Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia

[Guest]

Storelab, a Russian player in data recovery, recently released a long-term study comparing hard drives from a number of different vendors. The controversial report offers interesting data and provides a snapshot of HDD reliability and defect reasons.

Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia : Read more

 

[cmcghee358]

Why post this study if, at every opportunity, you tell us that the data is so limited we aren't to use it as guidance on the quality of the listed drives?

Seems a waste of time.

 

[mitch074]

@cmcghee358: because if they didn't put it at least once per page, polemics could be started by any website linking to one page without it said "THG says Seagate drives are crap!".

Which is true, but only according to a limited, but still relevant (and one of the few available) study.

But, it correlates pretty well to what I experienced: the only failed Hitachi drives I got (and I got a bunch of them) were due to:
- manufacturing fault (and RMA worked well and fast) creating faulty sectors,
- old age (10 years) creating faulty sectors.
Never once, in the two dozen Hitachi (and IBM) drives I had to manage, was a failure related to hardware fault - even dropping a (not running) 2001 drive from one meter height on solid concrete failed to damage it.

I tried Maxtor, Toshiba, and WD drives, and most of these eventually developed unrecoverable hardware faults leading to massive data losses; Hitachi drives caused, at worst, a few files to be lost due to irrecoverable sectors (many times, I got SMART warnings before the data became impossible to rebuild).

I got some Samsung drives recently; they're cheap, and they added shock resistance capabilities in the 2.5" versions, I'll see if they do better than the Hitachi ones (I do backups on Hitachi drives still). If this report is any indication, Samsung notebook drives in RAID 1 array for a desktop machine should allow for reliable operation - the one I have carried around for 2 years in my fanny pack seems sturdy enough, too.

 

[jj463rd]

Oddly enough I had to get rid of some old relics (I.B.M. XT's) from the mid 1980's last year.All 5 of them had hard drives which still worked and the machines were still fully functional.Sad I would have liked to have kept them but there was too much clutter in my house.

 

[jsowoc]

I'm not sure if my comment is valid, but because Seagate has a lot of market share, its drives are considered "reliable" by many. If I paid a premium for the drive, it's because I have (had?) valuable data on it, and am willing to pay for data recovery.

Could this be part of the reason why Seagate has more than its fair share of drives sent in?

 

[Quotidian]

yes, very nice...all my hard drives are seagate...:s

 

[obrut]

I have replaced all my Seagate drives with WDs during the last year. My personal study for the last 20 years show that throughout this period only the WD drives show long enough lifespan and reliability. Recently (last 2-3 years) Seagate took quality out of the equation. Currently they are only interested in market share and not the fair name their own brand.
Again, this is personal study - for example I have used only one Hitachi drive during this period, so I can't make statistics on the base of one.

 

[liquidsnake718]

Well I live in the Philippines and im not happy to say that almost 2 years ago I bought a WD Passport and it died on me after 3 months. WD or the retailor replaced it for me via the local distributor. However I lost all of my data that was backed up because prior to that my significantly older Seagate serial IDE 80gb with THAT very same data died on me!

Yeah WD gave me a slightly upgraded HD with 40 more GB but all that info and files that were lost was irreplacable. The problem, was a faulty pin, or the reader that looks like a raptors nail! The device would just click and click and my HDD wouldnt read.

 

[Guest]

I'm not sure why but I don't like Seagate too Most of my hard drives are Hitachi and I've got 2 failures - one after a power surge and another which was some bad sectors, but the drive was 60GB and it was around 3 years old. I have one Seagate drive and it works fine, I've been using it for around 3 years now on a storage server.
I know a lot of people who had problems with that particular "CC Fly", maybe that is why I don't like Seagate. Nowadays I'm turning to WD, I really want to see how are they doing.
Btw I have 3-4 40GB Maxtors that are still very much alive and working for about 9 years now

 

[dragonsqrrl]

I remember reading about some problems with the Seagate 7200.11 series, along with a lot of bad ratings on Newegg.

 

[Azriel4444]

The Seagate 7200.11 series was horrible. I avoid them no matter how cheap they are on sale. 7200.12 are way more dependable.

 

[cmcghee358]

I would argue that 7200.12 is too new to decern if it's reliable yet.

 

[irh_1974]

In Communist Russia, hard drive reliability looks at you

 

[thuan]

try "seagate 7200.12 CC34 firmware reallocated sector count on" on google. I have two 500GB drives from Seagate that have the same problem. The one I have with my desktop at home I sold after a few hundred bad sector, the one I have at work I am still using and it has 4574 bad sectors, still going but very slow sometimes. It triggered Seatools of course, but I'm too busy to bring the damn thing to warranty without having another spare, so backing up everyday is now what I do.

IMO 7200.12 with CC34 firmware is not that great either. FYII have another Seagate 7200.12 CC35 firmware and it has been ok, so it might be another firmware fiasco that Seagate doesn't want to acknowledge after the last generation "Seagate" case.

 

[cmcghee358]

^ Case in point. This also is only a testimony of 2 drives. Except the fact that he suggests there is more information contained in google about that specific firmware. Regardless, the 7200.12 is too new to really say if it's reliable or not. Basically, YMMV

 

[thuan]

Yeah it might be fixed with later firmware, still I think the attitude that they took by quietly ignore it is wrong, even though there're quite a number of hits on gg to suggest that there is something wrong with this firmware revision. As I said, it might just be another "Seagate" scandal that Seagate decided to keep under the rug to save face.

 

[b2man]

Reguardless of the HD manufacutrer, I think all hard drives suffer from one common problem that can either shorten their life dramatically or give you a HD that lasts well over 3 years. And that is the packaging and shipping to your home. The "dropping" of the package at your door. The "tossing" around of the box in the truck. My personal belief is that most hard drives already have a lot of wear and tear before you even install them in your computer. Just my 2 cents.

 

[mitch074]

@b2man: that's why, ever since HDDs became movable goods (i.e.smaller than a suitcase), they had the capability to have their heads parked. The second 'revolution' is liquid/fluid bearing for the axes... Which reduces/prevents damage from relative motion caused by a shock on the casing.

I was rather astonished to see the ratings on recent drives: when parked, up to 1000G!

 

[Guest]

FBI should raid Google and make their hard drive analysis public. It's embarrassing how they post their most common hard drive failures but hide the brands involved. Ad revenue really does help to keep their mouth shut.

 

[mikewong]

I turned to WD a few year ago, from Seagate and I'm still happy with them.
One thing for sure: backup, backup and backup!

 

[superhighperf]

this is totally opposite of my experience with HDD. i have had 4 Hitachi drives and they all failed. i will never buy a Hitachi drive again. the price point on their new 7200 rpm 2TB drives is great but i got reamed by them too many times.

i did have a WD blue 640GB drive fail and got an advanced replacement. that is a great feature and i have bought several WD drives since then.

the longest running drive i have is an old Quantum Bigfoot from 98'. 5-1/4" 12GB monster that sounds like a vacuum cleaner when it spins up but it still works. not that i ever use it

 

[hannibal]

I bought a WD Passport and it died on me after 3 months.

Well The WD hards drives are ok, but the problem has been these external storage devices. They seems to run too hot in some environments. It correlates the problem said in this article with temperature and drive heads. If you can keep you WD cool enough they are realible drives!

 

[silky salamandr]

[citation][nom]obrut[/nom]I have replaced all my Seagate drives with WDs during the last year. My personal study for the last 20 years show that throughout this period only the WD drives show long enough lifespan and reliability. Recently (last 2-3 years) Seagate took quality out of the equation. Currently they are only interested in market share and not the fair name their own brand.Again, this is personal study - for example I have used only one Hitachi drive during this period, so I can't make statistics on the base of one.[/citation]

Same here. After RMA'ing a 7 month old Seagate 7200.11 I was done with them. The drive was used very lightly but just crapped out. I decided to try WD black 1tb drives and I love them(for now).

But the most important thing you readers should get from this is that ANY hard drive will fail. Its not if it will but when it will. With hard drives being so cheap, its honestly your fault that you would lose data. I dont run raid but I have all my important data across 3 of my 1tb wd drives and hava a 4 one sitting in an esata dock to back up all of them.

Backup and then make a backup of your backup and then you will NEVER lose data agian.

 

[g00ey]

I have had 4 drives from WD, 2 of them external and 2 of them internal. They were all from different production batches. Their storage capacity is in the 500GB - 1TB range. 3 of them failed beyond recovery within a year. I even tried freezing them but that didn't help me retrieve the lost data. So I quickly bought a Samsung Spinpoint and cloned the partitions from the only surviving drive and chucked it as well.
As far I'm concerned WD drives are as reliable as Pogo Stick on quick sand.

I have now built a raidz2 file server based on OpenSolaris consisting of 8 Samsung EcoGreen drives. I don't know how reliable they are but they can't be worse than Seagate or WD. At least thanks to ZFS I can afford to lose two drives without losing any vital data, giving me plenty of time to replace them and rebuild the storage pool. If I want to I can also have a few hot spares that kick in automatically as soon as a drive fails.

ZFS FTW

 

[neiroatopelcc]

I think hitachi is doing so well here because they're not selling directly to end users.
They deliver primarily to oems, and as a result their drives are found in raid boxes and other places, where you have raid and thus won't need to send in drives for recovery.
I have to say though, that of the 76 Hitachi drives we've had in use here from 2004 to 2009, only two had failed. In contrast, I've had 5 seagate 1tb drives fail between january and may 2009. Which is a lot, considering I only have 4 of those in use at any given time.