New found hatred for Western Digital....

[Krankshaft]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I don't mess with raid at all on my e-mail server / domain controller I have two dual 250GB Seagate Barracuda hdds and I just have Windows 2003 server mirror them.

If one drive craps out I have drive two to boot off of. From there I can just put in a new second drive and remirror to it done.

You have to admit the more HDDs you have in your array the more points of failure there are.

That firmware BS WD did for RAID is unforgivable though. I've been shying away from them lately and going for Seagate within the last 3 years I've had 2 drives crap out on me I was able to recover the data but barely.

These weren't mirrored drives either just single drives on standalone PCs.

[kc8adu]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

i tend to use different brands in a mirror.so the same mode of failure is unlikely to hit both drives at once.all mfrs make duds.

I don't mess with raid at all on my e-mail server / domain controller I have two dual 250GB Seagate Barracuda hdds and I just have Windows 2003 server mirror them.

If one drive craps out I have drive two to boot off of. From there I can just put in a new second drive and remirror to it done.

You have to admit the more HDDs you have in your array the more points of failure there are.

That firmware BS WD did for RAID is unforgivable though. I've been shying away from them lately and going for Seagate within the last 3 years I've had 2 drives crap out on me I was able to recover the data but barely.

These weren't mirrored drives either just single drives on standalone PCs.

[Scenic]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

from my point of view, its always the same pattern on WD HDDs..

they either fail within the first few weeks (anywhere from DOA to bad sectors after a couple weeks) or they run pretty much forever..

samsung always was a painus in the anus for me.
sure... quiet & fast.. but that doesnt help at all if the HDD fails after a couple months to a year..

one Samsung HDD i had was really a PITA.
Spinpoint F1 with 500GB iirc.
worked fine, quiet, no SMART problems. but somehow the windows installation _always_ got buggy or corrupted (no boot, strange error messages, ..) after some time.

turned out the drive was basically working, but slowly corrupted _all_ the data on it while reading/writing without showing any bad or relocated sectors

you could copy multiple movies, mp3s and large images onto the drive and everything seemed to be just fine, but a week later, all those files were corrupted. movies had random blocking effects, skipping and strange blip noises on mp3s, images with random "bad pixels" or whole parts of the picture just missing or replaced by random colors..

i'm sticking with WD so far, but staying away from the cheapo drives.
Seagate seems to be OK too. (they prolly are *really* cautious now about firmwares and stuff after that fuckup they had)

samsung.. no go for me.. always tried it again with those and ended up with (semi-)dead drives after half a year or so..

what else..? hm..
maxtor by now are just relabeled low-end seagates.. i liked to use the original maxtors though
(with the exception of the Diamond Max Plus 8 Slimline drives.. with their firmware fuckup (basically the same prob seagate had recently))
still have a couple Diamond Max Plus 9 & 10 and some MaxLine HDDs going strong with no probs at all..

Hitachi? OK i guess.. got a few and had no probs so far, but they tend to vibrate quite a lot.. (humming computer case anyone? -.-)

ExcelStor? idk about those. strange thingys.. look exactly like Hitachis, but the reliability is .. well.. nonexistant it seems..

i've got an old (made in late 2003) ExcelStor J680 80GB IDE drive that i use for test-booting. not fast, not very quiet, but runs ok. had to use a more recent 160GB ExcelStor in a customer build due to very low budget and other brands were not in stock. epic fail.. 1st drive worked, but died during the software install after windows (*click click click*), 2nd drive was DOA and the 3rd survived all testing on my side and still seems to work..
at least the customer didn't phone me up yet.. >.>

[Sudum Gumudu]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

How long ago did you buy your drives? If it was a few months ago you may be able to run the TLER patch on them.

Tried that. These WD6401AALS-00L3B2:s have TLER permanently disabled
Have placed an order for four RE3 500:s. For the 640:s I will hopefully find some use.

[seanc]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I was quite happy with Seagate, until their firmware screw up. I've not been bitten by any data loss through it, just had to work out where all the drives were and update the firmware.

The only failure mode I usually see on Seagates are bad sectors, usually I can recover the data, this includes one with more than 26,000 (supposedly) pending sectors.

Western Digital haven't been bad to me recently either. I used to hate the older drives for being so noisy, the newer ones are OK. Had 2 x WD1600AAJS get bad sectors, a few years apart, so no common batch. 2 x 1TB got loads of bad sectors - got them replaced and are running fine now.

Had none of the 320GB Hitachi's I've bought fail either - looking good.

Samsung HM160LI laptop drives failed in abundance. Same for Spinpoint F1. Pulled from Dells/HPs.

Maxtor I have never been comfortable. They make a lot of clunking on boot up - seems to be common across all drives, but it just feels wrong.

[Colt45ws]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Did that Seagate with 26k pending trip SMART? I have one here with 1700 reallocated and a couple hundred pending. Not only does it think the drive is good, the Value for each of these is 100..!

[seanc]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I think it has, yes. SMART in the BIOS was turned off, so it didn't complain on a reboot. I've seen similarly bad Seagates, they seem to be able to go quite a while before they trip SMART.
Think I had one with over 7,000 bad sectors which I was actually able to make a working clone of!

I always run Speedfan to check the status of a drive before tackling any issues - I've wasted too much time fiddling with other stuff only to discover a failing drive.

[Topcat]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

The irony, I have a pair of 73gb sata raptors and a pair of 250gb WD sata's in my office machine. All of these drives are over 5 years old, all still working fine with no bad sectors. WD used to be my favorite ide/sata drive, fujitsu was always my favorite scsi. 370forlife got a big box full of my decomossioned fujitsu scsi's, some of which ran 24/7 for 8 years or more......still worked... Granted, a few of them were making bearing noise, but they were free of bad sectors. It may not be just WD, it seems most all HDD quality has taken a huge hit the last few years.

[ratdude747]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

planned obsolescence?

[Topcat]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

planned obsolescence?

I've been saying that from the beginning with bad capacitors...... Motherboards we can fix, shoddy hard drives we can not. pathetic of the drive makers, there's no need for planned obsolescence with storage devices other than greed. I guess it all comes down to greed in the end, but atleast we can fix the caps.

[Agent24]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

The rate at which storage requirements increase I guess they figure the drives will be upgraded before they fail most of the time....

From the manufacturer's point of view, what's the point in wasting money making a high quality design, having only a few people buy it (because most people just want the cheap one) and then having to do it all again 2 minutes later because people want a hard drive 5 times bigger and some other company has beat you with a drive 5 times bigger which costs half that of your own one which is 5 times smaller.

Too many people don't know or don't care about the quality of what they buy, if everyone demanded top-notch products then everyone would have to produce that

It's stupid when you see someone marketing a PSU or Motherboard with decent capacitors in it, and then some moron comes along with a stupid review and says "The 1000 Watt Deer is better because it's 10 times cheaper and it tested fine with my $2 multimeter when I was running it on my Pentium 3"

"Also it has 3 fans in it with 30 LEDs on them so it's really worth it"

I personally like good products which is why I never buy ECS motherboards or cheap PSUs etc.

I guess If everyone sold the highest quality product they could, the price would come down anyway. But then those companies couldn't sell you a new piece of kit every 5 seconds when the old one goes up in a sheet of flames or cloud of paper and foil...

[severach]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

turned out the drive was basically working, but slowly corrupted _all_ the data on it while reading/writing without showing any bad or relocated sectors

I had a WD 120GB just like that. Anything you install or copy to it gets corrupted without any complaint from the drive or the controller. I labeled it as "Bad Controller." Several years later I got a SMD station and remembered that drive. I swapped the RAM chip from another board and now it works.

[Agent24]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I had a WD 120GB just like that. Anything you install or copy to it gets corrupted without any complaint from the drive or the controller. I labeled it as "Bad Controller." Several years later I got a SMD station and remembered that drive. I swapped the RAM chip from another board and now it works.

I've always wondered about failures of cache RAM on hard drives, never seen it myself though (as far as I know!)

[Junk Parts]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

All we have are simple systems here. We use single hard drives in desktop PC's. Everything is on WD drives and working fine for now. In the past I've had problems with Maxtor, Fujitsu, and Western Digital too. I did learn that using the WD setup disk on their larger drives "60 gigs and above" does make them faster. They also store their data on a different area of the disk if the WD setup disk is used.

[dood]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I'm still sticking with WD for my desktop drives. Can't say much of anything about their server drives... I'm not sure who's making 2.5" SAS drives for HP these days, but that's what I've got the most experience with in the server field. Granted, our oldest 2.5" drive is maybe 1.5 years old.

[Sudum Gumudu]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Tried that. These WD6401AALS-00L3B2:s have TLER permanently disabled
Have placed an order for four RE3 500:s. For the 640:s I will hopefully find some use.

Have been running the four WD 640:s as a RAID 10 array on a Promise 4650 controller 24/7 now for two days without even a hint of a hiccup. It indeed seems to be working (touch wood).
The RE3 disk order is put on hold for now.

[370forlife]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I've been saying that from the beginning with bad capacitors...... Motherboards we can fix, shoddy hard drives we can not. pathetic of the drive makers, there's no need for planned obsolescence with storage devices other than greed. I guess it all comes down to greed in the end, but atleast we can fix the caps.

badharddrives.com?

[Krankshaft]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Solid state storage is the future in reliability the HDD is the only magnetic media device still in a modern PC. When the prices of solid state memory come down and the storage size on a single IC increases further they will dwarf magnetic HDDs.

I believe manufacturers are reaching the limits of what they can fit on the platters in a 3.5 footprint. The new perpendicular recording technique used when HDD manufacturers hit the terabyte mark is evidence of this.

When you think about it platters spinning at 7k RPM (fluid dynamic bearings to run the platters with minimal runout and quietly for thousands of hours) the tolerance of the read head gliding over the platter is thinner than a human hair. It's a wonder these things work at all. We need something simpler.

[Sudum Gumudu]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

Have been running the four WD 640:s as a RAID 10 array on a Promise 4650 controller 24/7 now for two days without even a hint of a hiccup. It indeed seems to be working (touch wood).
The RE3 disk order is put on hold for now.

It makes you wonder if the ICHxxR Intel RAID controllers are especially fussy or unreliable with desktop harddrives. I ran my last computer with a RAID 10 array on a Promise 4200 with two Maxtor and two WD 250:s SATA 150 without any problems.

[Scenic]

Re: New found hatred for Western Digital....

I believe manufacturers are reaching the limits of what they can fit on the platters in a 3.5 footprint. The new perpendicular recording technique used when HDD manufacturers hit the terabyte mark is evidence of this.

i'm still wondering why the HDD industry doesn't pick up the old idea of the 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot HDDs again TBH.

fast, but small(-ish) 3.5" HDDs as system drives and stuff and huuuuge (4+TB?!) but not-so-fast 5.25" drives for storage..

imagine what they could fit on 4 platters of a 5.25" HDD if they already manage to squeeze 2TB onto a couple platters in 3.5" form factor...