Read this if you have a Seagate External HDD

[Bharat Varma]

I guess I'm one of the fortunate ones. I can't remember when my last HDD failure was (I guess more than 15 years ago, TOUCHWOOD!!)

Thanks to the OP + others for sharing about HDD failures and (painful) recovery journey.

I'd like to add that for the last 7 years or so, I've been using an internal Seagate Archival 8TB HDD (in an external enclosure) as my master backup. Yes, it has SMR technology but I wanted large backup capacity. Sure, its a slow drive but considering its primary usage is for backup, I can start the incremental backup process and do other things. And this drive has had a fall of 2 feet from a table. So, I have 2 more exact backups on a number of smaller capacity drives (seagate + hitachi) that I've accumulated over the years. I wont go into my backup process as the OP clearly mentioned not to.

Backup processes are quite critical to all computer users today, so please add your inputs to the one I've just started here -

https://forum.jjmehta.com/index.php/topic,68400.0.html

[krishnanv]

I just had a Sandisk Extreme 500GB SSD fail on me.

While speaking to the recovery tech , he said easier to recover data from HDD than SSD.

Stellar data was able to recover my data from the crashed SSD. Very expensive proposition but had to  be done.

So anything can fail anytime, do have working backup strategy :-)

[Monster]

True, there are many statistics online which shows seagate HD's have much more failure but also to take it into account that they are more used earlier so higher percentage comes from there too. I use mostly WDs but because of this donor disk issue I always buy two HDs from the same batch so atleast I have a donor disk when it is required.