knocking out your local drive and your backups. Crashplan supports individual file histories, and so does iDrive, not many other backup services do, so check. But if your drive gets encrypted, and that gets backed up, it's not a problem with these 2 services, as you can just restore from a date prior to the ransomware attack and you have your original data back. Plus these options support real-time backups as well. With Crashplan, file revisions get backed up every 15mins if there are changes (maybe less if I want it to). And any of those versions are recoverable.
I don't worry about my data anymore with the redundancy of the Synology NAS, plus off-site backup solution. And it satisfies the best practice of 1-2-3 backup plan (at least 1 local backup / backup to at least 2 different physical locations / at least 3 copies of all data).
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WD External HDDs.Last for ages
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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Now I have a couple of WD internal HDDs and they work very well... let's see what can I find to make the backups...
Thank you for your post.
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I'd have to say my experience with Seagate drives is fine: my NAS has 4 * 4TB Seagate drives (ST4000DM000-1F2168) organised as RAID 5 that have run 24/7 since early 2015 and - so far - no problems at all.
My USB (air gapped) image backup drives are also Seagate and are all fine as well - I can't remember when I got them, but they well and truly predate the Seagate NAS.
In fact, the only HDD failures I've had in the last 15 years have all been Maxtor drives of various sizes.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: I'd have to say my experience with Seagate drives is fine
...
In fact, the only HDD failures I've had in the last 15 years have all been Maxtor drives of various sizes.
Maxtor - Wikipedia[^]
Quote: In a deal worth US$1.9 billion, Maxtor was acquired by its rival Seagate in 2006. The Maxtor brand is still in use by Seagate
Hmmm, seagate good / maxtor bad ??? 
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
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I remember years ago to have a failure in a HDD from an HP server... a super expensive SCSI drive at 15K rpm... I got it replaced by an official HP drive... which was exactly a MAXTOR drive with an HP sticker... 
Never again it failed, but well, I paid almost twice its price for a sticker... 
Till today I've been very lucky with HDDs, but I thought asking here first...
Thank you for the answer!
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Joan M wrote: I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB.
If you don't mind my asking, what do you have for a NAS device? How are backups performed / maintained on it?
I ask because I just bought a cheap NAS to house my random junk, and its backup mechanism is very limited.
Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.
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I like Hitachi Touros. They (well mine, bought some time ago) came with little caring cases.
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A double bay Synology.
The backups are being done by they hyperbackup solution to an USB external HDD.
They have a versioning system that is great to access different states of the files you are interested in recovering.
The biggest problem is that it seems they are not capable to handle multiple drives to make backups.
This means you are forced to create n backup tasks (n => one per external disk) and program them to use a specific external disk... this is giving you a failure each day (for the missing disk).
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Well sounds like the Synology has a lot more in the way of features than the Buffalo.
While Buffalo has a backup mechanism its very limited.
Thanks for the info, I will have to look into one of those.
Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.
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I've been using a D-Link DNS320 (2 bays, max of 3TB discs) (Ethernet) for a few years. It has not had any problems, even though I had been using second hand 1TB discs, but have bought 3TB as I was running out of room. Also, my Acronis backup s/w was up for renewal; so I have followed advice seen over the month to use AOMEI. Thus far, AOMEI looks good - it is different from Acronis. I quite like (but not got used to) the fact that you can open backups as local drives (somewhat more long-winded that the Acronis method of double-clicking the required backup file). I've not been using it long enough to get a feel for how it deals with saving old backups. I am using the free version; thus far, the only Acronis feature that I have used that AOMEI doesn't have is email notifications and one-step cloning (you can clone in two steps and both feature are available if you get the paid version).
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A very interesting source of data here: Backblaze [^]
This is not their first report, similar data is available going back a few years, IIRC.
TL;DR You can't go just by manufacturer alone.
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I have noticed that some responders have provided negative views of the Seagate Drives.
I have primarily used Maxtor (I believe Maxtor has been absorbed by Seagate.), Seagate, and Western Digital drives with the majority of my machinery.
I have never had a problem with any of them.
However, to be fair to those who do not like certain drives, one should consider the following...
The drive manufacturing industry goes in cycles like any other industry. However, with drive production a certain vendor can produce superior drives for many years and then suddenly put out a "dog" as a result of many factors such as attempts by R&D to create a new technique for data storage, a lowering of demand for a particular drive type, popularity shifts, etc.
If any one such vendor were to continuously put out bad drives over the long term, they would have been out of business by now. So my advice, is to select a drive type that fits your requirements and then select one such drive from the major vendors still manufacturing such hardware.
If you buy a drive from such outlets as MicroCenter Online, for practically all vendors, it will come with a 30day return guarantee. If you have concerns that may go past the 30days, you can purchase replacement insurance for an affordable fee.
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I used to love Maxtor drives. Never had a problem with one (we are talking way back in the day). I think toward the end, the reliability might have went down, and I don't personally think their reputation followed them to Seagate when they were absorbed. I don't care for Seagate personally. I normally go with WD drives, but don't have the brand loyalty as I did with back in the 90's with Maxtor.
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One thing you could consider is using data compression on the data on your drive to possibly extend it's usefulness a bit further before looking for another drive.
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