In reply to a post by Banger:

Just had a Seagate 7200.12 500gb develop 44 bad sectors after 2 years.

You get a 3 year warranty with these HDDs.

I've had 2 (of 12) of these HDDs replaced without quibble.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

In reply to a post by Banger:

Just had a Seagate 7200.12 500gb develop 44 bad sectors after 2 years.

You get a 3 year warranty with these HDDs.

I've had 2 (of 12) of these HDDs replaced without quibble.

How did you manage that? I dont have a Seatools code because the drive passes smart diagnostics. Did you send back to the retailer?

got 2x ocz agility 3 in raid 0

pumps out over 1000 mb/s

i use it for gaming and occasional movie dl / unrar / encode

i backup both my os on my vertex2e and my raid 0 to an external usb using acronis true image home

have tried intel rst also on my z68 mobo but i was not that impressed with transfer rates

Well I have just been on to Seagate tech support and they said they will swap my drive for a re-certified drive. Is this a refurbished drive as I may be better off seeing how long it lasts as the warranty is til Aug 2013.

Sounds like a refurbed drive Tim which I wouldn't touch.

Personally, I find it's luck of the draw, just like with new drives. I've got 2 500Gb refurb Seagate units that are around 4.5 years old, running in a non-essential capacity and they're just fine.

Interesting. Having said that I have performed a low level format on the offending drive so probably recertified my own drive for now. Although the Google labs study on drives that have bad sectors doesn't give them much of a probability of survival beyond 60 days.

In reply to a post by Banger:

I was looking at the Hitachi GST site and it already says part of WD.

i know, sad really, oh well at least Seagate did not buy up Hitachi GST. the problem is that now we are in the same stage as graphics card and CPUs, just two manufactures.

Now using the Hitachi as a boot drive as it's faster than the seagates both burst speed and average read speed.