current status on HDDs?

[kikkoman]

looks like seagate strikes again.... after returning from holidays i noticed that one of my HDDs is beginning to act up.

it's a refurbished 7200.9 250gb unit i got last year under warranty (when 2 of those went south whithin 1 week).

it faintly clicks whenever i update its SMART status or scroll long websites (probably because my swap file is on it).
the SMART status itself is fine (except half a dozen reallocated sectors but they've been there for a while) but i've learnt the hard way not to trust SMART readouts EVER so i take this as the first sign of its slow demise.

my other HDD, a Samsung T166 model which is pre-PMR too, has been running about twice as long (about 7000hrs), has lower temps (avg 30 vs 37°C), is way faster (~90 vs. ~70MB/s read speeds) and still works like a charm.

my PSU's voltages and ripple are okay so i blame it either on bad luck or seagate selling me crap. (not absolute crap, but obviously there's something wrong).

alas, goodbye seagate!
but what next? as i said, i'm not unhappy with samsung but i have no experience regarding PMR drives and at a first glance pre-PMR drives are either expensive or hard to source.

i haven't heard bad things about WD drives in a while. haven't had one in a while either.

TIA,
felix

[acstech]

Re: current status on HDDs?

The samsung drives I've sold have generally worked well. One 250GB OEM drive got taken out by a bad power supply (Antec 350w SP w/ Fuhjyyu's), but that's hardly the drives fault.

I recommend them.

[dood]

Re: current status on HDDs?

I've had drives of every brand live for 5+ years... I've also have drives of every brand last less than a year.

Seagate drives have been my pick because of the 5 year warranty. Now they're dropping that on some drives. However, their RMA process is very easy.

Maxtor, I avoid in general. Even though I do have a 200gig ATA drive that I bought from staples 4 years ago that's still running good... their fuckup with the slimline series has tainted my opinion of them forever.

Western Digital, I've never had a problem with. Obviously, some failures here and there, but I've got plenty of old WD drives still going strong (unfortunately, they're all in the 15-20 gig range :p)

Problem is, I cannot judge the quality of modern drives compared to those that were made over 5 years ago... things do change.

[i4004]

Re: current status on HDDs?

>i haven't heard bad things about WD drives in a while. haven't had one in a while either.

wd is the only thing i use, and so far-so good....

about samsung..dunno...but i think it's probably the brand that's least used overall...
and probably because it came last when hdd manufacturing is in question...
offcourse that doesn't say anything about quality..

[Scenic]

Re: current status on HDDs?

@ dood: Maxtor = Seagate ... at least now..

every "Maxtor" drive with a model number starting with STM... is a rebadged low-end Seagate..

i keep calling them "Seaxtor"..

the real Maxtor drives work fine (at least all non-slimline ones ) for me.

@topic: i've been using WD lately and had no issues so far.
only one DOA with a RE3 (RAID Edition 3) series HDD.. had lots of bad sectors directly after unpacking, but thats probably not WDs fault (was shipped by that dumb shop in a waaay too small box for my like..)

that drive got RMA'd without problems.. got a brand new one a few days later..

[PCBONEZ]

Re: current status on HDDs?

For drives over 80GB I've been using WD RE or RE2 series almost exclusively for the last couple of years. I haven't had any problems at all.
RE and RE2 are the Server-RAID class drives. 5 year warranty.

My belief is if you source drives that originally came with a 5 year warranty then you aren't going to have many problems even with used drives, and I don't.
I would expect the same experience with Seagate that has a 5 year warranty.

Only problems I've had with drives at all were drives that came with a 2 year or less warranty as new.

It's not super hard to find used RE drives (any 5 yr warranty drive) that still have 1,2,3 years of warranty left when buying used either. [Two reasons.]
- When private people upgrade they usually don't care how much warranty was left on the old drive.
- Many businesses change out drives at the 2 or 3 year point as standard preventive maintenance.
[**When some company upgrades a whole room full of servers that had 5 year drives you can get your hands on drives with 2,3 years of warranty left - IN BULK. - I got a case of 12 250GB RE last Oct for ~$250 and all have 2+ years left on warranty. - That's cheaper than brand new drives that have LESS of a factory warranty on them.]
-
WD was the last to adopt PMR.
The RE Series with model numbers ending in SB (IDE) or SD (1.5G SATA) don't have it at 250GB and I think not at 320GB.
I'm not sure if the YS or YD Model RE Series have PMR or not in the smaller drives but it's likely to be over 400GB.
The RE2 (up) are probably all PMR.

Here's a nugget for folks with older systems.
They are hard to find but there was a WD1200SB - 120GB RE Series IDE drive.
Just dandy if your system (or RAID controller) doesn't handle drives over 120GB.
I occasionally see WD1200SB in quantities of 3 to 5 for sale on eBay.
.

[Per Hansson]

Re: current status on HDDs?

There is very little difference in the failure rate of modern harddrives between manufacturers (Barring of course issues with certain series / batches)

Anyway, the harddrive is much more likely to get damaged when being en route to you, I would pay more thought into buying the HDD from a place that you kno packages them very well

I've bought 3x WD GP-RE2 1TB harddrives for use in a RAID5 array, each one from the first batch has failed
Most likely poor handling by the shipping company (because they had different serial numbers / dates)
The replacement drives have all been finethus far (knock on wood)

[Junk Parts]

Re: current status on HDDs?

Here is what Junk Parts has to say on this topic!
In the past, I built a few budget systems "usually for me" and installed used Maxtor drives in the 40GB range or bigger. These drives kicked ass for the money, and were fast too. These were ATA 100 drives, and I got them for $10 to $20 each tested. Next we ended up with "Home Built" PC's that had ATA 133 controllers onboard. I bought four "Slime" Line drives for these. They worked fine at first, but within three years all these new Maxtors failed, but only after being older than two years. No RMA after two years! I used what ever trash I could find for awhile, and most of these older ATA100 drives turned out to be WD drives. So next fast forward a few years. I had a friend who tried to put a WD 160 GB IDE 133 drive in an old Gateway. He crashed and burned because his Gateway BIOS couldn't support such a big drive. He gave me that PC in a load of trash for the dump. Well I went after that hard drive. By the date code it was 9 months old. Did an RMA with WD on it and in 4 days a brand new WD 160GB ATA 133 drive was delievered to my door! My wife is still using that drive today and it fine! It was so fine that I got me a new WD 40GB ATA 133 7200 RPM drive for my Junk. Mine still works fine too.
Its a new world now, and our PC's are so "yesterday!" I'm learning about SATA, RAID, and other things. I'm not going to give my money to Dell for a "locked down" factory PC so I'll hire an independant builder next time. Kc8adu this means you! Topcat or Per Hansson could do it too but they are in a whole different region of the world from me.

[dood]

Re: current status on HDDs?

Hey man, I'm closer to you than KC8 is...

By the way, I'm now seeing a large failure rate on laptop drives manufactured in 2003. They are Toshiba, Hitachi, and Fujitsu. Not surprising considering their 6 year tenure out on the road. These are not commonly docked laptops... they travel day in and day out. All are from Latitude C640's. Oh, and all were the original 30 gig drives. As long as the rest of the PC is okay, I'm replacing them with 80 gig WD Scorpio's. Much faster than the old 30 gigs, too.

[willawake]

Re: current status on HDDs?

I've had drives of every brand live for 5+ years... I've also have drives of every brand last less than a year.

i agree
i am pretty ok with seagate though. have quite a few running in the office and at home

[i4004]

Re: current status on HDDs?

>Anyway, the harddrive is much more likely to get damaged when being en route to you, I would pay more thought into buying the HDD from a place that you kno packages them very well

have you ever read the specs of those drives, ie what they can stand when they're off(ie when heads are parked)?
do look for that data and you'll probably ditch the idea transport makes them less reliable...
(heh, you could also try kicking the hell out of some of your older drives to establish what they can take when being turned off...)

otoh, i know of at least few cases where kicking the hdd(while being on) actually made them work(when they stopped to respond during operation)...but that is more like a curiosity...

>I would expect the same experience with Seagate that has a 5 year warranty.

eh,,seagate had 5years on all drives(if i'm not wrong) and it's only now they're going to 3.
is it just a coincidence that this happens a bit later than they merged with maxtor.
i think not, but i won't be able to tell you much more because i'll never buy anything form company even remotely connected to maxtor...

about used drives:
seagate 7200.7 series( i have 2 of these in my machine) seems to be above the average when it comes to reliability, if storagereview relibility survey is any parameter to judge it...
it really stands out when it comes to results(wd raptors aside, but those are higher standards).
that was made(7200.7) back in the day seagate didn't have anything to do with maxtor...

[Per Hansson]

Re: current status on HDDs?

i4004; It's the general consensus with the guys in the forums over at storagereview that shipping damage is the most likely cause for failure
I think I even read some HDD manufacturers saying the same thing, but I'm not about to try to find that thread which was written years ago

But I'm sure the HDD manufacturers ship harddrives in specially made boxes enclosed in foam just because they are too stupid to figure out that they can handle the rough handling
And yea, I'm very well aware that a harddrives stuck head can be let loose by gently tapping it against a table

You keep on kicking your harddrives, all the best of luck!

[willawake]

Re: current status on HDDs?

they might be shipped in foam but we get only oem drives here which are not packaged at all. we used to get seagate packed in "seashell" cases which was cool but no more.

i havent had a doa for a while. maybe just lucky. i used to get a few

[PCBONEZ]

Re: current status on HDDs?

i4004:
I don't see how a sample size of 2 drives says anything useful. - LOL

All:
To clarify what I tried to say before.
I don't think 'brand' has anything much to do with the reliability you should expect.
The length of the warranty does.

I just happen to be using WD.
I don't think they are better or worse than anyone else.
-
PMR, my take:
Like any new technology I'll wait until it's been around a while before I put money into it and then I'll skip models from the time period it was new. When I first started looking at it I saw lots of complaints of 'phantom file loss' from owners of Seagates.
[phantom file loss = SMART is okay and CHKDSK passes, but files keep going corrupt.]
-
If I remember right Seagate's 7200.1 Series were the last non-PMR drives they made.
So I'll probably be skipping 7200.2,3,4,5 at least if they ever fall into consideration.

Junkparts:
I used a lot of Maxtor's up until about 40 gig. (When Maxtor was Maxtor)
Never had a problems until they changed to those extra slim frames.
Those buggers seem to get really HOT (just like DeskStars) and that's what got me looking at WD and Seagate again.

Last bad drive I had was a POS 1 year warranty WD. (Customer's drive.)
Had 8 days of warranty left when I got it so I RMA'ed it.

Been a while since I looked but as I recall Scorpio laptop drives pull more power and run hotter than comparable drives from other manufacturers.
[Might be an issue in some laptops.]
They were the first laptop drives to exceed 2.5 watts which means they need an AC adapter to use them in a USB caddy.
[USB ports are rated for 5v at 1/2 amp max.]

.

[i4004]

Re: current status on HDDs?

>I think I even read some HDD manufacturers saying the same thing, but I'm not about to try to find that thread which was written years ago

how does that damage occur? as i have trouble imagining it.
i have troubles imagining damage to
a)pcb
b)case
c)platters
d)heads...

all the vital parts, really...how does ship or truck hurt'em?
or fork lift...

>You keep on kicking your harddrives, all the best of luck!

who the hell said i was doing it?
gosh
-----------------


>i4004:
I don't see how a sample size of 2 drives says anything useful. - LOL


2 of my drives, and few hundreds on storagereview....


>If I remember right Seagate's 7200.1 Series were the last non-PMR drives they made.

7200.10 perhaps?
as first to use pmr
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pro...acuda_7200.10/


>I used a lot of Maxtor's up until about 40 gig. (When Maxtor was Maxtor)
Never had a problems until they changed to those extra slim frames.

http://picasaweb.google.hr/i4004b3/Hdds_2009_01_09#

really self explenatory when it comes to sizes...

maxtor drive lasted about year and a half...

seagate 7200.10 has some working hours(not much), works..i don't trust it at all...

wd only used to copy system disk...works. would put it into machine if 7200.7 was to die...

but i think maxtor i had before that one wasn't slim, and it lasted year and a half too...i'm not sure, though...

[gg1978]

Re: current status on HDDs?

The drives that i've seen most often fail are WD, Maxtor, and Samung.. Or at least the drives in my dog pile are mostly them.. The Samsungs still typically work, but the ones that i've seen tend to get unrepairable bad sectors.. The Maxtors are mainly either the slimline ones, or the ones that trash their firmware zone.. As for WD's, mainly noisy spindle motors, bad sectors..

I have yet to pull a dead Seagate from a PC.. Had a couple of seagates that had boot sector issues, but the customer's data was OK..

As for dead laptop drives, mainly Toshiba, Hitachi.. Haven't run across any dead Seagate, WD, or Samsung laptop drives yet, probably because they haven't been around long enough to make failure common in a heavily used laptop..

[dood]

Re: current status on HDDs?

As for dead laptop drives, mainly Toshiba, Hitachi.. Haven't run across any dead Seagate, WD, or Samsung laptop drives yet, probably because they haven't been around long enough to make failure common in a heavily used laptop..

I had one samsung laptop drive fail after 6 months in service. User was not thrilled.

[dood]

Re: current status on HDDs?

i have the following drives in service in my PC:

Maxtor 6B200P0
ATA-133, 200gb, 7200rpm
POH count: 50,395 (that's 5 and 3/4 years)
Power Cycle count: 929
Started out as a primary drive, then got pushed to file storage after about 2 years. Since then has seen only little access, mostly just sits there, powered up.

Western Digital WD360GD-00FNA0
SATA 1.5, 37gb, 10,000rpm
POH Count: 34,221
Power cycle count: 253
Was used in a server environment. Taken offline to upgrade storage, came home with me. Is used as my primary

Seagate ST3250820AS
SATA 3.0, 250gb, 7200RPM
POH Count: 7,496
Power cycle count: 560
Has been storage from day one. This houses my documents and game installs. Does sometimes see some action when I'm in a gaming mood.

[gdement]

Re: current status on HDDs?

I like Seagate for the warranty, though I have had some fail none have been catastrophic. I had plenty of warning to get the data off, and then mailed them in for replacement. Some other brands might be just as reliable, but their warranties usually aren't as good. I had bad experiences with Maxtor and Western Digital so stopped buying them, but it's been years since then. I lost count how many Seagates I've bought for myself or other people in recent years, with few failures and none severe.

Couple months ago I bought 4 Seagate ATA IV 20GB drives on ebay. All of them have around 2yrs of POH on them, and work fine with no strange noises or anything. Not that it's a representative sample - if they weren't advertised as working I wouldn't have bought them. But it was interesting to note that the drives with the highest POH also have the lowest Max Temp recorded. Coincidence?

A few days ago I settled for a WD. Their PATA drives were more readily available than Seagate. Warranty is 3yrs instead of 5 but that's not bad. The obsolescence of PATA is becoming an annoyance I'm afraid. Before much longer I'll probably start needing SATA adapter cards.

On that note, I wonder how warranty replacement will work in the coming years. I have a 750GB Seagate PATA which I don't expect is a very reliable model, and I'm in doubt they'll have anything to replace it with when the time comes. It still has ~4 years left.

I would pay more thought into buying the HDD from a place that you kno packages them very well

Stay away from newegg then.
Every OEM drive I've ordered from them (~5-6) has arrived with the bubble wrap crushed on one side, and in some cases that vulnerable side ended up against the side of the box. In 1 such incident the drive was DOA, in the other it was okay. Other shipments the drive still had the crushed bubble wrap but it wasn't against the side. Whether the drive floats will depend how much packing peanuts they decided to put in.

Unfortunately they hardly stock anything in retail boxes. And in a forum I saw their people making really lame excuses for how they pack, like "OEM drives don't come with a box so it's not our fault." (paraphrasing)

The manufacturers have trimmed down on retail packaging though. They're not as lax as newegg but they don't use the huge foam containers they did 10 years ago.

[Junk Parts]

Re: current status on HDDs?

I'm sorry Dood you are right. You are much closer than Kc is. I hope you don't charge me extra for being stupid. I would...LOL Just yesterday I was looking at the Dell used junk page. Some of those Insperation 530 units looked real close to what I want in my next two PC's. and they were in the $350 to $500 range too. No I didn't push the "Add To Cart" button. I'm not that stupid!!!Yet. I have to see what "Real Builder" like you can offer before I would buy some more Factory pacted junk from Dell ! My brother says the mobos in the 530 is made by Fox Conn with intel chipsets. Is this good? See I told ya I'm stupid. Now if I were to get a Build from you I could drive down to your area and pick it up. This keeps the big brown UPS truck from having its chance to kill it. I like that. Oh the part that pissed me off with the used 530 from Dell was that most of them have Vista "ME II" on them, and Dell wants $150 extra just to down grade them with an install of XP. From what I saw when they do the XP install the Vista is still there also. I wonder if they give you what ever is needed to start using the preinstalled Vista again if you want to, or does that cost ya another $150??? I wonder if "Stihl" makes a two stroke PC yet? The orange and white box would look cool with a compression release on the top and a pull cord comming out of the side don't ya think? Here is a good question for you Dood. Whats better, a RAID setup or the SATA hard drive, or are they one in the same??? See my "Stupid" is showing again.