What fails for you the most?

[Mad_Professor]

Putting poll out here to see that the census is on hard-drive failures specifically brands and series.

I don't have a preference, I just buy whatever is cheap, I don't buy Toshiba since they are notoriously bad for failing constantly.

But right now I have twelve cheap seagate desktop 3TB drives in my fileserver and they have been good up until now, now they are giving me trouble, bad sectors here, drives disappearing there. I also got two seagate 1.5TB which are constantly problematic.

But what's funny is my six samsung 1TB drives that I've had from 2009 are still going strong with no issues and also my two WD RE4 500GB as well.

But I've got a stack of dead or bad seagates, WD blue/blacks and shit ton of toshiba drives.

I've argue with few buddies of mine whom are in the I.T field who have sworn seagate or WD were the best and that they have no trouble. I've had one computer consultant say only to buy WD blacks.

I don't know what's a more reliable brand. Frankly I'm thinking of swapping out my 3TB seagates for 4TB WD SE drives which are "value" RE drives and still have the 5 yr warranty.

Let the flame war begin!

[mariushm]

Re: What fails for you the most?

Toshiba drives are the old Hitachi .. western digital was forced to give up the classic hdd part of hitachi to someone (some sort of anti-monopoly practice)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/w...hitachi-buyout

And if my memory is correct, hitachi actually bought it from IBM... yeah, here we go:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,5915,00.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST

Samsung no longer sells classic hard drives, they sold the classic hdd division to Seagate :

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/about/n...d-business-pr/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12...s_samsung_buy/

-

As to answer your questions.. I was probably lucky to never have hard drives fail on me (knock on wood). The only drive that started to have bad sectors was a Maxtor 3.2 GB drive, the one in my first ever computer.
I have Seagate and WD drives in my system and they work fine.
I was a bit biased against Samsung because a long time ago I bought one of their CD-RW drives after it received an excellent review in an IT magazine... and it failed on me after about 8 months. A good friend bought one around the same time and it failed on him a month after mine failed.
As for the others... I'm impartial, but the price difference is so small between models is so small that I don't care to experiment with drives from other companies, i'd probably stick to WD or Seagate.

[shadow]

Re: What fails for you the most?

I was pretty lucky that I have not had hard drives fail on me personally. However just yesterday I had a look at a laptop which had a Seagate consumer series hard drive begin to fail. And I have seen a Maxtor fail. To me, hard drives are so cheap now a days. The quality and quality assurance simply isn't there. I usually pick whatever is cheapest/most appropriate at the time and ensure I have a backup. Seagate and WD are pretty much the same to me. Have never seen a WD fail, however I am sure they do. If I was looking for something a bit better, I would go for a hard drive with 5 year warranty like the WD black.

[cheapie]

Re: What fails for you the most?

I think it's pretty much just Seagate, Toshiba, and WD now. I usually stick with Seagate, but Toshiba is awesome too if you can find it. WD doesn't seem as good. I LOVE my two Seagate Barracuda 7200.9s. I have the 120GB and 160GB versions. The 160GB is as perfect as they get. The 120GB, however, has one bad sector. Now, it's been in use for over a year with exactly one bad sector and no signs of getting worse, so I'll keep using it. It was also reporting communication errors, but that was fixed by plugging it into a different SATA port.

[c_hegge]

Re: What fails for you the most?

The consumer drives are all bad, regardless of the brand. I've only seen a few WD Caviar blacks, but I haven't had to replace one yet. The scorpio blacks, on the other hand seem much less reliable. I've sen a few of those die.

[joshnz]

Re: What fails for you the most?

Every brand I see fails now as for desktop drives western digital and seagate fail on par. most drives I see fail are due to external factors.
Every laptop drive I see usually dies from dropping.

[larrymoencurly]

Re: What fails for you the most?

Recently, somebody at SlickDeals.net said his company had bought 100,000+ hard disks over the past 7 years, and the rate of DOAs was 4% for WD, 5% for Seagate.

I've never had any hard disk that I bought ever fail on me (yet), but I noticed that WD drives show fewer slow sectors than Seagates do:

MHDD results for 2TB drives:

Hitachi 2TB, 5400 RPM, 667GB platters:

< 3ms: 152,86,259
<10ms: 9,735
<50ms: 25,356
<150ms: 334
<500ms: 0
>500ms: 0

Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001, 7200RPM, 1TB platters:

< 3ms: 15,130,905
<10ms: 189,015
<50ms: 376
<150ms: 1,367
<500ms: 1
>500ms: 0

Western Digital 2TB, 5400 RPM, 667GB platters:

< 3ms 14,672,666
<10ms 648,967
<50ms 51
<150ms 0
<500ms 0
>500ms 0

[Topcat]

Re: What fails for you the most?

I've seen a little of them all listed fail.....can't really point the dirty end of the stick at one brand and say another brand is the holy grail....

[lti]

Re: What fails for you the most?

My dead hard drive pile has two IBM drives and one Toshiba. I had a second Toshiba drive fail under warranty and get replaced. The replacement still works, but it's getting old. Toshiba drives seem to fail consistently after two years. I've never personally seen a bad WD or Seagate drive, but I haven't used very many of those.

[SuperDuty]

Re: What fails for you the most?

I've never ever have a hard drive fail on me, I have about a dozen in use in my various computers and they all work fine. There are some Seagate, some Maxtor, some Western Digital, a pair of OCZ Vertex 2, no problem with any of them.
I also have about a hundred more good hard drives from pretty much all the manufacturers (from Conner to WD), some are over 20 years old and work just fine. I even have a good IBM 60GXP !


I have a very small pile of dead HDDs, there's an old Maxtor, a 40gb IBM Deskstar, a Seagate from the U series, a laptop Western Digital IDE and an Hitachi 2.5" IDE. I also have a Samsung 160Gb SATA that has a PCB problem, it worked until a little chip burnt inside.

[goontron]

Re: What fails for you the most?

My brain.
Oh, you mean HDDs. Western digital likes to fail i have had some sitting on the shelf fail and i have had one somehow get 6523 un relocatable sectors and all the rest are a PIBCAK

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: What fails for you the most?

Recently, somebody at SlickDeals.net said his company had bought 100,000+ hard disks over the past 7 years, and the rate of DOAs was 4% for WD, 5% for Seagate.

I've never had any hard disk that I bought ever fail on me (yet), but I noticed that WD drives show fewer slow sectors than Seagates do:

MHDD results for 2TB drives:



Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001, 7200RPM, 1TB platters:

< 3ms: 15,130,905
<10ms: 189,015
<50ms: 376
<150ms: 1,367
<500ms: 1
>500ms: 0

The Seagate 2 TB looks sick.

[kc8adu]

Re: What fails for you the most?

i see more dead seagates than anything.
but we also need to see market share for each brand.
i may see more dead seagate because there are more of them out there.
anyone have the numbers?
and all brands have their turds.seagate 7200.11(firmware bug all i got that died were easily revived with terminal commands)wd greens,maxtor slimlines,ibm deathstar 60gxp,75gxp,ect

[cheapie]

Re: What fails for you the most?

i see more dead seagates than anything.
but we also need to see market share for each brand.
i may see more dead seagate because there are more of them out there.
anyone have the numbers?

I hear it's about equal now that WD purchased HGST - something like 40% Seagate, 40% WD, 20% Toshiba or so (that's not exact, but it's at least close).

[momaka]

Re: What fails for you the most?

My friend has a console and laptop repair shop.

From the 2.5" HDDs found in laptops and consoles, almost all of the failed ones are Toshiba. And they fail quite often too. I think I only ever saw two failed Seagates and 1 Fijitsu. The Fudjitsu was likely dropped because it had a stuck head on the platter. I actually revived that one for about 1 hour before it died again (opened it in a regular, non-clean room, and unstuck the heads). One of the "failed" Seagates was also likely dropped. It was still detectable in BIOS, though, so I just low-level formatted it. It found 1747 bad sectors, but after that it has been stable since. I actually used it for about 5 months in one of my computers before the motherboard took a dump. The bad sectors never increased, so it's still working.

So IMO, Toshiba is the absolute shit when it comes to hard drives. I've seen way too many of them fail. The worst part is they don't give any indication when they are about to either. One day they work fine and no bad sectors, the next they don't detect at all.

Personally, I've never had an HDD die on me. However, I have been donated quite a few "marginal" HDDs that later died on me. So my "dead" pile is actually quite big. I have 2 or 3 older Seagates (7200.7, 0.8, and/or 0.8), 3 Maxtor (one of them is 80 GB SCSI), 2 or 3 IBM/Hitachi Travelstar, 1 Fudjitsu laptop HDD (mentioned above), lots of 2.5" Toshiba SATA HDDs, and some others I don't remember right now.

Also recently got a 1 TB drive with lots of bad sectors. Windows refused to install on it because it would eventually try to write to some bad sectors and then the HDD would drop out and disappear from BIOS. I split it into 3 partitions and was able to install Windows on one of them (mind you, this for my own use and not for a main computer or anything like that). Seems to be stable now and the bad sector count hasn't increased. However, I RAR-ed a bunch of files one time and tried to extract them later in another computer, but the RAR file was corrupted. Rebuilt the RAR again on the PC with the bad HDD, and this time it was fine. So that HDD cannot be trusted. But for testing, it is okay.

Other than that, I still have an 20 GB IBM Deskstar 307020 and a 30 GB IBM Deskstar 305030. Both are still operational and both have over 20k hours on them. Also, both have a bunch of bad sectors. The 307020 is a little more unstable with a 120+ bad sectors - likes to click-beep-restart every once in a blue moon. The 305030 hasn't done it in quite a while. Stuck with 21 bad sectors (IIRC) and 31 reallocated, but still works and I still use it. It's a slow piece of turd, though - and loud too. Doesn't help that the motherboard it's connected to limits the read/write speeds to UDMA-2.

[lti]

Re: What fails for you the most?

So IMO, Toshiba is the absolute shit when it comes to hard drives. I've seen way too many of them fail. The worst part is they don't give any indication when they are about to either. One day they work fine and no bad sectors, the next they don't detect at all.

That's exactly what happened to me. If they don't fail completely like that, they suddenly get really slow and develop hundreds of bad sectors in seconds. From that point on, the bad sector count keeps increasing until the drive gets thrown out and replaced. That is what happened to the dead Toshiba drive I still have. The failures almost always happen when the drives are about two years old (within a month), but they sometimes fail after one year (just after the one-year warranty expiration date on most laptops).

As for the two IBM drives I have, one came with my old Gateway Solo laptop. It's still in that computer because it works, but it's extremely slow and has 7 bad sectors. The bad sector count hasn't increased since I started checking it. The other drive was in my old HP laptop. I upgraded that drive to the dead Toshiba drive with tons of bad sectors (I did buy it new and it worked fine for two years) and put it in an enclosure. The drive lost power a lot of times while it was running (because it was powered directly from a USB port), and it eventually failed because of that.

[c_hegge]

Re: What fails for you the most?

If they don't fail completely like that, they suddenly get really slow and develop hundreds of bad sectors in seconds. From that point on, the bad sector count keeps increasing until the drive gets thrown out and replaced...

That's how most failure seem to occur for me. The user usually brings in the PC and complains that it suddenly takes 5min+ to start, and the HDD will usually fail a short test in Seatools. Often, though, it is still possible to clone the HDD to a new one with Ghost (or at least get their data off it). Only a small percentage of the HDD failures I see suddenly render the drive completely unreadable.

[Pentium4]

Re: What fails for you the most?

I voted Hitachi. They seem to get the click of death a lot in my experience, and be especially sensitive to heat. I may be a little biased by Seagate is my preference for hard drives

[momaka]

Re: What fails for you the most?

Also recently got a 1 TB drive with lots of bad sectors.

Okay, small correction here...
It's a 500 GB HDD, not a 1 TB. ST3500620AS to be exact. And has 741 bad sectors and 1306 pending.

As for the two IBM drives I have, one came with my old Gateway Solo laptop. It's still in that computer because it works, but it's extremely slow and has 7 bad sectors. The bad sector count hasn't increased since I started checking it.

If the bad sector count is not increasing and the HDD is not ticking when you try to read/write files off of it, it's probably fine (or will be at least for a while).
Is it a Hitachi Travelstar DK23AA by any chance? I have 2 of these that are failed and a bunch of the same model that are slow with lots of bad sectors.
Also have a two or three 20 GB Hitachi Travelstar DK23EA with a few bad sectors, but those are all stable and fine otherwise. My laptop has one and I use it daily. Still going strong. On a hot summer day, the HDD temps reach up to 58C. Just a few weeks ago when it was really warm in my dorm, I saw it reach 60C for the first time. When I shut the laptop down and pulled it out, I checked the temperature with a thermocouple - it really was at 60C. I could barely hold it. Still works fine, though. It has had 5 bad sectors ever since I got the laptop.

I voted Hitachi. They seem to get the click of death a lot in my experience, and be especially sensitive to heat.

Seems like you just posted right before me.
Mmmm yeah... 60C on my Travelstar... that's sensitive to heat

[eccerr0r]

Re: What fails for you the most?

The only hard drive that has never failed on me is one that I never used...