I've been selling and doing DR on HDD for 20 years now, and frankly speaking, Seagate drives reliability isn't the best.
Numerous new technologies led to severe issues like : 5400.6/7200.4 platter dust issues killing heads the more they heat, the infamous LBA 0 fw issue on desktop drives, motor bearing seizure on 7200.10/12, lots of bad batchs on 7200.14 ST DM001/002/003, more than WD or even Hitachi. On SAS drives, the Cheetah 15K.x are not very reliable (replaced LOTS of ST3600057SS), but the Fujitsu and Hitachi are not very either.
Toshiba drives are not great either. The 2.5" MK series had an important return rate, more than the competitors. The MQ01ABD is better, but faces platters demagnetization that leads to bad sectors.
The 3.5" ACA drives are a Hitachi prod line that was "given" to Toshiba when WD acquired HGST. They are quite basically Hitachi drives with a Toshiba firmware.
Edit : and now DR on Seagate drives like the Rosewood family (like the ST1000LM035) is the absolute worst nighmare for any data recovery guy. Ultra brittle head stack, easy platter damage when shocked, self encrypted firmware and SMR. If those disks makes some motor noise or head clicking, we don't even bother to open them anymore.
Thanks for lots of valuable information, finally someone who has some data not just a story. Could you please share more? Any source on Toshiba ACA being made using HGST tech? What do you think about reliability of helium drives? On paper they should fare much better than air drives.
Numerous new technologies led to severe issues like : 5400.6/7200.4 platter dust issues killing heads the more they heat, the infamous LBA 0 fw issue on desktop drives, motor bearing seizure on 7200.10/12, lots of bad batchs on 7200.14 ST DM001/002/003, more than WD or even Hitachi. On SAS drives, the Cheetah 15K.x are not very reliable (replaced LOTS of ST3600057SS), but the Fujitsu and Hitachi are not very either.
Toshiba drives are not great either. The 2.5" MK series had an important return rate, more than the competitors. The MQ01ABD is better, but faces platters demagnetization that leads to bad sectors. The 3.5" ACA drives are a Hitachi prod line that was "given" to Toshiba when WD acquired HGST. They are quite basically Hitachi drives with a Toshiba firmware.
Edit : and now DR on Seagate drives like the Rosewood family (like the ST1000LM035) is the absolute worst nighmare for any data recovery guy. Ultra brittle head stack, easy platter damage when shocked, self encrypted firmware and SMR. If those disks makes some motor noise or head clicking, we don't even bother to open them anymore.