HDD Discussion

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion

How are we doing with the manufacturers these days? any recent early failures of drives?

what is the quality of Hitachi desktop drives these days?

these seagate 7200.9 are all making an awful whine from new. i really hate it. I dont think i will get any more.

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion

well i got a WD3200KS 320gb Sata II drive. there was no probs with sata compatibility. sounds good. i will give wd another try. i also picked up a samsung 120gb just for the hell of it, i hadnt seen one before.

I see one shop now has possibility to order samsung 500gb sataii 16mb for 139 euro. Thats compared to 207 for the WD and 235 for the seagate. its not a bad price.

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

Hitachi should bve fast and probbly reliable. Have got a 40gb drife from then, as an replacement for on of the famouse IBM ICL35 sereis drive. Some 250GB i have seen in action, damn fast. I have not heared something abouth problems with hitachi only drives.
Any way, with Samsung i have the best succes, never had one bad, and i do suggest those to any who ask me abouth computers.

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion

i will get some hitachi also then next time. the thing is that although we had the deathstar problem, i am seeing travelstar drives that have lasted for 5 years or more. The thing is that whilst ibm and maxtor maybe have a bad reputation i was able to ghost my data off both brands of drive (they start to get very slow) but with WD i have had and seen many head crash with no possibility to get working again.

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

Well right, there where some issues on some 7200rpm models. But luckily my seagate is not afekted yet. I have my 120gb Maxtor still in use, but another drive from the same series is burned in my brothers rig..... you just have to have an ey on the 12v line with maxtor. This is probably nothing seriously, but why experiment? there are enough risks in building a stable system today.

[momaka]

Re: HDD Discussion

Couple of weeks ago I got a free computer from a dumpster with a 30GB IBM DTLA 305030. With Disk Checkup, it shows:
Power On Time: 22k
Power Cycle Count: ~2500
Reallocated Sector Count: 20
Current Pending Sector: 19
and another attribute similar to the last 2: 29
Drive is still working fine though, and has been for a while. Scanning it with HD tune returned no errors.
Today I cleaned up that computer a bit more and then defragged it. All went well. Then I decided to transfer some of my music on it. Almost all the way at the end during 1 of the transfers, the hard drive clicked twice, then made a shutting-down noise (that special IBM Deskstar zzzaaaaaaap) and restarted itself. I knew what that meant, so I canceled the transfer of files quickly and opened Disk Checkup. So now it shows 30 under that last attribute instead of 29. Reallocated Sector Count and Current Pending Sector are still the same numbers, though.
Seems like I have a failing hard drive under way, yes?
If so, that's ok, since I have my important files on other computers. Will probably use it untill it breaks.
...
By the way, my sister has an old laptop with a 40GB Travelstar. Last time I checked it had 8 or so reallocated sectors. Power on time is over 125k hours so I guess that's not too surprising. It does run a little hot though - at around 46C.
I read an article long time ago about Deskstarts. If I remember correctly, it said that the glass platters and magnetic film on top of them expand with different rates as temperature rises, which is what causes the head to touch the surface and ruin it. Don't know if that's right though.

[acstech]

Re: HDD Discussion

There's a reason they call 'em Deathstars.

[i4004]

Re: HDD Discussion

>The thing is that whilst ibm and maxtor maybe have a bad reputation i was able to ghost my data off both brands of drive (they start to get very slow) but with WD i have had and seen many head crash with no possibility to get working again.

i had the opposite; maxtors die suddenly, and wd slowly....

[momaka]

Re: HDD Discussion

i had the opposite; maxtors die suddenly, and wd slowly....

For Maxtors, I think that depends on the model. I think it's the DiamondMax 8/9 series that died suddenly. The Slimline ones, however, would have a slow, toasty death - at least from what I've seen. They tend to run hot too.

My cousin used to have a Slimline Maxtor. At first, it would display occasional errors when writing big files on the drive. Then it started happening more often and with all files of various sizes. When I last heard from him, the HD died. I'm not too surprised though. That thing would get so hot that you wouldn't be able to touch it for more than a few seconds at a time. My guess would be probably over 60C (my highly accurate finger test, lol ). I suppose the fact that it was connected to a crappy L&C PSU for 5 years or so prior to that didn't really help either.

By the way, does anyone have experience with the new Hitachi Deskstars?

[Wizard]

Re: HDD Discussion

I had no issues with many HDs if cooling air flow is observed even on the slim maxtors. That means modifying the case chassis to have holes where HD are. Cable/wires management as well.

All the same, I still pulled them all out of my machine long ago now.

Cheers, Wizard

[pentium]

Re: HDD Discussion

I had no issues with many HDs if cooling air flow is observed even on the slim maxtors. That means modifying the case chassis to have holes where HD are. Cable/wires management as well.

All the same, I still pulled them all out of my machine long ago now.

Cheers, Wizard

My Thermaltake skull case is wonderful for keeping the hard drives cool because there is a dedicated fan that constantly blows air over both drives.
It's probably partially the reason why my 40GB slimline and my 120GB 7200.7 have lasted for so long even though they ran non-stop.

[i4004]

Re: HDD Discussion

temperature doesn't make much difference, sccording to goodle reasearch on hdd rleiability...
and they have plenty of hdds to test it on...

[jpdoe]

Re: HDD Discussion

IIRC you're correct on google's findings about hdd temperature and reliability. But I would bet proper cooling makes a difference regarding how noisy the drive becomes over time. Less bearing noise makes proper cooling worthwhile IMHO.

On the other hand, It would be wise to consider the fact that google's servers form factor is totally different to regular ATX cases. I wonder how much that affects the applicability of google's paper to regular workstations/servers.

[i4004]

Re: HDD Discussion

well, true...different form factor, but temperatures are read like they are read...
40° in their system is same as 40° in your system..
and according to them, it's not too much...

what their paper REALLY lacks is mentioning of brands...i bet maxtor did worst...

[kikkoman]

Re: HDD Discussion

they say they used drives from "many different mfr's" but in total only nine different models which are used for up to 5 years
---->> my suspicion: they mostly (if not entirely) use server grade disks.

[pantherts]

Re: HDD Discussion

kikkoman,

That's why for my storage drives I only buy Enterprise class drives. I have two 1 TB Western Digital RE2 drives running in my system holding all my music, movies, application backups, books, backup, etc. I have my system running 24x7 and I knew I needed good reliability with storage drives. Enterprise drives are made to run all the time hence their high MTBF rating.

[i4004]

Re: HDD Discussion

>---->> my suspicion: they mostly (if not entirely) use server grade disks.

google's too cheap for that...
and they don't need it if they have enough redundancy, and they do...

you know, it makes sense; 2 crappy drives is better than 1 good drive that happens to fail...hehe...