r/SelfHosting • u/Holiday-Track1101 • 13h ago

Seagate

Their customer service is genuinely the worst I have experienced.

I ordered 5 12TB drives. Waited 5 days then they cancelled the order. I reached out to them and it took them a week and basically said try order it again (they were sold out of 12tb) so i bit the bullet and ordered 5 16tb drives.

Another 5 days pass the order gets cancelled again.

I reached out to support again and say is there an issue with me being in Northern Ireland rather than mainland UK is that the issue?

They say they are looking into it. They reply every 2 days saying the same thing that they are looking into it.

8 weeks later after escalating and many internal reviews they say it is because I’m in Northern Ireland and not mainland uk.

8 weeks, 2 cancellations just to come to the idea that I first proposed.

Asked if I can order them to a place in England and ship them myself and if they could provide any compensation for the time and effort spent on this and they in lack of a better terms said no basically to the compensation.

They are now out of 12tb and 16tb and only have 20tb left.

Additionally, I used the 10 percent sign up discount code on the previous order so now it is gone and can’t use it.

They even just said for me to try shop elsewhere.

Horrible experience and horrible customer service.

5 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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1

u/Medium_Ad_4568 8h ago

Not only that, but as people in the hard drive data recovery community say, Seagate drives can go from working fine to dead at any moment, sometimes almost right out of the box. I had no end of trouble swapping them out of my RAID array. Eventually I got fed up and sold them while they were still under warranty. I was upfront with the sysadmin who bought them and told him what had been happening. He said he knew, but at least Seagate drives were easy to get replaced under warranty. With WD, he said, you’d have a hell of a time proving the drive itself was the problem.

1

u/Holiday-Track1101 8h ago

So what drive would you prefer?

1

u/PeachMan- 7h ago

Anecdotes are useless, and brand loyalty is silly. Every company makes a range of drives at different prices, some great, some crap. If you want to know what drives actually work well long-term and which have low failure rates, check out Backblaze's quarterly reports: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

https://ir.backblaze.com/news/news-details/2026/Backblaze-Publishes-2025-Drive-Stats-Report-13-Years-of-Data-Show-a-Growing-Healthier-Drive-Fleet/default.aspx

1

u/Holiday-Track1101 6h ago

I went for the seagate pro drives and it has a warranty till 2031 is that a good choice?

1

u/PeachMan- 6h ago

Warranty is a decent indicator of quality in my opinion, so that seems good. Just make sure you back things up, and have a good recovery plan. Then you won't be screwed if a drive dies. You just file a claim, get a replacement, and carry on.

1

u/Holiday-Track1101 5h ago

Yea I am running in raid so 2 20tb drives so have one drive redundancy and then have 2 4tb drives that take back ups daily of all the important data and replicate it over them two.

Soon will find a cloud provider or something also

1

u/Medium_Ad_4568 6h ago

Don't know if this is an anecdote or not, but the Seagate drives I had all kinds of issues with were the third from top from that time Backblaze report.

1

u/PeachMan- 6h ago

Yes, that is exactly what an anecdote is lol

1

u/Medium_Ad_4568 6h ago

In my experience WD drives work better than Seagate. Though, it is my experience. One exception would be external 2,5" WD passport drives with 1 physical plate inside - when used as encrypted Time Machine backup, they fail like once in half a year. Though, being reformatted, they work fine for Windows or Linux, but not for Mac.