During this week beginning August 13, 2012 I’ve seen four Seagate 2.5″ hard drives fail.
All of the drives except one are the 500gb size. The other one was a Seagate ST9640320AS 640gb 2.5″ . This is the first time I’ve ever come across a certain brand and size range fail in multiples all in a week. I will try to get the model numbers for you, but I believe they were all the Momentus model.
Momentus
Maybe it was a coincidence that I saw this many hard drive failures this week all belonging to Seagate. I don’t know but it doesn’t help me have confidence ordering Seagate drives in the future. Let’s get one thing straight, all hard drives fail period. It really doesn’t matter what brand it is, there is not a perfect hard drive out there.
Backing up your data is really important. There are so many different ways to back up, and some of them are completely free. Microsoft has what is called Skydrive. Skydrive is a free service that allows you to upload your important data into their cloud storage solution. They provide 25gb for free and it is relatively easy to use. You must sign up for a Windows Live ID to gain access to an account.
Google has a free service called Drive. It allows 5gb of storage for your important files. Google also has what is called Play. Play allows you to upload your music to Google for easy playback and music backup. It allows you to download a song you uploaded twice, which means you can retrieve a song should you need to.
More solutions are Crashplan, Dropbox, Amazon.com cloud storage, Apple ICloud, and Pogoplug teamed with an external USB hard drive.