Had the same experience and opinion for years, they do fine on Backblaze's drive stats but don't know that I'll ever super trust them just 'cus.

That said, the current home server has a mix of drives from different manufacturers including seagate to hopefully mitigate the chances that more than one fails at a time.

Did you buy consumer Barracuda?

I currently have an 8 year old Seagate external 4TB drive. Should I be concerned?

I had the opposite experience. My Seagates have been running for over a decade now. The one time I went with Western Digital, both drives crapped out in a few years.

Funny because I have a box of Seagate consumer drives recovered from systems going to recycling that just won't quit. And my experience with WD drives is the same as your experience with Seagate.

Edit: now that I think about it, my WD experience is from many years ago. But the Seagate drives I have are not new either.

HP servers have more fans!

These drives aren't for people who care how much they cost, they're for people who have a server with 16 drive bays and need to double the amount of storage they had in them.

(Enterprise gear is neat: it doesn't matter what it costs, someone will pay whatever you ask because someone somewhere desperately needs to replace 16tb drives with 32tb ones.)

Fleebay? Yup, me too!

30 to 32 platters. You can write a file on the edge and watch it as it speeds back to the future!

I had 3 drives from seagate (including 1 enterprise) that died or got file-corruption issues when I gave up and switched to SSDs entirely...

I've had a Samsung SSD die on me, I've had many WD drives die on me (also the last drive I've had die was a WD drive), I've had many Seagate drives die on me.

Buy enough drives, have them for a long enough time, and they will die.

Yeah, same. I switched to seagate after 3 WD drives failed in less then 3 years. Never had problems since.

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh..check your backups I guess?

This isn't unique to computing.

Just about all of the products and technology we see are the results of generations of innovations and improvements.

Look at the automobile, for example. It's really shaped my view of the significance of new industries; we could be stuck with them for the rest of human history.

That's how most technology is:

• combustion engines - early 1900s, earlier if you count steam engines
• missiles - 13th century China, gunpowder was much earlier
• wind energy - windmills appeared in the 9th century, potentially as early as the 4th

Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.