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HDD reliability study

Which brand has failed on you?

  • Total voters
    131
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)
 
FlatLine84 said:
BTW, I've just been to lazy to take the maxtor out.
Click to expand...

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 !
 
Malogato said:
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)
Click to expand...

vote the one you feel is the "worst" :p
 
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.
 
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
 
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.
 
DougLite said:
Then again, I guess not everybody has as many drives as me :p
Click to expand...
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.
 
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
 
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.
 
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?

 
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.
 
I really think something else is at play there, PSU or bizarre incompatibility between the host and drives.
 
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.
 
Kept getting the drives from the same place? Kept handling them the same way once you got them? Shipping and handling can be killer
 
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 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.
 
davidlem said:
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.
Click to expand...


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