So many posts about HDD failures...

Nanobot

Nanobot

Nanobot

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18 Sep 2008
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Well I'm going to be looking at new 750GB-1TB HDD soon and thought hey, why not read up experiences about HDDs before getting one. I'm quite surprised and more confused now as to what really is reliable these days, or whether its a case that its only a small percentage that I'm reading and the other percentage are the happy people who dont post because all is good with theirs.
Personally, I've always been a Seagate fan, but having read comments about Seagate failures, mainly from users with large capacity drives, ie 1TB, I thought perhaps I should look at WDs or the Samsung F1s.
Lone behold, there are more postings about WD and F1 failures!
Was hoping to have a poll set up to gauge opinions on each HDD manufacturer and their reliability from end users. Failing that, any responses welcome.
I only need one new HDD, maybe I should just RAID a Seagate, WD and F1 and hedge my bets!
 
The thing is, people are not going to post upa new thread saying "hey, my HDD hasn't failed!" if you think about the amount they sell there are bound to be a few failures and people WILL complain about these when you get one.

I use F1's and haven't had a problem with a single one and always recommend them, i would say the F1's one of the most reliable.
 
i bought some HDDs recently and was going to go with the seagate 1.5tb drives but with reading the reviews of it and the posts about it on here decided to go with 2 1tb F1s instead as i already had 3 of them (2 x 750gb and 1 x 1tb)

about 2 weeks later one of the 750gb F1s got the click of death and sounded like the head had crashed, i had had the drive for about a year. i would still buy more F1s even though one of mine had died though
 
There was a poll a while back though I can't remember the results.

I do remember one of the owners here saying that hard drive failure rates were the same, which means the bigger sellers e.g. Samsung or Seagate will have a larger volume of returns.
 
you need to be smarter in your purchasing decisions these days and do a lot of reading. as for what hard drive to get i use my past experience and knowledge to get the right drive, e.g

ibm drives, ever since the deathstar damage i never touched another ibm drive again, i dont even touch hitachi drives.
maxtor used to be good up until they pulled out the sata drives and those had issues so i moved over to seagate.
seagate was good up to the 7200.10 generation now with the 7200.11 being mass failured i never gonna touch those and even the 7200.12 i wont touch till 6 months or more after they have been tried and tested by others.

now samsung, there have been issues with samsungs drives using the large 334gb platters ever since they came out. thats gonna be the 1tb and the 640gb drives, so to play it safe i avoid those drives and stick to the 250gb platter drives from samsung.

western digital, as of late have had issues with excessive head parks, but if like me you have done your homework on this issue and know what your doing then its simple to fix using a wd utility to disable the idle timer on the drives.

you need to know your stuff these days.
 
^ Pretty much the point I was raising with the lottery that is HDDs. I too have had more or less every brand going back 5 years, with the only failure being a 3 month old Maxtor which while I will never touch again, Seagate do own Maxtor so that was a worry.
Having said that, all the reliable drives, mostly Seagates are currently under 500GB and have never once failed, even have a 10GB Seagate from an old Dell that still performs perfectly - perhaps proving your platter theory.
I do wonder if the rush to break through the 1TB barrier from all manufacturers has perhaps been a touch premature - like a fast train that cant run at top speed because of poor tracks.
Well, back to the drawing board for yet more reading before the weekend purchase.
 
i orderd a Western Digital Caviar Black 1tb, my friend who i am in a clan with, works for a big euro company much like oc and i asked him for advice. He looked it up and the Western Digital Caviar Black had a 0% rma. In fact he got one for himself because he said its very rare to find a product with 0% rma. The samsungs had a 4% rma.
 
DooMeR said:
i orderd a Western Digital Caviar Black 1tb, my friend who i am in a clan with, works for a big euro company much like oc and i asked him for advice. He looked it up and the Western Digital Caviar Black had a 0% rma. In fact he got one for himself because he said its very rare to find a product with 0% rma. The samsungs had a 4% rma.
Click to expand...

Perhaps he meant the company he worked for didn't have any RMA's on the drive, which could mean that customers could have sent their drive directly to WD if it had died.

I am still waiting for the WD 2TB drives to come down in price after waiting so long for the 1.5TB seagates (which I wont touch now, even though they are a reasonable price!).
 
At work I use about 20 drives a week and maintain all the systems that leave (they are used 24/7 for logging purposes so are always being accesed)

The only drives we will touch ATM is WD, you get the odd failure from new, but if it's a runner it stays running and very rarely fails. Think we've had 2-3 dead drives from site in 3-4 years

The only duffer they seemed to of made is the WD800 PATA drive, which the mechanical bearings give up the ghost and the drive screams. Also had a few WD1200 SATA units give up the ghost.


We used to use Seagate, but they suddenly became unreliable. IBM / Hitachi wouldn't touch with a barge pole since the Deathstar fiasco, and the Maxtor 120GBs ALL failed, 100s of them.. never again.

Don't know about Samsung, but aint gonna risk using them.
 
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Fluke you like many others seem to be judging the hitachi drives based on an old ibm disaster that was the deskstar. Since hitachi have taken over the drives are solid reliable performers not always the fastest but they are among the most reliable drives i have used in recent years. Maxtor fully agree had a few of them go on me and will not be giving them another chance. Seagate have a badly tarnished image right now and although the new 7200.12's look nice i will be waiting for some user reviews and a bit of time to pass before i am willing to take the leap.
 
One of my raptors seems to be going **** up at the minute. :(

Under warranty so no probs geting it replaced.
 
Hmm, is it just me but when people RMA their drives, do they care about what data is still on it? I know its become faulty, but what about things like emails and business documents or accounts?
As its faulty, you cant really DoD clean the drive before RMA'ing it and I care for where or what happens with my docs and emails etc after the event.
 
Gerard said:
One of my raptors seems to be going **** up at the minute. :(

Under warranty so no probs geting it replaced.
Click to expand...

I used to have to original 36GB raptors in RAID0. One died just out of warrantee and the other has continued to run without issues as my gaming rig OS drive. It was all happy with a couple of games until the games themselves got too big so I've used an old Maxtor from my old 1.2TB RAID5 array that corrupted itself.

Also - never thrown a drive out and of the failures all bar one have appeared on the first format and verify.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
western digital, as of late have had issues with excessive head parks, but if like me you have done your homework on this issue and know what your doing then its simple to fix using a wd utility to disable the idle timer on the drives.
Click to expand...

From what I have read, isnt this just for the Green Power models and not the Black or Blue? Is anyone else having to apply this timeout fix for their drives that are not Green?
 
Thanks Cyber, I've opted to giving WD a try for a change instead of usual Seagates and instead of any of the new .11 or .12 Seagates, its a 640GB aals which hopefully wont need any tweaking judging by the two 640s you mentioned.
 
WD haven't been the greatest in the past but their AAKS and newer drives seem to be a massive improvement... I'd still bet on the seagate 7200.10s but they are a bit slow now - hoping the 7200.12s are a return to form.
 
when it comes to new tech im a late adopter since i want to see how reliability pans out.

i was still using 188gb platter drives when 250gb platter drives were out. then i went to 250gb platter drives when 334gb platter drives were doing the rounds, and i found there that samsung were having issues with the high density platters on thier 1tb drives. now i use the 320gb platter drives from western digital since they dont seem to have any problems.

wont touch any of the 500gb platter drives now till the end of the year. need reliability over speed when it comes to hard drives.
 
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