Can you teach us how to "look at S.M.A.R.T from time to time"?

Rich, my finding is that Seagate does no longer test the drives or use inferior Chinese parts to cut cost and be competitive, nothing else can justify their inferiority.
Shipping may be a secondary problem.

The problem is that we, as consumers, are cheap. ;)
You can still buy retail drives in retail packaging, or you can save money by buying drives intended for OEMs, sold in bulk by the manufacturer, then re-sold individually. In that case packaging for shipping is the responsibility of the seller, so you depend on what that seller normally provides, at the same time hoping the person doing the packing isn't having a bad day & does a reasonable job.

"Having said that, there was also a manufacturing problem with the number of platters of the bigger drives, but I think many manufacturers experienced the same problem."

There are & have been decent models as well as drives prone to high failure rates, pretty much regardless the manufacturer. No matter what you're buying, it normally helps to research, read reviews, ratings etc. before you buy, & especially with hard drives, try to make sure you're buying the right product to meet your needs. They currently make hard drives for all sorts of purposes -- not just for sticking in your PC -- & buying the wrong one [e.g. for a NAS] just because it's on sale can cause headaches.

For some reason, I have had bad luck with the Seagates. Everyone I had failed(3 or so), albeit after a few years, but the WD running along side have made it years and years.
I'm loving the 2 500gb Samsung SSD's I have.

I currently have four Seagate drives that are worthless and none of them are over 6 months old. They were all bought in retail packaging. Three of them were purchased at the same time at Best Buy and the other from Walmart. None of them lasted more than 2 weeks, but I am too busy to mess with returning them. I just know not to buy any more of them. I was trying to replace a failing OEM WD drive.

Oh, I forgot one thing...S.M.A.R.T data on all four says they are fine but you can't reliably store data on them.

Sam,
What you say is most probably true, and my comment is just from observation and analysis, after reading through many reviews. just noticed that the majority of the DOAs and immediate failures seemed to be the OEM, bulk drives. And Mike's comment is very astute, that each vendor packages them differently. For a while, it seemed that things coming from Newegg were coming in paper bags (not really), while the same item sold by Amazon had better packaging. Again, just my observation of the two vendors.

"It was very costly to recover with professional help old fotos etc. and only partially successful. The family now considers following my very old advice for the three best computer helpers: backups, backups and backups."

I think it worthwhile to add that backups, depending on what they store, should ideally be stored as redundantly as possible. An external drive provides some protection if the PC/laptop itself is damaged/fails, but an optical disc [DVD/BD] should also survive water damage, or better yet, can easily be stored off premises. Stuff like photos can also be stored in the cloud [as photos or part of an encrypted archive], taking advantage of redundant drives in protected [& also redundant] data centers.

Without installing it etc, i assume it created a new folder called "Program files (x86)32".
Instead of putting it in either "Program files" or "Program files (x86).

But that is cause of his virtual HD, problem does not exist on normal installs.

"C:\Program Files (x86)" (x86) for 32bit instructions vs. "C:\Program Files" and 64bit instructions.
Microsoft has categorized Program data in 32bit and 64bit. If a program like today is 32bit (which it is) can still work on a 64bit OS and perform low level tasks with certain exceptions. Karl is not adept with 32bit vs. 64bit, neither with the Windows OS.

program files(x86)32

I have seen this map in a virtual Windows7-64 also in a real Windows7-64

The map's "Program Files" and "Program Files(86)" are protected by Windows.
The map "program files(x86)32" is unusual and also NOT protected by Windows.

If a user has no administrator rights, a program is not allowed to write in the map "Program Files"
Most of the time a user has not a problem with this, because the user has a administrator-rights.

I have installed several times Windows, also for users with normal standard rights.
These person's are not allowed to install any program.
And if they use a program, which writes data in de program-map, they become a error.
Therefore they always have to type the password for Windows Mail.

If it is neccescary I install a program in "Prog_For_Everyboy".
Then the protection of Windows does not work and the program works also.
Most of the time this is done for games.

"GOTD should re-consider such false commentaries, because it’s not fair to bash developers in such cynical manner, including but not limited to country of origin."

I politely disagree...
Besides the practical limitations -- it would require paid staff to research every comment -- you're talking about what would often amount to censoring opinions... NOT a good thing.

Besides, no matter what you read, where, it doesn't hurt in the least to practice critical reading. We're used to sales ads, wondrous claims that could hardly be true, but the same sort of inaccuracies are often present in anything from blogs to articles to books.

"i have a samsung sdd and you dont show temp"

SSD temp values are generally just a placeholder -- whatever value the SSD maker chooses to use, it never varies. With no moving parts, if it were to get hot enough to start failing, so too would the rest of the electronics on the PC or laptops main or motherboard.

lmao are you trying to read an ssd temp??? an ssd is NOT a HDD. you dont need this software it's not for ssd.

"Interpreting diagnostic data often relies on experience, S.M.A.R.T information other than temperature is not something many of us have experience in analysing."

There's also some variance between drive manufacturers regarding what some of the data reported actually means, making it even harder. Enter Backblaze, an on-line backup service maintaining "nearly 40,000 hard drives and over 100,000,000 GB of data stored for customers". As a community service they publish data that would be likely impossible to acquire elsewhere.

Here are the five S.M.A.R.T. metrics or numbers they say to pay attention to: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/

Thanks mike, a really interesting and informative link as an aid to analysing the data presented by today's download and similar programs.

"A company without name and address"
Really? Click on "Homepage" above and go to contacts (http://altrixsoft.com/en/contacts/):

Address: Ryabikova bul., 35-24, Irkutsk, 664043, Russia

The "unusual and wrong location" 'Programs x86' is the standard install location for 32bit programs in Vista/7/8 64bit, even you can't see it in a german version of the Windows Explorer but in Total Commander etc. you will.

Küstenwache,

Karl indicated directory was 'Program Files (x86)32' The 32 is wrong!! If you use a 64 bit version of windows, all 32 bit apps should be located in 'Program Files (x86)', 64 bit apps are located in 'Program Files'! Please read carefully before you are too quick to comment!! Most of the issues commented on here, are due to people not reading the readme.txt, description and or website info.

Yes indeed, under contacts there is a rudimentary address, but what I think Karl is looking for, is an impressum located under company like you can find it e.g. at ashampoo.com (german and enlish site).

The usual installation folder for 32bit programs is Program Files (x86) respectively Programme (x86) without any *32*. My experience with Karl is, that he knows what he is writing about.

I tested the recently gaotd Pro version of this app and I was quite disappointed, not to compare with Hard Disk Sentinel Pro (another giveaway). So I uninstalled via reboot (Shadow Defender - gaotd).

Have a nice day at the german coast.