Seagate drives are like crows - if you don't get along with one, they tell their friends and harass you. For any given user, either Seagate drives are perfectly fine and last ages no matter what is done to them, or every single one they touch will self destruct with the lightest use for no reason. That it really does seem to vary by user rather than specific models or production runs is the baffling part.

There really was a time where Seagate drives were trash. It hasn't been that way for quite a while now, but that reputation remains.

That's the thing I am trying to point out. Like if you get lucky some of their models appear near perfect and seem to keep lasting forever.

But I've experienced the other side of the coin where I had a hard hardware failure on a hdd, the warranty and replacement process was insanely painful. Then when I finally got a replacement it also had a failure. Same painful replacement process. The 3rd one wasn't even the same model but at least it worked.

One of the sister drives of the first one had a hardware failure shortly afterwards. I didn't even bother going through the RMA process and just migrated to Samsungs.