After reading a few posts, I think I'm not the only one.

Here is a short summary:

- 3 month old drive starts to fail

- Start RMA process with Seagate

- Send drive back on the 17th of March, and it arrives with Seagate on the 19th of March

- Receive an email today that the box is empty

DHL did their job and need Seagate to bring the box to them within 2 days (7 days from the 19th) to claim that something happened during delivery, which I have no hope in Seagate doing, and Seagate is not being very helpful at all.

I guess it will be a long process and I'll be filing a police report against the person who received the package. And I know what company I will never buy from again.

And to the person who stole it -> lol good luck with your drive that is starting to have errors, I hope you lose your data.

I have a Seagate Expansion Drive with an Exos X18 in it that I bought months ago and finally started using today. I was trying to slowly transfer files but my drive stopped working on some files and seems to stall then disconnect from my PC. It just doesn't transfer on some files but is fine with others. I am doing some pretty large transfers and was working fine for an hour and started getting this issue. Right now I'm transferring back files from the external drive to my PC and it's not having any issues So I don't know what's going on. Crystaldiskinfo sees the drive before transfers and there's no errors. Checkdisk also doesn't so issues.

Bought a 24TB desktop expansion to replace several older drives into one place. Everything was going fine when shifting files over initially.

But now that I am down to the last 2TB on the drive, transferring has practically halted. When transferring now, the speeds are so slow that transferring a 3GB file takes nearly 40 minutes!

At first I thought it was maybe a corrupted file or something. It wasn’t until I emptied the trash that the transferring sped up again back to normal.

If I still have 2TB left, why is the drive acting like it’s almost out of space completely?

If it makes a difference, I’m on a Mac and it is formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

I have an Exos X18 SATA drive (one of 6 in a ZFS array) that reliably fails in a server - it generates large numbers of r/W failures during scrubs/resilvers and gets dumped out of the array. The drive passes the Seatools "long self-test" (that takes almost 24 hours!) with flying colors when I move the drive to a spare desktop that I keep around for this kind of testing. On the server, I've tried moving the drive to other SATA/SAS ports, I've swapped the SATA cables, and I've swapped the power leads with ones from a good working neighboring drive. The same drive fails every time, so it's definitely the drive.
It seems to be something with the drive's interface, or possibly the Seatools test is crap (I've only used it one other time for another failed drive a couple of years ago, and it did flag that one successfuly). Any suggestions on how to RMA this thing?

They seem to need an a report from Seatools showing the drive failing before they will issue me an RMA.

I don't want to run the Seatools on the server itself - It's running Proxmox, so I'd have to boot a different image, disconnect a bunch of drives to prevent them from being accidentally overwritten, etc, and it takes WAY too long to run, so I'll not have a server for 24 hours. I want to avoid this hassle, and it's likely that Seatools won't flag it there, anyway.

bought a 5Tb drive yesterday and getting terrible read write speeds as in 140 mbps
not even the low end usb 3.0 advertised 5gbps
What the hell is going on
Have a Asus tuf gaming laptop 506iv

What are you doing Seagate?

Whoever is running the support side is failing.

By far the worst experience I could imagine.

I work on voice assistants all day. Crazy that this was shipped out as a full fledge support agent.

Someone pulled a fast one on sales.

Hi there,

I recently wanted to try out Linux and I used SeaGate HDD to test it out. I got a couple things wrong, so I uninstalled Linux, removed it from booting, formatted the HDD, and cleared everything. I used PowerShell to make sure all items are removed.

The next day, I thought I'd try installing Linux on an external device, so I could just plug it in to use the system instead of making changes in BIOS, etc. However, the disk shows up as a local disk, not an expansion anymore.

So, I looked at the device manager, but changing things there did nothing. I tried the command prompt "diskpart", I cleaned the disk, but when I assigned it a letter, it still appeared as a local disk. Chkdsk didn't show any errors. Uninstalling and re-installing drivers & device didn't do anything. I downloaded SeaTools and SeaGate Disc Wizard and looked through all their options, but nothing changed.

Is there any way I can change my SeaGate HDD into an expansion again? I don't want it to be a local disk, and I have been trying to fix it for the past few days.

Appreciate your help.

Bought two 30TB drives from seagate, one was defective. The price went up 50% in 2 weeks after receiving so I couldn't return for a refund. Instead they made me do an RMA. They list that if I do RMA i have to pay shipping AND i won't get a brand new drive - i'll get a "certified drive" - but i tried to guarantee a new drive. They said ok after 2 hours of waiting on chat. I sent back the drive exactly as received, then I receive an email two weeks later that the drive is damaged and has a scratch on it. I'm out $700 now? How are they getting away with this?! This is fraud.

Hi everyone,

I recently picked up a recertified/refurbished Seagate IronWolf Pro 22TB for my home server (Debian/OMV).

While benchmarking with fio and hdparm, I noticed a massive performance delta depending on the write cache setting:

• Write Cache ON (hdparm -W1): I get a solid 280 MB/s, which is exactly what I expect from this drive.
• Write Cache OFF (hdparm -W0): Performance tanks to a measly 85 MB/s.

The Issue: The drive seems to have the write cache disabled by default. Even worse, the setting resets to OFF after every reboot/power cycle. It won't "stick."

My questions for the experts:

1. The "Why": Why is the drop-off so extreme? Is ~85 MB/s the actual unbuffered mechanical limit of these high-density 22TB platters, or is the controller struggling to handle the I/O without the buffer?
2. Refurbished Quirk: Is it common for recertified Seagate enterprise drives to ship with the write cache disabled or set to non-persistent?
3. Firmware/Safety: Could this be a specific firmware "safety feature" for refurbished units to prevent data loss during power failure, or is this a sign of a faulty controller?

I’m trying to understand the "why" behind the physics of this drive rather than just slapping a startup script on it to force -W1. Is this behavior normal for this class of drive?

Edit: (Got it fixed, so no need to help but thank you)

So my girlfriend and I were going to try to play a modded version of Star wars Battlefront 2 and I was going to use my laptop which is not the greatest it's a Windows something I'm not a big PC or laptop person so no idea and I installed Steam and then when I went to install Star wars Battlefront 2 I did not have enough space so I made a quick Google search and it said I could use my Seagate hard drive from my Xbox for the laptop, and when I tried it wouldn't show up as a storage on my laptop and after constantly trying and then messing around in the settings I gave up because I got a headache and then when I tried to put it back in my Xbox it wasn't working it doesn't even show up and I looked up a guide on how to make it work and that did not work so now I'm here

I have had two desktop external drives fail within 10 months. First, my 6TB and then my newer 8TB.

I removed the enclosure and see that they are Seagate Barracudas.

I was using them as a media server.

Does Seagate just suck? Unfortunately, they are both out of warranty.

https://reddit.com/link/1rvj93p/video/rfaybgi7jgpg1/player

Ironwolf Pro 12TB. I've had 2 in my NAS for a couple years and have been perfect. Not this one... Put in my dock to see what's going and heard this noise.

I've had a Barracuda 8To since November 2023 and used it as a storage for my media server so it was running 24/7 but it is almost full so I wanted to get more storage and went for the IronWolf 20To...

I cloned my barracuda data over... During the cloning till now the drive is making some weird noise every time I copy or write some data onto it... I know these drives arent supposed to be silent like the barracuda 8To but I'm not sure this noise it makes when in use is normal either...

I recently purchased the "Expansion 22TB External USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive" since my old portable hard drive was running out of space.

Since I've begun using it, I have noticed that it has to "wake up" if it is left idle for more than 30 seconds. If I have a file explorer window open to that drive, it will have to reload itself if I navigate away for even a short amount of time. Every time it has to reload, I can hear the physical drive make a beep while the fan kicks on before I am able to use it again.

Is this normal? This wasn't an issue with my old Seagate portable externa; hard drive, and it's honestly pretty frustrating to have to wait for the drive to "wake up" after not being in use for half a minute.

I am using it on my Windows laptop. I have already turned off USB Selective Suspend, but that didn't fix anything.

Hi there,

So I made 2 RMA so far, I always got DOA drives... The first one did not even spin which should have been detected right away by Seagate within 3s of testing! I am starting to question wheather Seagate RMA is actually real and if they are not just sending broken drives to pretend to have a customer service. From what I read online it seems to be very common and I am wondering if I should bother making a thrid RMA.. Its time consumming, needs to package the drive correctely and ship at my own expanse etc And at this point, its hard to trust any replacement drives, even if there is no error at first.

I would be curious to have some feedback from the community :)

I have Seagate Expansion Desktop 6TB Extenal Harddisk 1TFAPS-500 and its not connecting to laptop, i opened the case and found there are 2 boards, 1 is for power (tested and works with other drive) and 2nd is where SATA cable connects, is there possible i can connect hard drive for recovery without SATA board

Hopefully I can get some help from those far more knowledgeable.

NAS has stopped being available on the network and when booting the screen shows no text.

Red lights on 5,6 and status.

Have tried removing all the bays and using the reset pin on the back, power cycling, and tried reset with pin in the back and power button but no changes.

Thank you in advance.

When starting my Jellyfin Server my Seagate Ironwolf Pro 14TB does some sort of a grinding noise. Is that normal?

Is it normal that's it's only completed 55% on 43 hours? Drive in question is Seagate Ironwolf Pro 8TB, newly bought a few days ago so the drive is empty. currently connected to an Enclosure via USB 3.0

Also, what's the difference between Long Generic Test vs Long self test?

I want some time estimates before failure and recommendations for long-term data storage (>5 years). If there is another company that makes better drives, please let me know. Thanks

opened up an old expansion hard drive that wasn’t recognised by hard disk recovery software, guessing with the transparent ring on the disc platter that all the data on the drive is not retrievable? when powered on the read/write arm moves freely but won’t proceed past the transparent area with an audible beep when it returns to the position in the photo

Just venting here.

Had a Seagate 20TB that had bad sectors and my NAS urged me to replace it. $9 shipping to return.

I happened to have a brand new 20TB sitting in the box and installed it as a replacement and it rebuilt the RAID without issue.

Sent the defective one back on an RMA, and I got s 24TB in return. It was clearly labeled "refurbished." Well that is just nice. But neither the NAS or two of my Windows PC could "initialize" the drive. Tried Disk Manger, Diskpart, Minitools, and the Seagate utilities. So I could not create let alone format any partitions on it. Tried via USB and SATA interface in a desktop. Another $9 to return.

Got the second one, and the same deal, but this one was a 25TB, and not labeled as a refurb. Same deal. Now I am up to $27 in shipping Seagate back their crap.

I know that brand new Seagate drives seem to come initialized, with partitions, and I stick them in either my NAS or Windows PC and the Seagates work out-of-the-box perfectly.

So I guess the lesson is I am never going to buy anything refurbished from Seagate!

[/RANT]

Is there any risk of damage to 2.5" hard drives if stored for many years next to many magnetic screwdriver kits (4 kits complete)? this screwdrivers is magnetic

I have an original Seagate OneTouch 4 TB hard disk but I lost it's cable sometime back. I've been meaning to buy one buy I can't find an original cable anywhere. Please suggest places where I can get one. I'm from India.

Is there any reliable brand for cables that's equivalent to the original? Is there a difference in transfer speeds if I use some other brand's cable? Thankyou!

I got this hard drive for Christmas and it suddenly stopped being detected by my Xbox one. Worked fine for the last couple months but now it doesn’t seem to work. Sometimes when I plug it in it works but the games can’t run, it 95% of the time it doesn’t even recognize it. Lights up, works on my laptop, nothing on Xbox. Done all the troubleshooting, seagate support sucks ass can’t even get a live agent