Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia

[Syndil]

Me, before clicking the link to read this article: "Hmm, I wonder how Hitachi and Samsung scored?"

Me, after reading article: "Not surprised at all."

 

[Guest]

Forgive me, but I find that most of this article is just a translation from the storelab.ru site - no summarization or additional analysis. Perhaps this should be in the "news" section?

 

[nebun]

hot bad for Hitachi, hope they keep it up...like they say the more popular a product is the less reliable it becomes (seagate and WD)

 

[Guest]

I had one 250gb wd die slowly (bad sectory increasing), rescued successfully and one 30gb (7 yrs or so) fail instantly, which required professional rescue.
Professional rescue process, fortunately went very smoothly and costed only €450.
After paying €450 i've instantly decided that none of my data will ever again reside on single hdd.
I've bought 2x1tb WD black (2x108€) for first and 2x2tb WD green (2x170€) for other server, both raid.
Notice how dual hdd's are MUCH cheaper option than professional recovery and/or lost data.

 

[fromage2323]

statistics are just statistics. there are always exceptions to the rule. i have a seagate 160gb thats been running strong since 2002.

 

[curtains]

Hmm, I've been building/repairing computers for a long time now (as a job), and I definitely think average lifespan is longer than 1.5years or 3.5years, what I find is, if the drives is gona break, it usually breaks within the first 2 years, otherwise they tend to last for like 10+ years. In my experience I find that I see Seagate drives die least and more Haitachi drives Die, WD is somewhere in between and Samsung has only recently become more mainstream so I don't see them often.

 

[Guest]

Tom's can't repeat themselves enough that this study is "limited" and suggests the data would change if you lived somewhere else. Can I just be the first to say bull****? These trends carry no matter where you go.. I've easily built over 5000+ PCs in my career in many different locations and Seagate hard drives are the #1 drive to die first or be DOA. I would recommend anything besides Seagate. Also, many drives die right after two years almost on the dot, and this is why many manufacturer's carry a two year warranty. Seagate has the 5 yes, but I'd rather keep my data and go with a different brand. This review is frustrating as Tom's ignores the data right in front of them and relies on geography as a scapegoat.

 

[MRFS]

Thanks to everyone for their excellent comments above.

I hail from a super minicomputer era during which rotating platters would vibrate themselves to death, like unbalanced washing machines, about every 3 months.

So, I'm happy to see the real progress that has been made with 3.5" form factors during my 40 years in the IT industry;

I personally manage 5 workstations each with a varying number of HDDs.

The older workstations have been demoted to backup servers, which we only switch ON to do the backups, then we switch them OFF.

This seems like a better fate for aging PCs than the local solid waste dump. And, it's an iron-clad way to prevent virus or malware infections.

The drives in our oldest PC are all more than 5 years old, and they all continue to show zero errors during routine disk checks!

I can't attribute our success with HDDs to any one factor, but I am happy to share with everyone a few things which are true of all our HDDs presently.

Here goes:

(1) all HDDs are in dedicated drive cages with fans actively cooling the entire drive cage;

(2) all drive cages are in mid- and full-tower cases placed on the floor, where cooler air congregates (hot air rises);

(3) all drive cages are well ventilated, and some have dust filters that are better than others; I try to wash or vacuum those filters every 3 months;

(4) perhaps the unsung heroes of our workstations are the combinations of good uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) outside the chassis, and high quality PSUs inside the chassis, with operating wattages at or below 50% utilization where efficiency peaks;

(5) I can't prove this either, but I strongly suspect that frequent disk checking may result in sustaining the strength of magnetic charges, particularly on horizontal magnetic recordings;

(6) this next point will surely evoke controversy, nevertheless over time we've experienced much better performance by using multiple RAID 0 arrays, on the theory that each component drive is accessed half as much in arrays with 2 x HDDs, and one-fourth as much in arrays with 4 x HDDs, on average;

(7) we do go overboard with multiple redundant backups, because a failed HDD, even in a RAID 0 array, simply requires us to replace it, and then re-copy any "lost" data; this policy results from using probability and statistics to predict an extremely low, almost zero probability that all redundant data sets will fail at exactly the same time (cf. "conditional probability", for those interested in the math);

(8) even with workstations networked over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN, doing regular backups is as simple as running an XP batch program in Command Prompt (aka DOS Window) e.g.:

D:\> xcopy folder E:\folder /s/e/v/d
D:\> xcopy folder F:\folder /s/e/v/d
D:\> xcopy folder R:\folder /s/e/v/d
D:\> xcopy folder S:\folder /s/e/v/d

Where,
E: and F: are local partitions
R: and S: are network drives

Piece o' cake.

Because storage capacity is now so very cheap, we do a similar thing with all of the drive images of our C: system partitions, even keeping a history up to the last 10 such drive images on every partition that is large enough.


I hope this helps.


MRFS

 

[tpi2007]

Luckily, the only HDD that has ever started to fail on me was the 30MB harddrive on my 286 IBM PS/1 from 1991. And even that one didn't just die, it just got more and more band sectors. On a specific part of the drive, if I ran scandisk or was unfortunate to try and copy something into it, it wouldn't leave that area; I had to reboot the computer then LOL.

But as someone has pointed out, there are so many factors to take into account, that you really have to be careful with conclusions.

Especially, you have to consider that a drive's health depends on how it's treated during transport, and how you treat it at home. If you have a PC tower beneath your desk and you accidentally kick it once a month, don't expect miracles in the long run.

With that said, I have to say I've been lucky with my drives so far.

I went through all my HDD's last week and I can say all are working:

- 420 MB Conner Peripherals from 1995 - working 100%

- 4 GB Seagate Medalist from 1998 (?)- 100%

- 6 GB Fujitsu from 1999 - 100%

- 40 GB Quantum Fireball from 2001 - working very well, but with a few realocated sectors (I hit the computer accidentally a couple of times back then)

- 120 GB Seagate Sata 7200.7 from 2006 - 100%

- 640 GB WD Caviar from 2008- 100%

- 500 GB WD Caviar Black from 2009 - 100%

- 500 GB WD Caviar Green - 100%


I also have two Maxtor Drives working 100%:

- 6 GB from 1998

- 40 GB from 2002

As you can see, I have some very old drives from various manufacturers (some of them I got second hand for vintage purposes), some deemed unreliable by some Tom's readers, and they are all great.

Sure, there will always be brands that are more reliable than others, but middlemen and the end user also have a responsibility in how they treat them.

 

[JonnyDough]

Dell used Hitachi and Samsung for years. This could be why. But also, I have to wonder if that's also the reason for less returns on those drives. Dell support FTW? No.

 

[LORD_ORION]

Reality Check... buy drives with 5 year warranties. Most consumer drives are BAD (1, 2 or 3 year warranties, and when the warranty is up, expect your drive to fail.)

The manufacturers expect to get drives back in warranty, so if they say 5 years, you can expect 95% of the time the drives will be ok for 5 years.

 

[LORD_ORION]

This also brings up the point, how many of those WD drives were the ones with 5 year warranties? How many were the cheap high density cheap variety with 2 year warranties? Probably the majority of them.

 

[mr_tuel]

hmmm...I will look more seriously at Hitachi from now on. And knowing WD's vulnerability to wedged axles, I will now baby the heck out my 2TB external.

 

[FloKid]

My first Seagate went out of business in about 3 years. The second one died in like 2 years. The charts seems close. Let's hope this WD will behave a little longer.

 

[mjello]

So Hitachi is the safest drive. Its good they continually call this a very limited study. I had a server with 6 hitachi 15k 150GB drives. 4 failed in less than 2 years, Ultimately causing data loss on the raid 5 array as one drive failed, and while rebuilding the array to a new drive a second drive failed. We have more than 30 seagate drives which are on their 3rd year now and none has failed.

This is the finding of a so limited study that it can only be called a case study. Which this article essentially is. Very interesting to hear about the design flaws though.

 

[Guest]

I think this study is true I had two 7200.11 hard drives that failed just after a year of use. no more seagate for me.

 

[nforce4max]

WORLDS LOUDEST G3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4cj81pjlQM

Unique Maxtor failure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cs0Hu9BQRg

 

[spartanii]

I don't know much about the reliablily differences in smaller drives but I have a 80gb seagate that I've had for 7 years and a 320gb seagate for 6 years. I only payed $100 bucks total for them and I dont have anything on my computer that can't be downloaded or copyed from another source so if they fail with in the next year I'll feel I got my moneys worth. Anyone have a HD last 10 years?

 

[nforce4max]

I don't know much about the reliablily differences in smaller drives but I have a 80gb seagate that I've had for 7 years and a 320gb seagate for 6 years. I only payed $100 bucks total for them and I dont have anything on my computer that can't be downloaded or copyed from another source so if they fail with in the next year I'll feel I got my moneys worth. Anyone have a HD last 10 years?

I got a few that are 20 while some have gotten lucky and managed rare IBM drives from the 1970s which were true monsters. At my school they got a platter assembly to a 30mb Winchester (1973) that used three 14inch platters.

 

[hypocrisyforever]

If you use seagate I wouldn't let this article wig you out. It is really in reference to the one "bad" kind, the 7200.11 Granted, I've never used that one, but I've been using seagates in all my builds for literally years, and I've only had one fail prematurely. Coincidentally, it was one of their ES server drives that was supposed to be way more reliable. At any rate, they rma was SUPER easy and I got a replacement fast. Point is, I wouldn't classify them as bad. My one drive is on year 8 right now and still cookin'.

 

[Guest]

The results of the report corelates with the user ratings on Newegg. I avoid Seagate like the plague. My favorite brand is now WD followed by Samsung.

 

[hersch]

Hitachi manufactures the (ex IBM) Deskstar (aka DeathStar) Drives. Some moons ago I remember that when we were tied in an Enterprise situation with IBM Desktops, the number of DOAs and Disk Failures on the Deskstars was just phenomenal. Result, we never went back to IBM for Desktops and even Servers. So if Hitachi is now running with the same basic architecture as the IBMs DeskStar, I for one will never touch them again and the same goes for Seagates, they are overpriced and the performance is just ok. Personally, I have been using the WD and Samsungs for the past 5+ years and have only had 1 failure (my mistake) so far.

 

[Guest]

back up your data

 

[Guest]

i have been using computers since XT, my experience is HDDs is those that are made in Singapore, Malaysia (and in case of Samsung - Korea) are reliable. I avoid any made in China & Thailand drives. I had all brands of HDD fail on me prematurely and the common denominator was where it was manufactured. I can safely I have experience based on at least 200 HDDs that we have purchased and used since my early computer days (my 1st HDD was 10mb 5.25" HDD w/ a dedicated / proprietary ISA controller.) I have also used Toshiba, IBM, Conner and Maxtor. Same applies, the Singapore made models are built like a tank. Based experience w/ current generations, I agree with the article findings that single platters are more reliable.

 

[taltamir]

toms, the data is more then enough to be reliable, the problem isn't that it is some "limited dataset", but that your analysis.

Here are some SENSIBLE conclusions that you did not draw:
1. There is a direct inverse correlation between how much a drive costs (and how famous it is for reliability), and how likely the owner to keep backups. Specifically, seagate customers, least likley to keep backups, hitachi? most likely.
2. Same as #1, only replace "keep backups" with "afford data recovery".
3. Same as #1, only replace "keep backups" with "store important data"... the cheaper the drive / less famous (for reliability) the drive, the less likely it is to store important data.