Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

Oh, BTW, this was on a PC that was not OC'ed and fine.

And the errors after formatting occurred even with a fresh partition and connected to a Prime95 stable PC, when connected to my Asus P5QL Pro for testing and that's when I noticed file system errors.

Windows Vista didn't error out when the HDD was changed, the Windows Vista installation was fine after changing the HDD.

->Looks like the PCB or cache is bad. Because it seems to stealthly corrupt data!

->Where even MHDD can't detect it! ->NOT a classic Western Digital failure, where they're would be sectors flagged.

->When I scanned with MHDD, not even signs of sector access problems and even the seek test is fine!

Could be solder joints LOL.

[KeriJane]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

Hello.

I just replaced a Seagate 7200.7 160GB SATA drive out of an HP Pavilion.
The drive has 4 years of light use and grew some bad sectors causing Windows to crash but fortunately sparing the 10GB of personal data.

This seems noteworthy to me because the drive was mounted vertically against a well ventilated air input with decent airflow. Even so, the drive was sitting here at 45℃ and SMART had recorded a max of 50℃.

Oh well. 4 years isn't actually bad but this was a light user mostly surfing the web and saving pictures from his camera. He didn't even have Photoshop on the system. Plus it was well cooled. Additionally, the Bestec 300-12z PSU tested well under load with very little Ripple. (it seemed low at well under 50mv @ 200-220w)

I can't imagine this drive lasting very long in a Video Editing machine with less than perfect cooling or maybe a little more Ripple.

It's a bad idea to generalize but this is the latest of a series of very hot Seagate 7200.7 - 7200.10s that I've come across. All but 2 had some bad Sectors and those were click machines.
Could the heat be killing these drives? Or the rumored platter coating flaking?
Maybe Seagate isn't so great despite their popularity?

The single 7200.11 I came across seemed cooler to the touch. (yes, I updated the firmware while it was here) Also it tested OK and wasn't a clicker.


Have Fun,
Keri

[i4004]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

Oh well. 4 years isn't actually bad but this was a light user mostly surfing the web and saving pictures from his camera.

i'm a heavy user of 2 7200.7 drives and they're still going strong.
fragmentation is unbelievable(i never reall defrag) i do a lot of video, millions of small files too etc.
no problems whatosoever.

I can't imagine this drive lasting very long in a Video Editing machine with less than perfect cooling or maybe a little more Ripple.

weord that you say that, as my main rig really is video editing machine, primarilly.

i'll let you know if anything happens to these 7200.7 of mine.
<wink>

[EGuevarae]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

fragmentation is unbelievable(i never really defrag) i do a lot of video, millions of small files too etc.
no problems whatsoever.

Fragmentation (or lack of it) is tied to the underlying file system (FAT, FAT32, NTFS,HPFS,you-name-it...), which in turn is responsibility of the host OS.

Just my 0.02 ......

And the 7200.7 drives I've seen in video editing are dead already. Four of them is not that much of a testing universe, but if you consider that the set consisted of five, it makes you wonder.

[bgavin]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

I'm just finishing up a Vaio laptop that developed bad sectors and destroyed the OS.

The good news is, the hidden recovery partition was unaffected.
I imaged the entire disk, then wiped the system partition, and made a second image of the empty sys plus the recovery partition.

Newegg overnighted a WD Scorpio Black in 320gb both cheaper/faster than I could get to Fry's this morning. $21 shipping vs. at least 1 hour service call to go buy the part. Fry's rarely stocks the premium drives, so I was better off buying from Newegg anyway.

I was able to restore the image to the new drive, do an F10 restore at bootup, and restore to factory default condition. The customer data survived, so that is restored also. A lot of work. Emergency basis, good money.

The bad drive was (of course) yet another Hitachi notebook drive. I have quite a pile of dead ones now.

[momaka]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

I'm guessing that Hitachi is one fo those earlier Travelstars. If so, those are notorious for failure, just like their Deskstar (GXP 60/75) siblings of that era. But at least they don't fail without prior notice (that is if you occasionally check the SMART data) or fail "at once".

[KeriJane]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

I'm just finishing up a Vaio laptop that developed bad sectors and destroyed the OS.

The bad drive was (of course) yet another Hitachi notebook drive. I have quite a pile of dead ones now.

Hi bgavin

Odd... I've never seen a bad Hitachi/IBM notebook drive. I've seen quite a few and replaced several with larger or faster drives.
I would expect to see at least some failures because of the rough treatment laptops often receive but haven't yet seen a dead or even dying Hitachi.

Anybody want some 5, 10, 20 or 30GB Hitachis?

Actually, I threw out most of them (after a secure wipe of course)

Keri

[EGuevarae]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

Hi bgavin

Odd... I've never seen a bad Hitachi/IBM notebook drive. I've seen quite a few and replaced several with larger or faster drives.
I would expect to see at least some failures because of the rough treatment laptops often receive but haven't yet seen a dead or even dying Hitachi.

Anybody want some 5, 10, 20 or 30GB Hitachis?

Actually, I threw out most of them (after a secure wipe of course)

Keri

I can take one or two either 10 or 20 for a little experiment I have in mind (two same capacity over 8gb would do it as long as they are 2.5", the larger the better).

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

DK23BA series had an issue where the firmware would go 'poof'.

5K80 and 5K100 series had clicking issues in combination with certain BIOS's.
Interestingly Thinkpad BIOS's were like the worst one for that problem.
Thinkpad <-> IBM <-> Hitachi

Anybody want some 5, 10, 20 or 30GB Hitachis?

You need to put those here.
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=12
And yes, I'll look.
.

[i4004]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

Fragmentation (or lack of it) is tied to the underlying file system (FAT, FAT32, NTFS,HPFS,you-name-it...), which in turn is responsibility of the host OS.

Just my 0.02 ......

And the 7200.7 drives I've seen in video editing are dead already. Four of them is not that much of a testing universe, but if you consider that the set consisted of five, it makes you wonder.

what matters is how they die: if they start developing bad sectors i don't have issue with that...if they die suddenly, i have...
ie if they work fine for 4-5 years and then develop bad sectors, that's fine by me.

as for fragmentation and os/file system: so are you saying that there is a filesystem that deals-away with fragmentation?
well, offcourse you're not, and just knowing operating principles of hdd means you must have fragmentation, regardless of filesystem...

[EGuevarae]

Re: Hard Drive Brand Recommendation

what matters is how they die: if they start developing bad sectors i don't have issue with that...if they die suddenly, i have...
ie if they work fine for 4-5 years and then develop bad sectors, that's fine by me.

as for fragmentation and os/file system: so are you saying that there is a filesystem that deals-away with fragmentation?
well, offcourse you're not, and just knowing operating principles of hdd means you must have fragmentation, regardless of filesystem...

I too agree on the bad sectors. The units I told about died suddenly. I didn't check the PSU on those, now that I remember.
And as for fragmentation, it can't be completely avoided, especially on heavy use, constant file deletion systems. But the underlying OS (the FS, mostly) has to do with fragmentation on logical partitions.
Deal away with fragmentation? Not yet. Try to reduce it? Well, they try.
Depending on the use, FAT32 tends to frag more than HPFS or NTFS. I speak from personal experience. Actual mileage may vary ....

Out of curiosity, I opened an external hard drive that I had for quite along time : a 7200.7 is in there, still going.