Recently data recovery service around the nation has been flooded with Seagate drives! Basically all shapes and sizes with a staggering failing rate, some estimates at 25% annually including fancy thin 7mm drives with 2 platters and 4 heads and 2TB of capacity.
More than a year ago we published an article about the Seagate business model investigating the very first hard disk drive maker to enter now dying data recovery market. Will Seagate try, similar to what Apple has done, to lockout third party data recovery service providers by making their drives “irrecoverable”?!
Seagate Data Recovery
While we have seen reports of holding on to the drives for months and in some cases even losing the drive Seagate Data Recovery generally advertises with low prices.
After famous firmware freeze issues on previous series the latest Seagate drives have locked ROM, locked terminal and complicated lid, while industry standard tools cannot be used for HSA replacement. All these obstacles are making data stored on Seagate drives harder to recover! If you have Western Digital or HGST which is also the Western Digital brand or Toshiba, will on those drives data be easier to recover? According to analysis, yes! Not exactly easier, but likely.
Do we say only Seagate can recover data and other data recovery companies cannot do it? No. Seagate uses the very same technology to recover data as everyone else. They sell you a drive which is so bad (not just locked) that every one in four will likely fail within the first year of operation. About a year ago Seagate was facing lawsuit over 3TB DM drives who failed at staggering rate!
What about other makers? Are they also bad?
Current advances in low-cost, high-capacity magnetic disk drives fighting NAND Flash based storage devices have been among the key factors in establishing modern society. High-volume, consumer-grade disk drives have become such a successful product that their deployments range from home computers and appliances to large-scale server farms. About 15 years ago, it was estimated that over 90% of all new information produced was stored on hard disk drives. So hard disk drives are not generally bad, some models are! Backlaze showed many times that HGST Deskstar series have the lowest failure rate.It should not be a surprise, these days you can get a replacement drive (if under warranty) if you ask a statement from your data recovery provider about the work being done. Almost any provider!
Think twice next time you are buying a hard disk drive!
Don’t buy Seagate?
