News Report Claims Hitachi, Seagate HDDs Most Likely to Fail

[Admin]

A new report from Secure Data Recovery suggests that a potentially bad hard drive will fail in just under three years. This is most likely to occur with Hitachi and Seagate drives.

Report Claims Hitachi, Seagate HDDs Most Likely to Fail : Read more

 

[korekan]

maybe its current batch or else but what i experience is diff

toshiba will easily broken past 1 year.
but seagate/ hitachi can survive up to 10 years.
WD around 3-5 years.

 

[leclod]

Did I get this right, if my hdd is bad it might fail in the first 3 years.
For real, you call this information ?

 

[ComputePronto]

It's interesting how different the results are compared to Backblaze's drive failure statistics. Maybe most of the drives received by Secure Data Recovery were not used in a data center scenario? That seems possible, but I really have no idea. It might just not be a very good study.

For Backblaze, the Seagate and Toshiba drives very consistently had higher failure rates than Western Digital drives. This study shows instead that Toshiba does better than Western Digital.

maybe its current batch or else but what i experience is diff

toshiba will easily broken past 1 year.
but seagate/ hitachi can survive up to 10 years.
WD around 3-5 years.

In my experience, I can say that Samsung and Toshiba hard drives are almost definitely garbage. I am yet to have a Seagate drive fail. (Of course, I only own two Seagate drives. Not really a great example.)

Unfortunately, a 12 TB Western Digital drive that I've had in a 10-drive NAS for less than a year already seems to be showing signs of failure. This might actually the first WD drive failure I've ever had.

Did I get this right, if my hdd is bad it might fail in the first 3 years.
For real, you call this information ?

I think they mean that models or brands of drives known to be prone to failure will likely only survive for 3 years. If you're lucky and they somehow last longer than the 3 year threshold, their lifespans may be significantly longer.

None of that applies if your drive is already showing signs of failure. At that point, you should consider the drive unusable and just buy a replacement.

 

[USAFRet]

In my experience, I can say that Samsung and Toshiba hard drives are almost definitely garbage. I am yet to have a Seagate drive fail. (Of course, I only own two Seagate drives. Not really a great example.)

Of my recent (10 years) drive fails:

HDD:
2x Seagate (both several years old)
1x Toshiba (7 months old)
1x WD (5 weeks old)

SSD:
1x SanDisk SSD (3 years)
Of the dozen or so Samsung SSD - 0

 

[bluvg]

Maxtor! When did they gather these stats, 2010?

 

[Amdlova]

Seagate is owner of Maxtor, Maxtor is owner of quantum. See how bad it is? For last Seagate own the Samsung hard drive division = pure nightmare.
WD onw toshiba and Hitachi/toshiba.

You cannot run of bad hard drivers

 

[Arbie]

Most of my HDDs are external, and most of them are in USB enclosures. They get very light use, as cold storage.

All failures of those have been Seagates. Of three 3TBs, all failed. Then several 5TBs. Recently a 16TB.

I finally began shucking drives that failed, and found that the problem was often the USB interface! The bare drive was still OK.

Speculation: Seagate uses or allows use of very low-grade caps or other components in these USB circuits, and they're prone to aging or susceptible to power source spikes.

 

[einheriar]

The story does not talk about the class of hard disk used. are they budget drives, cheaper consumer drives, expensive consumer drives, fast gaming drives, budget NAS drives, more expensive class NAS drives, or enterprise drives??????
which speed class are they using 5400 rpm, 7200 rpm or 10000 rpm?
What was their load? 2½" or 3 ½"??

 

[jrharbort]

If a drive is defective, it'll fail earlier? Who knew?

That aside, the report is flawed. It only mentions which brands fail the earliest and worst, but not total failure counts. This same site has posted articles showing Hitachi/HGST drives are among the most reliable on the market. Not many fail, but when they do, it's early and quite dramatic. That's all this article points out.

That, and Seagate apparently remains as horrible as ever.

 

[newtechldtech]

it seems that older harddisks were better quality ... I have several old HDD from 1995's and still running fine.

 

[USAFRet]

it seems that older harddisks were better quality ... I have several old HDD from 1995's and still running fine.

Think about the data density on the same size platter.

1GB vs 10TB.

 

[dimar]

I mostly use WD Purple, Seagate SkyHawk as well as the NAS variants. After assembling all sorts of cheap and very expensive computers for the last few decades and seeing how the hard-drives live and die, I came to conclusion that it all depends on your luck. Just have a monitoring tool such as CrystalDiskInfo email you when a problem starts to arise. One day a Seagate drive will fail, another day a WD drive will fail. I've used a small amount of Toshiba and Hitachi drives and they all lived beyond 5 years, which I sold after their use.

 

[Dr3ams]

I have two 1TB Seagate drives and one 1TB Western Digital drive. I use them for backup. I've had them for about 8 years and I never had any problems with them.

 

[Amdlova]

Best hard drive is a single disk low rpm live forever.

 

[GenericUser]

I've been having nothing but problems with more modern (post 2015) WD hard drives. I've had several develop problems or die on me within the last couple years, some that were only a couple months old, some with low usage. Older ones I've had are still chugging along fine though with no errors.

Though granted, like every other "I've owned X brand(s) and have had Y failures", my experiences are purely anecdotal and hardly represent anything conclusive, but it still doesn't inspire confidence in WD for me moving forward.

 

[Jamesjoonya]

Modern WD drives are garbage. At least the MyPassport external USB drives. My 5 TB drive had issues just over a year from buying it and I had to recover 4.5 TB of data from it. I got on their website to ask them for a refund or replacement and never even heard back. I tried posting a review on their website about the drive and it legit would not let me. Meanwhile their MyPassports are rated at like 3.0 with almost half of the reviews being 1 star for early drive failure. Their solution is to have you mail in the drive, sit on it for weeks and then mail you back some refurbished one. So much for the 3 year warranty they claim.

Despite what this article states I highly suggest you steer clear from WD. They are cheap Chinese garbage these days and their support is utterly lacking.

 

[slash3]

Maxtor! When did they gather these stats, 2010?

Even worse, since Maxtor ceased to exist as its own brand back in 2006. Sixteen years ago.

Standard 3.5" HDDs seem to die early or keep trucking for a decade - the bathtub curve of reliability is very real, and is why you should always have a proper backup, even with new storage.

My anecdotal personal experience over dozens of drives across the years has tended to be pretty good with most brands, but I have had a few that gave up the ghost early and unexpectedly - one Seagate (around four months in) and one Hitachi (around one month in). That Hitachi was purchased alongside several others of the same model and make, which have now racked up over 100,000 power on hours without a single issue. Hell, I even ran an infamous IBM 75GXP "Deathstar" drive and it worked great.

I will say that external/USB HDDs tend to pop up a lot around failure conversations (outside of these larger data sets), which makes sense. The combination of vibration/movement and thermally restrictive casing puts them at additional risk.

Keep your drives cool, use a good power supply and they'll spin away happily for a long time.

 

[KyaraM]

I currently use three Seagate drives and one external from WD. Can't complain. Been using Seagate ever since my first self-configured PC now, and never seen any of them fail. One of the ones in use is an Ironwolf NAS and has been running since 2020 for 24h/day, seven days a week. No issues. The other two are Barracudas, one being 6 years now, approaching 7. Still perfect condition. The WD drive is older than 3 years, too, and powers on when my PC does.

 

[Jamesjoonya]

I currently use three Seagate drives and one external from WD. Can't complain. Been using Seagate ever since my first self-configured PC now, and never seen any of them fail. One of the ones in use is an Ironwolf NAS and has been running since 2020 for 24h/day, seven days a week. No issues. The other two are Barracudas, one being 6 years now, approaching 7. Still perfect condition. The WD drive is older than 3 years, too, and powers on when my PC does.

If you bought a WD external now you'd likely have it fail within a year or two. Sometimes even just mere months. Go to their website and check out the reviews for their external drives. Half of the reviews are one stars. They recently started cheaply producing them I believe. I have an old WD external that's still going strong. But my 5 TB MyPassport turned into a problem drive only 13 months after buying it. They won't even respond to my support inquiry despite the fact of claiming a 3 year warranty on their drives.

 

[USAFRet]

Go to their website and check out the reviews for their external drives. Half of the reviews are one stars.

The only ones you see are the fails.
The vast majority of users who have no problem, don't make reviews of "Great device!"

 

[Jamesjoonya]

The only ones you see are the fails.
The vast majority of users who have no problem, don't make reviews of "Great device!"

Incorrect. A lot of fools review their drive days into owning it before even allowing it to fail, also. Like " Got my drive yesterday, works great. Five stars!". But yes people will surely review when their drive fails. But the bad reviews are also in response to WD doing nothing to help them when their drive does fail. Major trend in those negative reviews.

If there aren't many failures why won't WD clear up those bad reviews by correcting their failed hardware problem for those customers?

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Yeah, it’s pretty much a crapshoot, and the way you use it. The harder you beat on a hard drive the faster it’s going to die.

 

[waltc3]

it seems that older harddisks were better quality ... I have several old HDD from 1995's and still running fine.

Yes, I'm running several HDD's right now--most brought up from earlier builds! Most are Seagates. My last drive failure was so long ago I cannot remember the brand of drive that failed! It may have been a Maxtor, circa 2008, IIRC. I think some of these tests leave out a lot of pertinent info, as other posters in the thread have mentioned. Then there's average cabinet temp to consider, etc. The info here leaves out so much, it's not possible to make a judgment.

 

[Sluggotg]

I have been remarkably lucky with the Dozens and Dozens of hard drive I have purchased over the past 30+ years. No DOAs, One failute in about 2 weeks and several hard drives that I wore out after years of constant use.
A Note on hard drives. I remember buying a 500MB hard drive from Costco for $500, (Maxtor). I couldn't believe it was only a Buck a Meg, Years later I bought a 500GB Drive and it was about $250. 1,000 time larger for half the price!