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It's not surprising for a HDD to fail after 4 years. Average lifespan is 3 to 4, so yours was just OK. What I don't know is why you stopped using the other 5. HDDs and batteries always fail, it's just a fact of life. Having them in an array means your data is safe and you just replace the failed unit.
Edit: My post was not meant to say that Seagates are better than brands; just that they are not worse. As I said above, all drives will fail and I was just a bit lucky to have mine fail latter than usual.
Mircea
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I have had a similar experience with Seagate drives. went through a couple before I bailed on them. My only working Seagate SSD is external, not heavily used. Have Acer SSD, Helix SSD, Sandisk SSD. I have a draw full of old drives SATA USB, USB adapters, a portable USB 3.5 floppy disk drive,....
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I keep saying I try hard to leave my personal bias out of it, but I've personally experienced so many failures, and keep hearing the same from so many people, I can't come up with a better conclusion that Seagate drives are just disproportionately SO much worse, I've sworn them off even if they were half the price of any other competitor. I was even given a system with multiple Seagate drives in it that were either already dead, or proved to be unreliable.
I've said this before here in the lounge, right now, all the Seagate drives I've ever owned are dead - not a single exception. Of all the WD drives I own, there's maybe one or two if I start looking hard enough in the oldest pile; of all the drives I no longer use, it's not because they died, it's because they're now so small they're no longer worth using. In each case, on the day I decided to stop using a drive, it was still spinning and I could still read data off of it. I wish I could say I'm exaggerating, but I have the pile of drives to prove it if someone wanted to pick them all up and start examining them one by one.
Seagate must have some good drives, otherwise how could they be so consistently bad, and yet the company remain in business. They must have some big, BIG government contracts that keeps them afloat. Which by itself isn't very reassuring, but that's another story...
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It could be that their commercial drives are reasonable.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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The consumer drives I see on Amazon are comparable in price/capacity with their competitors.
How different can "commercial" drives be? Are they so much more expensive to produce they couldn't compete (use those for the consumer market)? How do others manage, then?
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I don't know. I was just spitballing. I'm not even sure if they have a commercial line, though I remember back in the day their scsi drives used to cost a mint.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Well, WD has different "color" drives to identify their intended use...green/blue being consumer, then I know there's red, gold, black and I think I saw some purple. RAID, NAS, 24/7, whatever purposes. I never looked into the details.
For years now I just purchased their external drives (the "My Book" series), then take them out of the enclosure if that's not how I want to use them. A few years ago those had the green labels, but lately they've been blue.
So I only buy the "cheap" drives, yet they outlive the "equivalent" consumer Seagate drives...that's all I know and that's all I can say. My own observations speak for themselves so that's what I'm sticking with. 
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cool, thanks!
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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In the '90s, IBM released its DeskStar series (aka DeathStar). Thinking that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM", I bought two for my computer. Both failed irrecoverably within months.
This was not an isolated incident (see the nickname above).
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Cassandra - always right, never beleived 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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There is intelligent life on Earth, but I'm just visiting.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Have you ever noticed how all the things we use to detect intelligent life are pointed away from the Earth?
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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We've already given up on intelligence on earth!
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Close, +/- 2,000,000,000 years.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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I read that NASA detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Only an organic life form can produce methane. I'd say that's a pretty solid indication that Mars once had some form of life. What else would cause methane to exist in the Martian atmosphere?
I believe there is abundant life throughout the entire universe. How much of that life could be considered intelligent? Only a tiny fraction of that life is intelligent IMO. I say that because when we scan the stars for radio signals from other life forms, we find nothing. It's awfully quiet out there.
When you think about the tiny percentage of intelligent life out there, consider how many of those life forms have built a civilization. If they have created a civilization, are they listening to the skies just like us? How long would a typical civilization last? If there are extraterrestrials listening for radio signals, they won't be able to receive any radio signals from Earth if they're located any more than 70 or so light-years away. Here on Earth, 99.9% of all species have gone extinct. Modern man has only existed for 150,000 years, which is a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. How long will we last? How long will our civilization last? That's even less than the blink of an eye when we look back at the 3.7-4.3 billion years that Earth has existed.
As for our radio transmissions on Earth, who would be listening for our radio signals within 70 or so light years? To put that in perspective, the Milky Way galaxy is about 1,000 light-years thick. The diameter is 100 times that distance.
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James Webb telescope (I got to see it before it went into space) has detected stars 10 billion light years from earth. That makes space really, really big with lots and lots of stars. Given those numbers, it seems quite likely that intelligence can be found. However, as Enrico Fermi put it in a brief quote "Where is everybody?" The Fermi paradox "is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence."
At 10 billion light years away, how do we know that source of light still exists?
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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jmaida wrote: James Webb telescope (I got to see it before it went into space) has detected stars 10 billion light years from earth.
You actually saw the telescope in person? Wow, that would be incredible.
I understand that the most distant object observed by the James Webb telescope is 13.5 billion light-years from Earth. Estimates vary, but it's theorized that the Big Bang occurred closer to 14 billion years ago. That's amazing. To be able to see back 13.5 billion years is absolutely astounding. In terms of the size, and age of the universe, we can only theorize about the known universe. We can't observe anything outside the known universe, so there's no way to know what exists beyond that. Here's an interesting article detailing James Webb's distant observation: James Webb Space Telescope spots the most distant galaxy ever seen (image) | Space[^]
I don't understand how we're able to detect even more distant objects. I think it has something to do with the Doppler effect and the red shift in light from the distant object. Even so, the speed of causality is limited to the speed of light. If an object is detected at 33 billion light-years from Earth, that makes absolutely no sense to me. According to a Google search, the AI result states the following:
According to current data, the most distant object detected by the James Webb Space Telescope is a galaxy named "JADES-GS-z14-0", which is estimated to be around 33.8 billion light-years away, observed as it was just 290 million years after the Big Bang, making it one of the earliest galaxies ever seen. The ability to detect an object that is 33 billion light-years away has something to do with the notion that space isn't linear. It's a mystery to me as to how or why that can be. We know next to nothing about our universe and how it works. Even things like the understanding of turbulence and friction are unsolved mysteries in science. Then we have quantum mechanics and special relativity. We can't reconcile the two. I've done some studying about these two areas of physics, and the only thing I realized is that I feel like I'm mentally retarded. If you ever feel overconfident about your intelligence and knowledge, just do some research on special relativity and quantum mechanics. It'll make you feel so dumb.
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jmaida wrote: However, as Enrico Fermi put it in a brief quote "Where is everybody?"
The implicit assumption in that statement is that there is some way to get from there to here and they have it. That ignores the substantial evidence that we have that it is not possible.
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Oxy-nitrogen atmospheres like Earth's are inherently unstable without life as we know it - the oxygen would combine with almost anything and be flushed from the atmosphere in a geologically short time. We can conceivably also detect technological civilizations that produce large amounts of electromagnetic radiation. What about the intelligent non-technological life? The Greeks and Romans were just as intelligent as modern humans, but their civilization could not be detected at interstellar ranges. How many civilizations are trapped at that level?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: We can conceivably also detect technological civilizations that produce large amounts of electromagnetic radiation.
The other issue is that producing large amounts of electromagnetic radiation may simply be a passing phase. Already, a lot of our media is streamed over copper wire or fibre optic cable so TV and radio is declining or reducing in power to become more local. In addition, more transmissions are now directed, meaning we are going quiet. Other technological civilizations may follow the same path and hence be barely detectable.
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For broadcasting, it depends a lot on the selected technology. DAB radio is designed for not having some huge main transmitters on high mountain tops, with maybe 100 kW transmitted power (as it was in the days of FM), but rather a large number of small transmitters creating a moderate signal strength 'blanket' over the land. When we (Norway, that is) replaced FM with DAB, the required transmission power for the same coverage fell to 10%, measured per channel (and the sound quality of each channel was significantly improved). One important argument for switching to DAB was to reduce the electricity bill.
A partial reason for this reduction: If the signal from an FM transmitter is so weak that there is a lot of hiss and other noise in the received sound, that energy is wasted when you have to switch to another transmitter providing a strong enough signal. With DAB, two transmitters, each providing a too low signal, may be combined into a signal that is strong enough for problem free reception. If you put up a new transmitter, it doesn't need to provide the full power signal itself, if there are other, weak signals in the area, but only the power needed to lift the sum of the signals to the required level.
We use very similar technology for digital TV broadcasts (DVB), with the same power savings and same ease of installing new transmitters to improve signal strength in an established network.
The other major saving is in frequencies: Each block of 12-15 radio channels or 8-12 (or more) TV channels requires a single frequency for covering the entire nation.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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I replaced it with a SATA SSD and spent the next couple of days rebuilding the data from backups. (there was some permanent data loss and a lesson learned) In short, consider me jaded...I'll never buy another Seagate drive.