And hopefully the 5 year warranty means they actually have a chance of lasting longer than 1/60000 second as they brick themselves..

I had a 33% failure rate with my drives. Seagate refused to proactively exchange drives, even when they knew, for 100% sure, than my drives would fail. They made me wait until the drives actually failed before they exchanged them.

Just been with a client all day, their year old Dell desktop (forgot the model - had a vodka tonic whoops!) has had a major hard drive failure. All data lost, only backed up to August (don't ask). Apparently the Barracuda supplied with these models had a dodgy firmware, and unless flashed, tend to conflict with hibernation (somehow) and go dead. As in dead as a dodo. Then you wish you had flashed.

Great, so a whole generation of Barracudas tend to stop working. If this scenario is true (I can only vouch for some of the story) then .. well .. maybe I won't be as raptorous about the new drives from Seagate as I used to be. Reliability, after all, is pretty central to a purchase decision.

Guess I'll see..

So how long until we get shoddy firmware that bricks the drive?

A week? OK

Having had five (six maybe???) Seagate HDD failures in the last two years, I think I'll avoid this turkey.

The last Seagate to fail me was a refurbished replacement of a refurbished replacement which replaced the original drive. This time the Seagate site didn't even recognize the serial number and tech help was basically silent. Naturally they wouldn't replace the drive this time around.

Not me brother, I'm moving to Western Digital for new drives.

It's announcements and stories like this that we'll look back on and laugh about in a few years time.

Actually, I do already. Mechanical drives are now an evolutionary dead-end.

So, just when it should be 7200.13, they decide to go for the so-last-century marketing department whimsical fashion for names instead of version numbers?

Now that seems optimistic to me

Don't get me wrong, I'd like technology to live forever, but in reality it doesn't

I'd love to sell this to a client....

Me. Heres your new 2Tb Drive, for data storage

Customer. How long do you think it will last

Me. We will both be dead before the hardware

Customer. How will you make money with this

Me. Like I said, we will both be dead, so it doesn't really matter.

Anon in case I decide to start telling my clients to buy some

Yep, that was a few months ago when they tried to quietly announce that (I think) quite a few of their 500GB and 1TB disks had some very dodgy firmware on them. After a few days wait they produced some CD images with new firmware on. Flashed the two 500GB in my Mac and no problem. The side effect of all this is that my next drives will be WD.

"its rotational and linear vibration characteristics make it unsuitable for enterprise use" ???

Does this have meaning in engineering terms, that someone could explain? Or is it marketing bafflegab, intended to persuade "enterprise" customers to pay twice as much for a different model with extra gortleflab? Have had good luck so far with Barracuda 7200.n drives in "small" servers (more accurately, large capacity ones where speed was a lesser consideration than Terabyte count).

@AC with failing drives - I wonder if any of the other drive manufacturers would have been any better? I doubt it. IBM (pre-Hitachi) definitely not, from experience with the "click of death" in their "Deathstar" range. A batch of bad components can happen to any of them, and you'd need Google-scale usage of drives to accumulate meaningful statstics on who is better. And even then, past performance may not be a good guide to future performance.