Do all hard drives STINK now?

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louloomis

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Feb 6, 2009
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Hi. I just bought the following hard drive:

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Previously, I had never bought anything other than Seagate drives, and never had a problem. But, in light of the bad reviews I've seen of Seagate drives and because the hard drive referenced above was the highest rated drive on the seller's site (possibly the biggest online pc hardware retailer, btw), I bought it.

I installed it in my machine and when I booted up, the drive sounded like a car being crushed in a junkyard.

Needless to say, I'm very very unhappy.

I know a lot of people have had DOA drives, etc. (especially recently), but what is going on these days?

I do need to buy another hard drive and I'm a bit lost on what to get now.

Can someone speak to this point and guide me?

Thanks.
LouLoomis


 
Every manufacturer will turn-out the occasional duff drive, it's just bad luck if you happen to get it. WD are probably the best of the bunch at the moment (Disclaimer: this could easily change!); just return it and see what the replacement is like.
 
They don't all stink now. WD is up there in quality currently, and Seagate is good, though not quite where they used to be. In either case, the odds of DOA are quite small. Keep in mind that if someone receives a DOA, they are more likely to review it than someone who gets a perfect drive. Because of this, there will appear to be more DOAs based on the reviews than there really are.
 
I understand what you are saying....and what you are saying about more reviewers w/DOA's skewing the stats...

But my drive was DOA, so that just substantiates (and adds to) the growing number of unsatisfied owners...and rightly so.

-LouLoomis
 
I've had DOA drives from both WD and Seagate. It happens. To date, I've never had a drive fail once it got through the initial week, at least not until it was several years old. One opinion/conclusion that I've had concerning many of the recent failures is that as drives have grown in size, the possibility of failure has also grown. When dealing with 1tb and larger drives, there's just so many things that can go wrong that its almost a wonder that as many of them live at all. The only solution to this is a lot more testing, and testing under a lot more conditions than what was previously done.

Seagate obviously blew it with their most recent drives. The drives may have tested fine in the lab, but once they got into the real world, weaknesses started killing them like flies. My main issue with Seagate is not that the drives failed, but that Seagate took the attitude of denial for so long. If they had stopped making the affected series and issued a recall sooner, their reputation would have survived in much better condition. As it is, there has been a loss of trust, which then causes both potential buyers and repeat buyers to shy away from them and buy something else. And such failures, of course, end up reflecting on the idustry as a whole.
 
I have a similar problem with a newly bought WD caviar black and I want to ask few questions..
1. What does DOA stand for? Dead on arrival?!!!
2. Are there any free programs that I can use to test and benchmark my hard drives?
3. Is it generally acceptable to RMA the drive only because its loud? Does being loud mean the drive will sooner or later fial? I have a loud 6-years old 40GB WD drive and its still working perfectly.
Thanks in advance.
 
1) Yes, it stands for dead on arrival
2) HDtune will give a good basic idea. IOmeter is free too, but it requires a blank drive that you don't mind wiping for the test.
3) I would say no, unless there is something clearly and obviously wrong about it. Loud seeks (the clicking noise) are normal, and very much design dependent. Some drives are louder than others, and it has nothing to do with their failure rate.
 
Thanks. I'll google HDtune to dll it.
One more question: My new drive produces more than clicking noise, noise that is difficult for me to describe..Let's say low pitched..vibrational..Is there something wrong about that?
 

WD and other vendors have diagnostic programs to test their drives. You can download them for free.
Once installed, you can activate S.M.A.R.T in the bios, and collect drive operating statistics. Display these statistice with a program like speedfan.
 
Those drives as well as the 6401AALS drives are good. No manufacturer is 100% perfect. The drive could have been damaged in shipping as well.

I'm not saying all drivers are bad, but...

Quick UPS Delivery

I have to add that I have had good luck with UPS, Fedex, and the new Fedex to USPS switcharou.
 
drive failure is also dependent on the molex/hdd power connectors... most of them don't make full contact after initial connect/disconnect and cause drive failures because the 5 volt or 12 volt supply failed to supply steady voltage. I have seen many WD drives fail and slam the heads off the carrier limits due to an intermittent power connector...
 
I unplug and plug the drives a fair amount as well, mainly when cleaning the dust out or when installing new video cards, etc. Learned long ago that the plugs have to be seated well or the machine just won't work. Never lost a drive from it, though.
 


i know what you mean. it almost doesn't make sense.

but the average drive size keeps moving up. in April 2007, it was about 320 GB. in October 2008, it was about 640 GB.

Jeez, what a scoop that would be for Tom's Hardware or Anandtech if they could get access to drive stats of organizations that use a lot of drives, like Google or the NSA.

for maximum reliability, i think it's important to buy a drive that's coming off a production line that's been in existence for at least 6 months, so that the team has had chance to implement engineering change orders, etc.

there's sort of a "sweet spot" where the price per gigabyte is the lowest, the drives get good reviews, and the drive has been out for a while.

the one silver lining i can see to Seagate's recent mistakes is that they will try harder & maybe lower their prices. as long as, when the etailers are trying to flush the bad drives out of their system/ pipeline, i don't get one of them !
 
Overall, drives are pretty good these days. They still can and will fail though.

I've been following hard drives for over 20 years. One after another the big players that made known high quality drives have dropped out of the consumer market because of price competition. If brandA made a better drive than brandB but it sold for 20% more, they could not sell them. So the lowest price brand runs the show, and sets the standard for quality. I've owned very good drives from Micropolis, Control Data, Fujitsu, and IBM. They're all out of the market now.

I went into a new company, a small company, just over 7 years ago. We bought 4 new computers, with mirrored drives. Within 4 years we had replaced every drive in every machine, but due to mirroring we did not lose any data nor any significant downtime. At the end of that 4 years we bought new computers, which are now 3.5 years old and we have not had a drive fail in any of those machines. The computer I'm typing on right now has 3 year old drives in it, running fine, but I'm about to replace the entire machine. If I was going to keep it, I would probably replace the drives anyway.

I've been reading the reviews on newegg. The reviews for the recent drives are all pretty good, with high approval percentages. But I noted that for every brand there are a few people that get DOA drives, and they all complain about the quality of that particular brand. So a person buys brandA, gets a DOA, and says its a crappy brand and he should have bought brandB. Then another person buys brandB, gets a DOA, and says brandB is crappy and he should have bought brandA. These are humorous to read, because you can get a bad drive from any brand.

My current machine has mirrored drives. My new machine will have a single drive but I'm going to use a NAS for my main storage, and it will have mirrored drives.
 
Hi. I'm the original poster.

I want to say that I appreciate all the feedback thus far.

In terms of this quote from user "cadder":

"I've been reading the reviews on newegg. The reviews for the recent drives are all pretty good, with high approval percentages."

I disagree completely with your interpretation of the approval stats on NewEgg. To me, a 70% or 90% success rate (or less!) is HORRIBLE.

Think of it:

Does 1 out of every 10 cars that you drive instantly kill you by driving you into a wall?
Does 1 out of every 10 meals poison you?

No.

Why should we the consumer settle for decrepit hard drive garbage, then? We shouldn't!

I understand that these are mechanical devices and that there will be manufacturing errors...as always. But the percentage to me is so high that these manufacturers should be aggressively dogged for their incompetence. Remember, we as a society, now rely on PC's. Yes, we can mirror our drives (and do) and store tons of stuff off-site, but if we are willing to settle for garbage, we're going to end up in big trouble down the road.

Yes, I'm a raving madman! I own a PC, don't I? :))

LouLoomis
 


When looking over reviews on Newegg, or any other retailer for that matter, you should remember that most people who buy hard drives never write a review. They buy a hard drive, or some other hardware, it works, and they get on with their lives. I've only had a couple hard drives that were DOA, and Newegg exchanged them without question. I imagine that most people do the same. They install the hard drive, it works, and they never think about writing a review. If everyone did write a review, you would probably find that less than 1 in 1,000 had any problems.

That may not seem like a lot compared to cars that have problems or meals that poison you, but then again, have you ever considered how many recalls there are on cars, and how many foods have had problems that warranted their recall because they made people sick? You may have heard of the peanut problems in the past few weeks, or the tomato problems a year or so ago. When everything is taken as a whole, I think the problems we have with computer hardware are few in number, and they don't kill anyone.
 
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