Never buying Seagate again
IMO, Seagate hadn't been wrong with the whole hybrid drive thing. Being able to store a whackton of data, while accelerating the most accessed stuff, was a great in-between HDD and full SSD.
The problem was that the amount of flash they put on the drive was so tiny that was barely enough to cache anything. And if you rarely rebooted, your OS would still take forever to reboot since it didn't get flagged for caching.
Worse still, their drives were so god damn unreliable as to be a pitiful joke. I literally went through 4 of them in a 6 month period. One new plus multiple replacements, and every single one failed in shockingly short order. Eventually I just gave up. And this is on top of all the various other seagate drives I had that all failed. Literally every single one. The most I got out of a drive was 2, possibly three years. By comparison, I have countless (Well not countless, but I can't be bothered to do so) WD drives that have been going for many years now and they're still going strong.
And my experiences have been echoed by pretty much every person I know.
So their overall strategy may have been bad. It may have been good. But it really doesn't matter because Seagate has managed to build such a solid reputation for unreliability that no one in their right mind would buy their stuff. I don't care if Seagate says it's drives can eject dollar bills every RPM. I still wouldn't buy them, cause it would still end up failing before I recouped the cost of the drive.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
