Poll: Poll: What was your first Hard Drive Failure?

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Please vote in the poll, then, if possible, please state the make, model and reason for failure. An example:

Make: Western Digital
Model: Raptor 150GB
Dead on Arrival: No.

Reason: Probable controller board - drive spun down intermittently, the platters were fine, but it ended up corrupting windows. Quite surprising that after so long dealing with computers, my first ever failure has been a Raptor .

Thanks,

Smids.

 

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Never had a failure here, other than a DOA IBM 60GB Deathstar (still got the replacement somewhere).

Jokester

Good point - DOA's - where should I put these..... I'll add it.

 

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Wheres the none option? (touch wood)

Although I did buy a 2nd hand 74GB Raptor with a strange lag issue during boot when the drive was cold, RMA sorted.

I put it on the list but oh well, werewolf made the poll make sense I suppose .

 

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I voted Western Digital.

I bought a Raptor off a friend. It would have been fine had he not packed it in just a normal padded jiffy envelope

It span up fine and didn't make any weird noises but the Windows XP setup wouldn't recognise the drive.

Tentative - not really drive failure so much as user error (your friend).

 

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I've had quite a few hard drives fail. They've all be maxtors.

...and you keep going back for more

 

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Think its a bit unfair looking at results as it cant prove anything, im sure some makes are much more popular and therefore many more hdds have come from these makes. Thus increasing the chance of getting a broken drive.

Well, to an extent, but these manufacturers are all extremely popular, so unless you are an actuary, then the results can be indicative of a trend. The only 2 tentative makes up there are Fujitsu and Samsung, all the others have a long history in the business.

 

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The two obvious front-runners so far being the Maxtors and IBM's (no surprises on my part! ).

Summary so far:

Given that Seagate have been in the business for such a long time, I might have expected more, but no, Seagates seem to be as reliable as ever. Hitachi and Samsung are newish comparatively to the industry and this shows in their results. Western Digital are doing ok - seemingly about average in age/failure performance stakes. Don't know a great deal about Fujistu, so I can't comment there.

Keep the results coming people!!!

To all those asking for a 'no failure' option - I did ask but didn't get one. However, I suppose the poll makes more sense if we just stick to actual failures, else we might unbalance the table in terms of statistics.

 

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Make: Seagate
Model: Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ 250GB
Dead on Arrival: Yes.

I see you got a new one still. They are great drives. Mine is a storage drive back-up to my Raptor 150GB .

Anyway, keep the results coming in people - the table looks good from here with 74 votes. Let's see how long we can keep this going!

Dead on arrival isn't so bad, it's failures that are really bad tbh.

 

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If you ignore the infamous Deathstars (60GXP and 75GXPs IIRC) which were attributed to a major design flaw youll find that IBM (why isnt Hitachi included in this option since they bought out IBMs HD division?, other than avoiding tarring them with the same brush - especially considering theres little point in gathering data on a provider that effectively doesnt exist or make consumer grade HDs, if you differentate between Hitachi and IBM) actually do pretty well - I agree its not data to be ignored, but it puts quite a negative skew on your initial conclusion, especially if you want to produce a 'valuable' reliability chart...

Considering they were made about 5years ago and no one has mentioned another IBM(Hitachi?!?) model - it would be nice for those who voted IBM to clarify if it was one of the Deathstars or not - I would be surprised if we get many replies in line with your thread that didnt have a Deathstar fail...

Back to the point Ive only had a 30GB 60GXP die on me - for the fact it was on RAID0 for 2.5yrs before I changed it amazes me

P.S. Smids, you know me mate, Im just picky

ps3ud0

Hey pseudo

I purposely separated them because Hitachi now are great and I wanted to make sure nothing unfairly fell on their name. IBM, yes it is unfair on them but they no longer exist as a manufacturer so it makes little difference. I know exactly what you are getting at. In fact, I have two laptops (my sisters and my dads) here with IBM travelstars which run flawlessly (except both laptops have died for various motherboard reasons). I do ask for model of each drive polled though, so I tried to account for this. As you can see from the table though, Hitachi's have a very low score which wouldn't be seen if they were placed together.

 

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My next purchase just might be a Hitachi

 

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It seems a few WD Raptor 150's were faulty with their spinning up, clunk spinning down problem (my vote). Anyway, look at those Hitachi figures. Seagate is understandable given how long they have been in the field. I'm surprised at Samsung though, for such a new company, they really do have a high number.

 

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Just had a DOA Segate, replaced by another DOA Segate. Waiting for a RMA number so I can swap it for a Maxtor

-Leezer-

I really wouldn't recommend Maxtor - look into the hitachi's - faster and more reliable.

 

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I'm still not convinced that Maxtors are as bad as all that, they do have the highest number of failures out of all the hard drive manufacturers on the poll but it doesn't take into account the numbers sold or the amount of otherwise happy customers. People being naturally more likely to complain about problems than praise good service means that you don't often hear about what a company has done right.

This doesn't detract from the fact that the Hitachi is probably the best all round drive out there. One of the cheapest and most feature rich. TBH, those seagates are probably a bad batch if both were DOA.
Also, IIRC seagate are the oldest in the list and one of the most popular yet they only have 1/3 of maxtors.

 

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Hmmm. No failures for ages and now one of my nice new Raptor 150's has gone.

Just clicked and refused to detect in the BIOS.

You do have 4 tbh...

 

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120GB IBM Deskstar - wasnt right for a good long time (you could hear the head reset at random every now and again).
Not stopped me buying Hitachi Deskstar - they really are a very different disk
Currently have a Maxtor 200GB Sata thats starting to show the odd SMART error

You see it was for this reason I separated IBM from Hitachi. And look at Hitachi's results!!!

 

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But tbh, 3 out of 240. I now have 4x80GB hitachi sata-II's in RAID0+1 - looked like the best drives to get. My Seagate is my storage drive to complement that, but with RAID0+1, not sure if you need it. I do in fact have 2 travelstars (IBM) and 1 Travelstar (Hitachi) and they are all good. I know IBM had problems with the dodgy models but they really ought to have seen it in testing. I don't doubt IBM though, as I own an IBM Thinkpad T41 and the build quality is amazing. All their products are good and built well but I would have expected more from them with those model lines in terms of testing etc.

About the poll, I didn't make it to be scientific, just user input that people who are buying drives at the moment could see. I'm glad I did it now, as it does make you think about your next drive.

 

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Or it could be maxtor sell twice as many drives in which case they aren't actually too bad (purely specualtive, I have no idea about sales figures). Maxtors have a bad rep on this forum but on other forums people really praise them.

I think actually that Seagate have been around the longest and are actually one of the largest manufacturer's around - they even recently bought Maxtor (last month). So compare Seagate with Maxtor and Maxtor are still poor quality.

 

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First hard disk that failed on me was a 5MB (megabyte!) CDC, 1983. Fortunatley under warranty as it cost around £2000 then.

MY WORD!!! £2000?!?! How technology has advanced.

 

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Time for a thread revival?

 

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lost 1 raptor150gig (out of 1 7 days old...)

Your first one lasted 7 days?! Mine only managed 2! .