Hi everyone,
I recently bought a Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB (model ST20000NT001-3MB101) drive and today I had to return the second replacement drive within just one week. I’ve got it from B&H and they’ve been very helpful as they replaced the first drive in 3 days and today I had to send back the second one. Both exhibited filesystem corruption early on, even after clean formats with different file systems (Btrfs and EXT4). Despite passing SMART tests initially, the latest drive quickly failed with group descriptor checksum errors, rendering it unusable.
I rely on these drives for important backups, and it's unacceptable to have to RMA two brand-new units in a row. At this price and with the "Pro" label, I expected enterprise-grade reliability — not drives that fail in under 200 hours.
I looked this drive on Amazon as well and actually Amazon warns that this item is frequently returned. On B&H some mentioned they ordered a batch and many of them were dead on arrival. I have other Seagate drives and they’ve been pretty good and this brand has been on the market forever.
The question is, what’s happening to Seagate? Is this series indeed so bad? I have the option to get a refund as well and I was thinking to get a 20TB Exos drive instead but this is just ridiculous at this point. How can I rely on a drive long term? Of course I could buy another backup drive but that’s insane!