HDD reliability study

[perplex]

Hello, please vote the brand of hard disk that you have experienced fail on you. I'm wondering because I'm in the market for a new drive and interested in all the different brands :rolleyes:

I'm forward planning because my Deathstar is ~5 years old and still running fine :cool:

Anyway vote! :)

I forgot to add Samsung. Please use "OTHER" for Samsung and state in a post

[altec]

Hitachi is the only one that S**T out on me. Hell i still have a 964MB WD that still works.

[drizzt81]

I had failures from IBM, WD and Samsung.. so I voted other. I heard that this other site that reviews storage devices has a great reliability survey, which would be even better if more people participated.

[icthus13]

I've had a WD fail, but it lasted six years. So I think that doesn't count.

[USMC2Hard4U]

IBM Deathstar

Has Multiple(s) of them Die in Less than a 6 month period.

[mpeg4v3]

What about those of us that have had drives from multiple companies fail on us?

A few years back I had a Maxtor 20gb fail on me.

About 8 months ago I had an old WD 40gb fail on me.

About 6 months ago I had a Seagate 200gb fail on me (although thankfully this one was under warranty).

[perplex]

I can barely believe my Deathstar is stilling going after reading users experiences from it :eek: . I'm holding my breath everyday (not literally :p) for it to come crashing down and turn into a cloud of smoke ;)

[Vertigo Acid]

Had multiple WD drives fail on me, everything from 2gb Caviars to a WD2500JB.
Numerous dead SCSI drives, a couple from IBM, lost count of the Seagates, and a couple of quantum/maxtor drives. Had a quantum bigfoot fail on me, loudest crash i've ever heard. Had a pair of 40gb Maxtors fail on me in a RAID-0 array that I was playing with. Only ever owned one Hitachi drive, 36z15, and it worked fine until I sold it. Never owned any samsung drives.
I think one thing to remember in a poll like this, the more hard drives you see in a given period, the more dead ones you'll have. I have 50+ drives, mostly Seagate SCSI, pass through my house a month, as I buy and sell them on forums and e-bay.
http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/survey_login
We're not really well equiped to do this right; SR is ;)

[mewannafastpc]

i chose other, nothing dead for me

[_Korruption_]

I've had a Maxtor 40GB IDE drive blow up in a removable drive enclosure. Luckily there wasn't anything sensitive on it, and they were good with the RMA.

[foofighter06]

Had 4 Western Digitals die on me. 2 drives that died were replacements that died after replacing a dead WD drive. Only had one IBM/Hitachi drives die, and that's out of 7, three of which are 75GXP deathstars. :eek: 2 of them are still strong after 5+ years of 24/7 service. ;)

[Wolfsbane2k]

Good Old IBM Deathstars.
Had 2 20gb drives go within 3 weeks of each other - while i was awaiting delivery of a new one.

Still, that was about 4 years ago now - they've come on miles from then surely ? :P

[Devnull]

I am withholding my vote because only being able to vote for one doesn't cut it.

I've had hitachi, maxtor and WD drives all fail on me.

[KoolDrew]

Maxtor

[The_Mage18]

I've seen several drives fail and will just list the most notable

Maxtor slim-line drives.
Seagate drives that had the black rubber cover
WD odd sized drives (13GB, 30GB, 100GB, etc.)
IBM Desktop drives (notebook drives have never failed on me)

These days I pick whatever drive has 7200RPM, 8MB cache and at least a 3 year warranty that's the lowest price.

[furiousfords89]

i guess im lucky, i never had a drive fail on me..though i 'accidently' dropped my old 40gb ibm deathstar...ive been using a 40gb hitachi for a little over a year now and its a blessing compared to the ibm :)

[krizzle]

I had a very weird death streak...

I run a little tech support in my neighborhood. A guy accross the street calls me up, says two comps don't work. Turns out both of their WD Caviars died, practically simultaneously. No bios accross 3 different comps could recognize them.

Next week, I had an 80gig WD die on me. Had my father's corporate emails, too... quite a hassle recovering shit between cyclic redundancy failures.

About three weeks after, a neighbor's 200gb went all drummerboy on her. Guess what, WD again!

And a few days later, my other good friend's 80gig Caviar went kaput.

It's like they were all programmed to die in the space of 1 month... very very strange.

From then on, I concretely established my law: NEVER BUY WESTERN DIGITAL

[perplex]

jesus, it definately seems Western Digital is the one to stay clear of.

i think Western Digital read this poll ;) look at this (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24802) :rolleyes:

[Apallohadas]

I'm willing to bet that every company has hard drives that fail.

Just a hunch though. I could be wrong.

[DougLite]

Really, this should be a multiple choice poll :) Then again, I guess not everybody has as many drives as me :p

Also, I believe that any drive that has served for five years should not be too harshly criticized (if at all) when it does fail.

My most recent failure was a 120GB DiamondMax Plus 9 that was 2.5 years old - it gets my vote.

[Discostu2120]

3 separate wd2500jb's have failed on me in the last 3 weeks alone. Every one of them was out of the warranty period by between 3 weeks and 5 months. The frustrating part is, two of them were part of raids, so I have to replace them with the same thing.

When it came time to order drives for a new array last week, I went with 8 400gb Seagate 7200.8's. I don't think I'll be buying another western digital until I know their relliability has really improved.

I've had lots of drives fail, but with the exception of the deathstars none failed as consistently and early as these WD2500's.

I work at a company that makes educational videos, so we go through alot of hard drives.

[ethen]

I only have one HDD failed on me, Micropolis, it was in 96 i think :p

My upgrade cycle is usually 6-12 months, and usually i replace my hdd too, so far no bad hdd on my system yet.

[Menelmarar]

Never had a hdd failure in any system I've built. We have several old 500MB-10GB Western Digital drives we have retired because they are to low capacity. Dad would only buy WD back in the day and still does. So far have a 100% track record.

You can see my drives in my sig and other than those I had a WD45GB, and a 20GB that passed through my system and then moved on to others.

My dad has had about 4x WD80GB a 100GB, and 2x 160GB and a 200GB drives a 120Maxtor external, and several other WD40's still running. And a pair of WD74 raptors running raided for abou 1.5years now.

A friend did have a 20gig Fujitsu in his gateway die though.

[The_Tecknishen]

I voted for WD, but immediately afterwards I remember that I had an IBM Deathstar fail on me a few years ago.

[FlatLine84]

I meant to vote the maxtor, but voted WD, all my WD's are fine, my maxtors died on me.

[Dark Ember]

Only drive I've ever had fail on me was an old 10k Seagate Cheetah.

It was this massive half height 18GB SCSI-2 thing that sounded like a jet engine.

[acascianelli]

Maxtor: Almost a dozen
Western Digital: 2
Fujitsu: 1
Seagate: 1
Samsung: 0
Hitachi: 0

[uzor]

WD got my vote because, as mentioned above, most of the WD drives I have ever purchased died 3 weeks outsite of the warranty period. heartless non-RMAing bastards.

http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm/u_125984 (http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?u=125984)

[Menelmarar]

The poll is going to be severely inaccurate. You cannot base your judgement on it. WD and Maxtor are the most popular harddrive makers at least for people that build their own with hitach and seagate trailing behind somewhat.

I'm going to wager that the amount of WD and MAxtor drives in posession of our members far outweights and completely dwarves the number of other drives. With that many more your obviously going to hear about failures from those two when in fact their reliablitiy is probably among the best.

Edit to clarify:
If WD has a 1% failure chance and you sample 100,000 drives across our users you'll likely find 1,000 failures.

If Hitachi has a 5% failure chance and we only have 1,000 drives to report in, your likely only going to find 50 failures.

Drives will be installed in different configurations with different environments as far as humidity and heat go and you have users who report failure with a WD but didn't run a Maxtor, fujitsu, seagate i the same environemnt.

[perplex]

fair point but i doubt WD and Maxtor are That much more bought by people here :rolleyes: Maybe - Maybe not.

Would be ideal if there were people that handle thousands of different hard disks from people with computer problems for example for their job :)

[Menelmarar]

fair point but i doubt WD and Maxtor are That much more bought by people here :rolleyes: Maybe - Maybe not.

Would be ideal if there were people that handle thousands of different hard disks from people with computer problems for example for their job :)
I really think they are though. I obviously have no proof, just gut feeling. I've read many Max vs. WD threads that get as heated as Intel vs. AMD and ATI vs. nVidia.

[S1nF1xx]

FOCK YOU AND YOUR DEATHSTARS IBM!!!

I had 3 and they all failed. I'll never buy another IBM or Hitatchi drive again.

Sons 'a bitches. :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

[FlatLine84]

I'm running 3 WD's, 1 dead maxtor, and 1 seagate.

[FlatLine84]

BTW, I've just been to lazy to take the maxtor out.

[ColStripe]

Had 4 IBM Deathstars (when they were the hot "shit") all of them died. Only brand in recent memory that I've had really bad experience with overall.

Rest of my drives are WD and Hitachi's, zero problems.

[zandor]

All in the same box at work: 2 40GB deathstars & a WD 1200JB. The sad part is both of the Deathstars lasted longer than the WD1200JB. At home I've have a 5.5yo WD SCSI and a refurb 18GB Seagate Cheetah FC-AL drive crap out on me. What do you expect out of a 5.5yo drive and a $20 refurb though? I think I'm doing pretty well as I've got 18 drives running currently.

[Menelmarar]

By the look of the poll, Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate are the most unreliable. I would defintiely go out and buy yourself more IBM Deathstars for your upgrades ;)

[perplex]

By the look of the poll, Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate are the most unreliable. I would defintiely go out and buy yourself more IBM Deathstars for your upgrades ;)

haha :D maybe i'll follow your advice and get another Deathstar once this one dies ;)

[MERKMAN]

I think it would be a better pole if it asked which brand HASN'T failed on you.

I've had Maxtors and Western Digitals die on me, not to mention the 1 IBM DeathStar I bought. Whereas Seagates run cool, quiet, and are the best drive out there IMHO. Plus, no one else has a 5 year warranty. How can you loose?

[Pulsar]

Had a WD 80 gb die on me, but I believe that was due to a shitty power supply that old PC had. Also had to RMA a maxtor 40gb because it was making loud clunking noises at startup every so often (not click, just a singleloud hollow *CLUNK*). I've been lucky in that I havent lost any valuable data due to HD failure. Im using Hitachi 7k250 drives at the moment on all my home systems and have had no problems whatsoever (knock on wood).

[Malogato]

This poll would be more effective if it was a "multiple check box"

I've got half a dozen of each : Western Digital and Maxtor

I've got three seagates that are running flawlessly
Every single WD or Maxtor drive in my system has been replaced at least once (including my raptors)

[mluke245]

BTW, I've just been to lazy to take the maxtor out.

lmao...I fall victim of the lazy ass syndrome too.....thats classic though :D

BTW I voted for Maxtor. Had a 20gb Maxtor Quantom Fireball take a dive on me....that thing was a peice of sh*t !

[perplex]

This poll would be more effective if it was a "multiple check box"

I've got half a dozen of each : Western Digital and Maxtor

I've got three seagates that are running flawlessly
Every single WD or Maxtor drive in my system has been replaced at least once (including my raptors)

vote the one you feel is the "worst" :p

[S1nF1xx]

I have also had two WD's die on me. One was a 40GB, and the other was my Raptor which came DOA. After an hour of trying to find the driver for it, it came up detected as a 0MB drive lol.

Anyway, WD's advanced RMA impresses me. So if I have a drive that dies, I'd rather it be a WD.

[perplex]

Anyway, WD's advanced RMA impresses me. So if I have a drive that dies, I'd rather it be a WD.

maybe because they get so much practise :p

[Bugalaman]

WD is the only brand I've ever had trouble with. though their RMA service is excellent, I got my replacement 80gig back just a few days after they recieved the defective one

[djskankho]

I had a seagate 15k rpm drive lockup on me about 3 years after I bought it. The refurb ones they sent me were total crap, too. They all made strange grinding noises and other odd sounds.

I have 2 WD drives that have been going good for a few years now. I think one that I had in an aria might be on its deathbed now from so much heat.

[arkamw]

Then again, I guess not everybody has as many drives as me :p
There are major companies that don't have as many drives as you do.

Personally, I haven't had any personal drives fail. I fired up my 9.1GB 15k Cheetah a few years ago and got a strange grinding noise on startup but it worked. Own a 10GB Maxtor and a 80GB WD, none failed yet (knock on wood).

At my previous job, I saw drives of every major brand. I saw a lot of WD and Maxtors fail but, as has been pointed out, we sold many more of those than any other brand. The ones I remember failing most often were the Quantum Fireballs of yesteryear.

I really think that it comes down to thinking that a HDD will fail, it's failure time grows closer every day, and if you are diligent with the backups, you're going to be ok.

[kenpomasta]

This poll wont tell u much. I voted for maxtor casue it was the highest % of failures on me.
Ive installed many drives, I havnt seen much difference within maxtors and western digitals.
Ive used 8 Maxtors from 80 GB up to 200 GB, Ive had 2 that failed on me all within warranty and was replaced. Ive had atleast 40-50 Western Digitals from 2 GB up to 300GB, ive had maybe 4 failures. all mostly right @ the end of the 3 years. However I do still have a 6 GB WD running in a computer and that runs fine. I used to only get WDs, now Im i like to use WDs however will get drives from maxtor or seagate if the price is right. However I bet if I had used that many Maxtors I woudl have the same number of failures. Most of my failures were from a long time ago when my HDs werent cooled as well as they are now in cases.

And Ive dealt with Maxtor and WD for rmas. and WD has the best RMA of any HD manuf. They are very very fast and very quick with the RMAs

[BillR]

As much as this poll seems like a good idea there will never be any way to draw any useable conclusion from the results.

None of us knows anything about how the drives that failed were handled before we got them, a huge factor to the end user.

I have people bring computers to me all the time with “dead” drives that are not dead at all. I have found many other problems on those computers that fixed the problem much to the user’s surprise. Probably the number one issue is bad/wrong placement of the setup jumpers.

I have watched as people assemble computers and what they do to drives before and during install is a crime and a sin.

Having spent some time on the phone with several drive manufactures tech departments it’s seems pretty apparent that over half if a much higher percentage of “dead” drives that are RMA’d are not bad at all but have been hooked up wrong, screwed up during initial setup (SATA suffers the most from the latter it seems) and a low level format is all it takes to put them to rights.

I’m always amazed at how many people try any of the Linux flavors; decide to go back to Windows only to find they suddenly have a defective drive. A simple post in here or a phone call would have fixed that.

In the past 10 years or so, besides the Death Star syndrome I’d say Maxtor has been number one on the actual dead drive list based on my findings.

[uzor]

I went over to StorageReview because I knew that they have a reliability survey, but had never checked it out. Signed up over there to get a look at, but it doesn't seem like there is any way to see aggregate results. Does anyone (not that this is necessarily the best place to ask) know if there is a way to see their results aggregated to view an overall picture?

http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm/u_125984 (http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?u=125984)

[Discostu2120]

I wanted to bring this thread back up to say how dissapointed I am with western digital. I posted a couple weeks back about how I had 3 WD2500's die in the 3 weeks up until then, all of them just over a year old (1 year warranty on these drives). In the two weeks since I posted I had two more of these drives die on me.

Buying western digital wd2500's was the worst purchasing decision I've made in a while. I don't remember exactly how much I paid for these drives but it was probably around $150 a piece I'm guessing. Thats $750 dollars in drives lost in the last month alone, and whats worse is I have 7 more that were purchased around the same time. All I can do is wait for those to fail too.

8 of the 12 drives were in a RAID 5, so all my data was lost after the first two drives failed in the same night.

[DougLite]

I really think something else is at play there, PSU or bizarre incompatibility between the host and drives.

[Discostu2120]

3 of the dead drives were in one system with a PC Power and Cooling 510 EPS Power Supply. After the first two drives died, the PSU was replaced with a PC Power and Cooling 850. Then a couple weeks later the third died. They were connected to a High Point 1820a Raid card revision v1.1.

The other 2 drives were in seperate firewire external enclosures. The first was a Lacie bigger disk extreme 1 TB raid enclosure. The second was a Lacie 250gb single drive external firewire drive. (That makes it 13 of these WD's that I have, not 12 like I said earlier, oops)

So we are dealing with 5 dead drives in 5 weeks spread out over 4 power supply units and 3 host adapters. I think you can see why I'm quick to blame the drives? Tell me if there is something else I'm not thinking of, I don't want to kill the 8 400gb seagate 7200.8's I just got.

I am managing alot of drives, storing hundreds and hundreds of hours of DV. I have had lots of drives die on me, but none as consistently as these WD's.

[Vertigo Acid]

Kept getting the drives from the same place? Kept handling them the same way once you got them? Shipping and handling can be killer

[davidlem]

Every drive has a 100% failure rating. The only variable is time. Some come from manufacturing with issues and won't last long at all. Some are used in hot, humid, dirty environments and will choke sooner than later. There's nothing you can do about it. There is no safe single HD. What you need to look into is redundancy. If your data is that important, BACK IT UP. Otherwise open a savings account specifically for future data recovery efforts.

[frank b]

I voted for "Other". I've never had a hard disk fail. However, I've only used Seagate, Western Digital, and Maxtor. My favourites are the Seagates.

[Discostu2120]

Every drive has a 100% failure rating. The only variable is time. Some come from manufacturing with issues and won't last long at all. Some are used in hot, humid, dirty environments and will choke sooner than later. There's nothing you can do about it. There is no safe single HD. What you need to look into is redundancy. If your data is that important, BACK IT UP. Otherwise open a savings account specifically for future data recovery efforts.


I shouldn't have said the data was lost, I was able to restore it all, it just took quite a while because we are talking about 2tb+ of storage here. Three of the drives that failed were on the backup system and one of the failed was on the primary server. Fortunately what was lost off the primary was backed up somewhere else and what was lost off the backup was easily restored from the primary server.

I take these precautions to have multiple levels of redundancy because I know that hard drives WILL die regardless of brand, model, etc. (The most important stuff is in a vault at the bank. This storage is for a small business, not personal use.)

And to the person asking about the shipping, 8 came from zip zoom fly, the other 5 came direct from Lacie. 3/8 failed from zzf, 2/5 failed from Lacie.

I am not out to say that all Western Digitals are bad or that no other drives will fail, just that I have had a very bad experience with WD2500's manufactured in H1 2004. I have stacks of WD1200's and WD800's that worked for years flawlessly and are only retired because they are too small for my uses.

[tdg]

Had several WD's die on me, one Maxtor, two Quantums.

No IBM/Hitachis (even still using the the "Deathstar" drive), Samsungs or Seagate's have ever failed on me.

[mr.dearthian]

The only Western Digital I've had fail was because I physically dropped it. Otherwise have had many that have been champs.

My Deathstar went without any warning. I was working in Windows, next minute it was like the lights are on but nobodys home (Windows stayed up but the drive stopped responding). Rebooted and couldn't get back in.

Mr. Dearthian

[enlightenedby42]

I'm not a !!!!!! by any stretch, but I've used nothing but WD since about '98 and have never had one crap out on me. These include a 13.6 gb 5400, a 40 gig 7200 from 2000 that I sold to a friend and know for a fact is still working, and a PATA 120 gig. Currently have a 250 gb WD external, a SATA 160 gb, and a 74 gig Raptor in this rig. All worked like champs.
I DID have a 340 meg Connor (i believe) die in a Packard Hell 486 DX2 50 machine, but I guess that's kind of beyond the scope of this most unscientific survey.. :)

[TeedOff]

I've had so many freakin' WD drives fail on me that I've lost count. I'd guess at least 10 to 12 WD drives failed. Only 1 IBM Deathstar and no Maxtor or Seagates failed yet.

-TeedOff

[Zok]

Fujitsu notebook HDD.

[Lazn_Work]

Every brand has died on me at some time.

But Maxtor has been the worst.. Every single one I have ever owned died on me, and now at work, we are having their "Fireball 3" drives die on a weekly basis. Luckily the OEMs (Gateway, IBM, and Dell) are replacing them with WDs or Seagates...

==>Lazn

[superkdogg]

Umm, you do realize that your format is horribly flawed because the best selling drives could fail at a lower rate and still be the most commonly reported failure....

[gulp35]

I had a 300gb WD drive fail on me one week ago.
It was my first drive failure ever, and I had only had it for about 2 months....
However, WD was very friendly in their RMA process... In fact I still have the dead drive while I'm typing this on the new one (I used their Advance RMA thingy, so I have to ship them my old drive in 30days or they use my CC to buy themselves a replacement.)

I own about 7 WD Drives Some of which I have owned for 3 years + so I believe that this one failure has nothing to do with their overall drive quality... You can have more RMA'd drives than any other company, but if you produce much more than any other Co. then your faulty/good drive ratio could be lower than anyone elses.

[DougLite]

I'd bet if I posted a thread "Which brand of HDD do you have?" the graph would look much the same ;)

[Discostu2120]

I think model and manufacture date is more pertinent to drive failure than brand. I've had good and bad drives from every manufacturer, but the failure rate of specific models is much more consistent. For example all but one deathstar I had died. Every single Seagate SCSI I had died(forget what model, but they were all the same). And like I said before, about half my wd2500's have died thus far.