Getting annoyed with hard-drives rant

[rypt]

Seems ANOTHER of my drives is on it's way out, a 1TB external WD... this makes it the 2nd drive to start failing for me recently.

In fact looking back at things I have only 2 drives to last more than 3 years, one is an old 80GB Samsung IDE, and the other is an oldish Seagate external in it's 5th year now.

What is it with hard drives failing within 3 years? I've had this occur with all brands now, be it WD, Seagate, Samsung or Maxtor ... starting to really annoy me when they fail and I lose a lot of files
Seriously considering going to RAID now just because of the failure rates.


Someone recommend me some 1tb drives that will LAST and don't cost an arm and a leg (current set up is 2 Sammy 1tb F1s, Sammy 80GB OS drive, WD & Maxtor)

 

[CaptainCrash]

I agree with you, I've also noticed that drives seem to be failing prematurely more often these days. Maybe newer models are more highly stressed, maybe QC is being compromised to meet price targets, who knows.

It's a bit hard to recommend drives on the basis of reliability - the kind of large-scale and varied data you'd need for a decent statistical analysis tends to be confined to the boardrooms of the various manufacturers concerned, and I doubt if it would be readily available to us plebs for obvious reasons. Also, the recent high-density, high performance terabyte-and-larger drives haven't really been around for long enough yet to get a good picture of their mid-to-long-term survival prospects.

All I can really suggest is a decent backup plan, or maybe RAID 1 or 5 depending on your situation (with the usual disclaimer that RAID is not a backup) - at least drives are cheap enough nowadays that it needn't be ruinously expensive.

 

[Mattus]

I must be lucky, in that in 15 years of using and building PCs I've never had an HD die or even suggest that it might. Until recently I had a Maxtor 40GB in daily use that must have been 6-7 years old. I've also had Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and WD and they've all been bulletproof.

Makes me slightly concerned as I'm sure my time will come and all my HDDs will fail at once

 

[FaceplantSi]

Yeah it certainly brings home the importance of backups especially with the volume of data we are talking about these days, I guess that's why NAS units are getting more mainstream for home users now. It's certainly something I'm gonna be looking into in the not to distant future!

 

[AtreuS]

All hard drive manufacturers will have drives that fail, they have mechanical parts so its enevitable.

Ive worked in the pc industry for a long time and tbh apart from Excelstor and Conner ( remember them? ) all makes of drive have been equal in my eyes for reliability. Speed/cost and performance are where they differ, but as regards actual failure they are all about on par... barring models with inherant problems such as the notorious deskstars and the more recent seagate ones.

Ask any big returns dept which drive make comes back the most, i promise that unless there are "dodgy models" active at the time, they will say that they are all the same in the most part.

When buying a drive just read up about current bad models and then base your choice on that.

The forums tend to offer a distorted perspective on bad drives, the samsung F1's are very popular at the moment so lots of people buy them. However if one fails, and i suspect as much as 3% failure rate would be normal for any drive, people are VERY likely to post here ranting and raving, do the other 97% of people post saying its fine and working well? no they dont.

Dont read a lot into posts here ranting at a particular make, do your research and look over the whole net for opinons.

Personally i would go for samsung as they have been cool, quiet and reliable in my own experiance. No doubt others will have their favorites too