Big Respect for WD

Celador

Celador

Celador

Associate
Joined
29 Jul 2003
Posts
185
Location
B'ham, UK
Just a very quick post about my recent hard drive experience I thought might be useful to share..

A few months ago, during a "one-in-a-100-years" flood, we had the pleasure of 1m of overflowing river/drain/sewer water through our house. Alongside all the other damage that it did (and trust me, it did) my PC was completely filled full of rank smelling "water". Naturally I considered everything to be dead as a dodo but here's the twist... I was fretting that I had lost a certain amount of data, recent photos and the like, because of the dead drives - I was assuming them to be dead as they had been immersed for some time and even after drying out were covered in dried-out, brown sticky slime. But do you know what? When I connected the drives to a mate's PC BOTH DRIVES WORKED!!!!!! :eek:

As per my current rig, I ran a windows drive and separate storage drive; both WD. I used (and still do) a 36.7Gb Raptor for windows and a 320Gb (now 500Gb) for the storage drive. Both were 5yr warranty versions.

I have been involved with IT products for a very long time and to be honest given what they looked like, I wouldn't have bet a burnt out match on them working so given I didn't lose a single pic I can only say that I'll never buy another make of drive ever again!

Big up for WD :D
 
Yea I'd start backing up just to be on the safe side.

Not only are they air tight, but I'd imagine water tight as well. Dust inside where the platters spin would be havoc.
 
Absolutely. Given that the window in hard drive appears to be the mod of champions cos of dust etc getting in when the drive was opened, I wasn't too stressed about water getting to the actual platters themselves but thought it might bork all the circuits on the underneath of the drives. I was allowed to retain the drives "for data protection" after the claim but needless to say, I couldn't trust them long term and so am happily playing with their replacements :-)
 
I'd assume you backed up the data but just incase make sure you do as rot will have set into the PCB causing it to fail usually before its time.

Ah no matter I see you did replace them.
 
cokecan72 said:
somehow short and catch fire underwater? lol
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i think your letting it off pritty lightly there. I recon it would implode due to the vacume inside the harddrive and cause a mini black hole which would suck up the whole pc, but of corse not your hipser psu so that when you replace it all the hiper psu can go bang and kill it all again. :P
 
8igdave said:
i wonder what would have happened if they were maxtor drives :P
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Unknown however I have had issues with Maxtor IDE drives in the past tho.. had I think two or poss three fail on me back when I was running a 32-bit rig.

Are Maxtor known for good/bad drives??
 
Celador said:
Unknown however I have had issues with Maxtor IDE drives in the past tho.. had I think two or poss three fail on me back when I was running a 32-bit rig.

Are Maxtor known for good/bad drives??
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ive had 3 fail as well. They are known for terrible drives. Some years ago a poll was put up on here where people voted on which drives they have had fail. I think maxtor had something like 75% of the votes lol.
 
The benefits of having my PC upstairs.... haha

But yes I agree WD are rather good, I have a couple of their external HDD and despite me being clumsy and dropping off desks etc. They are still running strong :D
 
Odd really iv'e had a maxtor 500 gig for a few years now and its been faultless, i have however had 2 seagate barracuda's die on me, oh and a 64 gig raptor.
 
id back it up ;). There always has to be the odd hard drive that dies, just because the others did for you doesn't mean that on the whole they are less reliable. Maxtor statisticaly are far less reliable. So the way id look at it, if youve had reliable ones die on you and your left with an unreliable one. The odds are not in your favour lol.
 
So what's the answer.. given any single drive might fail its gotta be raid? My board runs raid but to be honest when I tried a raid array on a previous board (LanParty NF2) I had all sorts of issues where it seemed to be rebuilding itself all the time. I have 2 E-sata ports on the board which I have to use for raid.. is it worth getting a couple of big drives and setting up a mirrored array?
 
Celador said:
So what's the answer.. given any single drive might fail its gotta be raid? My board runs raid but to be honest when I tried a raid array on a previous board (LanParty NF2) I had all sorts of issues where it seemed to be rebuilding itself all the time. I have 2 E-sata ports on the board which I have to use for raid.. is it worth getting a couple of big drives and setting up a mirrored array?
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as many will say. Raid is not backing up data, ahrd drives rarely die now. Your more likely too loose a hard drive due to a psu going bang etc, or in this case a flood and produce a black hole if you have a maxtor drive.

But the point is that true backup comes from having data stored away from the source. For instance on dvd's or a portable network hard drive that your periodicaly back up onto etc.
 
8igdave said:
ive had 3 fail as well. They are known for terrible drives. Some years ago a poll was put up on here where people voted on which drives they have had fail. I think maxtor had something like 75% of the votes lol.
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they are so NOT known for terrible drives, they were simply easily the cheapest/fastest combo of drives for years, EVERYONE had a bunch of them. Also in times where we had 40-200gb drives, people tended to have a bunch of smaller drives. Its this simple, if the majority of people on the forum have maxtors, the majority of failures reported on the forum will be, maxtors. Shocking, when Seagate got big and most people bought seagates, when they had a bad drive suddenly it looks like only seagates are failing, where as in fact it was the same case, most people were going with seagate for warranty, cost/noise so more people report failures. These days maxtor are supposedly cheap rebranded whatever the heck seagate are currently making, if they use inferior parts i don't know but they've been bought out and are relegated to budget status, expect more failures. When they were on their own, they were fine.

I've had more maxtors die on my than any others, all my oldest working drives are also maxtors, why, because I own more maxtors than anything else... well thats probably seagate now as i've been buying seagate for a couple years.

Got a couple 2000 maxtors still going strong. the 3 or so maxtors i've had die, out of probably 30-40 drives across family computers for a decade, were all replaced next day on advanced rma with bigger better newer drives every single time. I got a 320gb sata for a 80gb ide once because its all they had in stock, they phoned to ask if sata was ok seeing as the first was IDE.


Water rarely kills components unless said components are turned on, even then its not as certain as you think. Was a thread the other day about a gfx card that was in a system with water pooling, crashed, working a few days later, I, and lots of others have had that happen too.
 
The numbers reported here are too small to make any assessment of reliability, you need to ask someone that uses 1000's of drives, or someone from a big distributer that knows how many are being RMA'd. The percentage failure rate is too low for us to know from personal experience. There was someone on here a while back that used lots of disks and (if I remember right) they only use WD at the moment after seeing high failure rate in other brands. Thing is, if your business depends on it then you will use the most reliable drive available.
 
drunkenmaster said:
they are so NOT known for terrible drives, they were simply easily the cheapest/fastest combo of drives for years, EVERYONE had a bunch of them. Also in times where we had 40-200gb drives, people tended to have a bunch of smaller drives. Its this simple, if the majority of people on the forum have maxtors, the majority of failures reported on the forum will be, maxtors. Shocking, when Seagate got big and most people bought seagates, when they had a bad drive suddenly it looks like only seagates are failing, where as in fact it was the same case, most people were going with seagate for warranty, cost/noise so more people report failures. These days maxtor are supposedly cheap rebranded whatever the heck seagate are currently making, if they use inferior parts i don't know but they've been bought out and are relegated to budget status, expect more failures. When they were on their own, they were fine.

I've had more maxtors die on my than any others, all my oldest working drives are also maxtors, why, because I own more maxtors than anything else... well thats probably seagate now as i've been buying seagate for a couple years.

Got a couple 2000 maxtors still going strong. the 3 or so maxtors i've had die, out of probably 30-40 drives across family computers for a decade, were all replaced next day on advanced rma with bigger better newer drives every single time. I got a 320gb sata for a 80gb ide once because its all they had in stock, they phoned to ask if sata was ok seeing as the first was IDE.


Water rarely kills components unless said components are turned on, even then its not as certain as you think. Was a thread the other day about a gfx card that was in a system with water pooling, crashed, working a few days later, I, and lots of others have had that happen too.
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That is a fair point. But ive still yet to have any other drive die on me and i dont think im alone in this. So i will stand by mine. Besides people also say the same about crusiable, there are so many failures because so many people owned them. Thats simply not true, they just happen to have very high failure rates.
 
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WD drives are solid. I've had at least 2 disks from every other make, 50+ Seagates. I've had WD's in the workshop at work dropped on the floor/chucked about and they still dont skip a beat.
 
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