Photo: Matthieu Lamelot
Looks like Seagate is being dashed on the rocks by the worldwide financial gale as much as anyone else. In addition to cutting nearly 3000 jobs, they’re changing course by giving their CEO the boot.
Not only are sales down, but their flagship line of hard drives has been plagued with failures (including this bargain drive, which I urge you not to buy at the moment). And just lately the failures have been revealed to span not just the 1.5TB HDDs, but the perhaps more common 1TB ones. The failures after only a few months of use, described by the Inquirer as “a new self-bricking feature,” are actually not hardware-related. Faulty firmware just locks the thing up, and RMA centers are reporting 30-40% return rates, which probably means that at least half the drives are failing.
As with NVIDIA and probably every other hardware manufacturer, this sort of failure is not a reflection of the ability of the company to deliver a good product — I’m running my PC on a Seagate right now and have for a year and a half — but is rather an indication of a single poor batch of devices, which should be avoided no matter your opinion of the company. It happens to everybody at some time or another — except Intel.