Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia

[nforce4max]

Personally newer drives don't last as long as I would like and don't trust them all that much either. I got old vintage Conner drives that are still working. A friend of mine has a old Quantum Fireball that has 43k hours use and still running. As for my segate I am not fond of the spin retry count that I am getting. WD drives are good but they need to be maintained as well the user has to keep them cool.

 

[ctbmike]

. Hardware RAID is really unreliable, it's a Sysadmins nightmare. The . problem is that the errors are handled internally in the controller without you/the system knowing it. Once the errors starts to get visible it usually is too late to do anything about it. Most Sysadmins say stay away from RAID5.

 

[mikem_90]

The big point is that hard drives are very much like cars. One run of them can be really good, another run, made the next year, can be complete crap.

With so many factors going into construction, so many companies making parts for them, formulas changing, specifications off by a couple microns here and there, you don't really know how reliable one drive is verus another till long term studies of these are done. Anything else is a few data points out of how many million? Even then, by the time its known, those models are gone and discontinued, and new unknown ones have taken their place.

Its all a big crapshoot. Seagate luckilly is losing mostly on the poorly written firmware. That is theoretically an easy fix (though they keep messing it up). I've unbricked several 7200.11 SD15 drives myself.

Drives with mechanical issues are much harder to deal with. Especially when manufacturers are not always keen on saying when they decided to do a re-design.

Go with a brand with a good reputation, good warranty period. But backup your data! Use Raid Mirroring for speedy recovery. Plan for the worst, hope for the best!

 

[lamorpa]

[citation][nom]TeraMedia[/nom]I have had 4 of 4 WD 400 GB RE drives fail, all after the 3-year warranty.I have 2 WD 5000YS...[/citation]
Can you get back to us when you have used 100X this number of drives, so your results can be of any use whatsoever?

 

[itpro]

With over 30 years in the industry and thousands of hard drives installed, I can firmly attest that all drives fail. Every manufacturer has put out drives that fail prematurely and others that are rock solid. I have thrown away vast numbers of IBM/Hitachi drives over the years, but am glad to hear that perhaps they are doing better now. Overall, I prefer WD drives for price, reliability and performance, but out of their newer drives I see a higher failure rate from their "Green" drives than the "Black" ones. The only ones that I avoid are Seagate for the reasons mentioned.

 

[jackshaftoe]

> The Seagate 7200.11 series was horrible.

Really? I have 6 of them in a RAID array and a spare sitting on a shelf. It's been 3 years, still haven't had to open that spare... WD on the other hand - 2 velociraptors, both failed within 6 months and had to be replaced by warranty. 500GB Passport lasted me 9 months. Never buying WD again.

 

[pcman911]

Many of the good companies have gone by the wayside and with that the rock solid reliability. Anyone remember Conner (bought by Seagate),Maxtor (bought by Western Digital), and Quantum. I still have some old computers around and the Conner 420MB and 800MB hard drives still run great. I too have many Maxtor 20-40GB that run XP great on P3-P4 systems. On old servers the Quantum SCSI drives seem to never quit. I have a RAID 5 of 4 Quantum 4.3GB UltraWide SCSI in an old server and still running perfect. Unlike this story, i have had many Hitachi "Deathstars" die and lose data. My changes with Seagate and WD are 50/50 and I do not touch Samsung "spinning death". Most of the Samsungs were DOA or within 6 months.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]Quotidian[/nom]yes, very nice...all my hard drives are seagate...:s[/citation]

SO are mine. But I have 2 in a 7 yeard old machine that are first gen Seagate SATA 1.5 and 2 second gen SATA 3.0 Seagates.

Of course as long as you avoid the specific HDDs shown here you will be fine.

Weird thing is at work I get a lot of laptops with failing HDDs and most are either WD or Toshiba. Have had 1 or two Seagates/Hitachis. that were either dropped or had liquid dropped on them

 

[blurr91]

Seagate drive is crap and the customer service is crap. I bought a retail Seagate drive for the 5 year warranty. The drive failed after 2.5 years. I call Seagate and the CSR said the drive was OEM. I said I bought it from a store, with Seagate packaging and matching serial numbers on the box. He pretty much called me a liar and the box was a forgery. I said I won't buy Seagate drives again if this is how you treat customers. He said that is your choice. I have never dealt with such a rude CSR before.

 

[youssef 2010]

[citation][nom]Quotidian[/nom]yes, very nice...all my hard drives are seagate...:s[/citation]

sadly I have one, too

 

[cobra5000]

Ive had several, different sized WD HD's since 2003 and not one has ever failed me.

 

[jlehew]

This is crazy to evaluate hard drive manufacturers this way. This does not mean anything because it is not a worldwide view of failures compared to worldwide failures. It is city data compared to Worldwide data and their are factors that can greatly skew the numbers.

Each manufacturer has good drives and bad ones as also noted in the comments on this article about good 7200.10 and the potentially bad 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives from Seagate. I extensively review the evaluations from NewEgg customers on each specific drive model to make my buying decisions.

For instance, I used to buy Seagate exclusively but their reliability on the newer, high capacity drives which I need has slipped so I'm buying WD 1GB and Samsung 2GB drives. Next year I'll re-evaluate the drives and will pick the most reliable model at that time.

The market share graph didn't indicate if it was Worldwide or just for Russia and it may need to be based on the city Storelab is in because that city may buy many more Seagate drives than anything else skewing the numbers.

The Hitachi drives may be more reliable as indicated or they could have been mostly enterprise class drives which are designed to last longer. Without a breakdown of the type of 500GB drive it is impossible to know. It could be Hitachi drive owners don't typically repair their drives but Seagate owners typically do.

What would be helpful is an analysis of which features of a drive make it more reliable. For instance, which type of bearings really make a difference? And how does drive temperature, head type, and types of actuators affect longevity?

John

 

[Guest]

I knew it. A 80GB Hitachi laptop drive is still going after 5 years and a 3 year-old 300GB WD internal still works after dropping it from 1 meter, while a brand new 750GB Seagate Barracuda failed after 9 months. WD/Hitachi FTW.

 

[ZakTheEvil]

I never had major problems with Seagate until 7200.11. Almost all my 7200.11s have been RMAd by now, and I think one of the replaced 1.5TB 7200.11s is acting up again. I'm crossing my fingers for 7200.12. On the other hand, I had really bad luck with WD, nearly all my Raptors and external WD drives have been RMA'd or just outright DOA. Majority of my HDs are still Seagate with a couple of Velociraptors in the mix. I never trusted Maxtor and IBM drives so I'm staying away from Hitachi.

 

[masterasia]

I'm probably never going back to Seagate. They suck hard. Almost every dead hard drive I've replaced in the past 3-4 years have been a Seagate. I fix and build computers on the side and have had no problems using WD and the new Samsung drives. The older Samsungs sucked hard too.

My boss however, still thinks Seagate is king and buys all Seagates for your SANs. We've had 3 major failures in the past 3 years.

 

[Guest]

My dear users of HDD!

I have Seagate and WD HDD for years, and they never failed. The main reason is they are 24/365 days on.

In five years of using each HDD i have not more then 100 cold restart on them and these is the main reasons that HDD not failed.

As somebody has written that he has old 4 GB HDD drives in server which never failed, and works for years up to now. So as we all know that servers work 24/365 on, so the HDD also works 24/365 on and has in the time of working a very small numbers of cold restarts.

The main reason that PC parts failed is cold restarts. My PC is 24/365 on and never fails. Some of them are from 1996 and is still working.

With cold restart all electronic and mechanical parts suffers from thermal shock, and these is the main reason for failure.

If PC components works 24/365 and has a less cold starts they will longer.

Some peoples recommends to switch off a PC if it is not used for 1 hour. These is very stupid recommendation if you count thermal shock on electrical and mechanical components!

So my PC is always on. The youngest one is 3 years old up to now, and has no one failure!

 

[zybch]

I'm sick to death of WD. I recently sent 7 (SEVEN) in for replacement at the same time, and they were ALL under 18 months old.
I now use Samsung and lately Hitachi and so far no issues (other than a sightly higher price for the hitachi ones), and I'll never touch WD or seagate again.

 

[youssef 2010]

My experience with HDDs is as follows

Being a computer user for 11 years,the first drive I owned was a western Digital Caviar 6 GB that suffered from bad sectors after 2 years (due to viruses not a mechanical defect) then I owned two 40 GB WD drives which are still going till this day (ever since I bought them in 2003 & 2004).Then I owned one 160GB drive in 2005 (still going).Then After two years, I bought a 500 GB WD Blue (Still going).In 2008, I bought a laptop that had a 200GB toshiba hard drive with an unbelievably slow spindle speed (4200rpm) but it's still going to this day.In the same year,I bought a 1TB WD green in (still going) Finally, I bought one 160 GB IDE WD drive for my old computer (pre-SATA) in 2010 and a 1TB 7200.12 Segate for my sister's computer (CC38).

I also assembled three builds for friends Which had a 360 GB Segate HDD, and the other two had a 1TB WD Green drive. All three are still working fine (thank god).Also, one of my friends has an older comnputer built back in 2006 with a 250GB WD still going to this day.

I've heard many stories from others about HDD failures. But, I exert extreme caution when dealing with my HDDs except for the first one as I didn't know back the what an HDD is.

 

[youssef 2010]

[citation][nom]lamorpa[/nom]Please send your amusing anecdotes to Reader's Digest. Anyone's personal experiences with a couple of hard drives are absolutely statistically insignificant. Read this article and the studies by EMC and Google.[/citation]

Its the insignificant personal experiences that make a company good or bad

 

[Guest]

with 20 years working as a hardware tech and field engineer all manufacturers drives fail, currently seagate is the bad boy but I remember WD, Hitachi etc at one time or another being just as bad. currently I find 90% of the failed drives I deal with are samsung's and seagate and personally I've had 7 replacement samsungs spinrites in 2 years in a 4 drive NAS. The only course of action is a backup copy of anything you value and RAID of any level is not a backup!

 

[rslayerr]

well...like some have said...all hdd fail....laptop is worst...im a computer builder,tech etc..i have buy and created alot of computer and hdd(15 years+)and the number one cause for failure,its moving the computer-laptop when its running..i have seen enormus(sp?) fail in usb external drive cause of this..people are moving it AROUND when its on...when you open a hdd..and plug it,run it.move it in your hand..you FEEL the restriction,you understand why it fail when moved..at speed of 7200rpm,there is momentum going from the spinnig disk etc(sry,,dont know another way to explain),so the "head" etc is getting a shock when its move...temperature is a nightmare too...dust...laptop,from my experience..are the worst..and i know why now!..but anyways..from all these years,i have test all hdd company and from my experience..the WD are some of the best..when you using it wisely (no moving around..drop-shock-temperature etc...)but..number one rule,,its always keep backup on another drive...that you keep unplug till you need to backup...its mechanical..like a car engine..moving piece is sure to fail one day or another..backup...and check temp-and shock-move dont do..
my 2 cent
rslayerr

 

[volkov956]

Interesting in the last 10 years of Hard Drive Failures my Tech business has to replace for customers over 75% overal are Hitachi that accounts for 50% 2.5" Laptop Drives

 

[rslayerr]

laptop yup..same thing here as a computer "repairer",,laptop..its incredible the number of time they crash..but 1 thing i have noticed...heat is a big issus with laptop...

 

[cletus_slackjawd]

A relevant and under reported article: HDD reliabilty!!! Yes, there are many of us who care about keeping our data safe with speed and capacity as a somewhat distant second to the actual safety of the data.
All you usually see see speed tests. Enjoyed the article and agree with it's findings. Too many corners being cut these days in manufacturing. Too many of these low cost, high capacity drives fail right out of the box or within the first 3 months.

 

[JohnMD1022]

As I've said for several years... Seagate drives are JUNK.

We once had 9 bad Seagate drives in our shop at one time. They represent far and away the majority of the HD problems we have seen. These range from DOA (inexcusable) to premature failure (often as short a time period as 2-4 months).

That 5 year warranty may sound fine on paper, but what good is it when the replacement is the same junk (and, in fact, the replacemrnt will be a refurbished drive, e.g., some else's failed drive)?