How Do Hard Drives Work?

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The next time someone asks you "how does a hard drive work," send them a link to this video. Actually, the first 25 seconds of the video explains things quite nicely.
 
Now we need another video titled "When Drives Crash"
 
That was a great video. Most of that I did not know. I am just happy the HDD works more than 10 hours without failure. I just wish they would work on the reliability over density in priority. I have been thinking of trying a 4TB Seagate drive. I keep hearing about the high failure rate. Should I just stick with Hitachi/WD?
 
STrAYeR said:
That was a great video. Most of that I did not know. I am just happy the HDD works more than 10 hours without failure. I just wish they would work on the reliability over density in priority. I have been thinking of trying a 4TB Seagate drive. I keep hearing about the high failure rate. Should I just stick with Hitachi/WD?
Click to expand...

Hard drives are like cars, same bias reputation applied to an entire company by a person with a bad experience, inversely it is the same with good experiences. Buy from a manufacturer and stay away from rebrands and you should be fine. I have had drives fail from each and some last forever (it seems) but if data is really important to you, work with a nice backup strategy to preserve your stuff.
 
STrAYeR said:
That was a great video. Most of that I did not know. I am just happy the HDD works more than 10 hours without failure. I just wish they would work on the reliability over density in priority. I have been thinking of trying a 4TB Seagate drive. I keep hearing about the high failure rate. Should I just stick with Hitachi/WD?
Click to expand...

I've had the most problems with Seagate drives, especially in Laptops.
I just wish Dell wouldn't use so many of them.

Same with Server drives, Most my failures have been Seagate drives. Both Hitachi and WD have been excellent.

However, I had my first couple 4TB WD server drives fail last month, within few weeks of each other.
They where 3 years old, but still not happy about it. Lucky I've moved most my large raids to Raid 6, so I can handle a couple failures.
 
Darunion said:
Hard drives are like cars, same bias reputation applied to an entire company by a person with a bad experience, inversely it is the same with good experiences. Buy from a manufacturer and stay away from rebrands and you should be fine. I have had drives fail from each and some last forever (it seems) but if data is really important to you, work with a nice backup strategy to preserve your stuff.
Click to expand...

Also like cars, unless there's a problem with really early failure, by the time you know if the failure rate is high or low for a given manufacturing run, it's too late to buy from it. You just have to make sure you have backups, and cross your fingers that you don't need to use them. From what I've seen, everybody's 4TB drives are pretty good though.
 
For anyone interested in hdd reliability, try googling "Backblaze". They have some really nice data on which hdd's/manufacturers are the most reliable. 4TB HGST drives seem to be really solid.
 
Definitely interesting but a strings of drives from WD and Seagate that didn't last the warranty period was enough for me. Went SSD and not looking back.
Still use a mech HD for archive; but will never use one for a boot drive again.
 
I was going to keep my comments to myself and void the hard drive wars but they appear to be in full swing.. so I will just say I have had the same 160gb Seagate boot drive for nearly a decade and its my boot drive. It also has a perfect SMART rating, as unlikely as that sounds.

My issue with Seagate is with their larger drives. The bigger they get the worse they are, it seems.

As mentioned above though, all brands make good and bad drives. Any search can net you results to back up or dismiss claims from all camps.
 
auntjemima said:
I was going to keep my comments to myself and void the hard drive wars but they appear to be in full swing.. so I will just say I have had the same 160gb Seagate boot drive for nearly a decade and its my boot drive. It also has a perfect SMART rating, as unlikely as that sounds.

My issue with Seagate is with their larger drives. The bigger they get the worse they are, it seems.

As mentioned above though, all brands make good and bad drives. Any search can net you results to back up or dismiss claims from all camps.
Click to expand...

Yeah; I could say the exact same thing for their older drives. Ran a stripped pair of 80gig segate about 10 years; flawless. Finally stepped up to newer drives because the SATA interface was so much faster. But I had 2 WD "Green" 1TB drive fail in less than 2 years.
And one Segate 500 GB fail in a year.
This effected my main work system and I was out of business; can't have that ever; sent to a SSD; now all our computers have SSD boot drives.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Yeah; I could say the exact same thing for their older drives. Ran a stripped pair of 80gig segate about 10 years; flawless. Finally stepped up to newer drives because the SATA interface was so much faster. But I had 2 WD "Green" 1TB drive fail in less than 2 years.
And one Segate 500 GB fail in a year.
This effected my main work system and I was out of business; can't have that ever; sent to a SSD; now all our computers have SSD boot drives.
Click to expand...
Density or drive speed is more likely the reason rather than the connection interface. Not many HDDs can saturate an IDE cable in consumer models.

In my experience hard drives are about as reliable as their warranties indicate. If you buy a WD Blue with a 1 or 2 year, I forget what it is, it's probably just as reliable as a Seagate with the same duration. I don't think Seagate sells any 5 year drives though, which is why you see so many tech folk saying WD last longer. People who care about drive lifespan buy Black Editions, which in my experience with a 5200 node network, are far less likely to explode than a standard Seagate. Those users then report that WD drives are vastly more reliable, which they probably are because they spent money to get the higher quality.

Seagate is also well known for its lemon lines. It got so bad on the 720011's that they offered free data recovery to their customers I think.

Funny enough, the highest on the reliability chart for 2015 looks like Hitachi Deskstars, which WD now owns? I remember when people used to call them "Deathstars" because they exploded all the time. It appears that may no longer be the case.
 
Video is incorrect for any hard drive made within the last 20-25 years.

They don't use ferrite heads anymore and it is more complex than simply the alignment of magnetic particles as a 1 or a 0 (you have to take into account encoding schemes and quantum effects e.g. GMR).
 
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