DFW Computer Integration

We specialize in Data Recovery

But we would prefer to prevent you needing that service

Since 2003 I have owned and operated my own data recovery (and computer forensics) business.  As I have been telling people this entire time, when it comes to hard drives with catastrophic failure, I see more catastrophic data loss with Seagate drives than any other brand.  Period. That continues to be true today.

In February 2016 it was announced that Seagate was the target of a class action lawsuit for excessively high failure rates of their hard drives.  But the story does not end there.  According to BackBlaze a cloud backup company that we both use and resell, the failure rate for Seagate drives of all kinds can be as high as 200%.  “Wait just a darned minute“, you might be saying right about now.  “How is it possible to have more than 100% failure rate?” And that would be a good question. The way the industry factors hard drive failures is like this.  If a hard drive fails in the first year, that is considered a 100% failure.  If it’s replacement as well fails in the first year, that is 200%, etc. Think about this for a minute. Seagate’s drives regularly fail in the first year.  With all your critical data backed up on one of these (or worse yet, you have no backup and it’s your primary data drive) it takes all this precious data straight to Hell in the first year.  Then there is a high level of likelihood a replacement will repeat the process in the same amount of time.  That should be very frightening. And if this wasn’t enough reason to avoid this company, there is a more recent class action lawsuit against the beleaguered storage company.  They are now embroiled in another class action alleging securities fraud.

So just say “no” to Seagate drives of any kind.

We only use and install 2 brands of SSD drives.

• Samsung
• Hynix

These are both excellent brands with good track records. But you still want a backup. Always. Fortunately if you bought a brand name external drive, you already know whether you’re in trouble or not.  But the identity of your internal hard drives (or external non-brand name drives) may be a mystery to you. How do you know if your hard drive is a Seagate? Simple. This works for internal and external drives as well.

For a Windows computer

1. Click the Start button (or Search window in Windows 8, 8.1 and 10) and type in Device.
2. Select Device Manager.
3. Click the arrow next to Disk drives.
4. Each drive will be identified with the manufacturer’s name.

For a Mac:

1. Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
2. Hard Drives are identified with the corporate abbreviations
3. WDC = Western Digital
4. ST = Seagate
5. HT = Hitachi or IBM

So what do you do if you have a Seagate drive?

We can clone it to a much faster SSD before it craters.  And I would highly recommend that.  Waiting until it fails is a very bad (and much more expensive) idea.  Cloning is much less expensive than data recovery.