We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
So how many more stories of these drives being absolute garbage do we all have?
Of all the drives I've ever owned. From Hitachi, Maxxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and others...this is the only one I've had that died. Apparently this is a trend with these particular drives?
This one is currently a paperweight
Just to add, I personally also have a really high failure rate on the SMR variant of the 8TB barracuda. 3/8 failed over 2,5y which is 37,5%.
While knocking on wood, I've had really good experiences with the 10 and 20TB Exos drives. These are younger but none have failed after extended use.
I've got a 16TB Iron Wolf Pro (which was listed as an Exos on Amazon but that's another issue). And apart from the noise, which is to be expected as higher capacity is intended for servers so can't blame them too much for that, and so far it's doing ok. This 3TB White Label Barracuda is the only drive I've had die in 20 years. I still think I've got some old IDE Maxxtor drives which still work.