Raptor Reliability

S

Sovereign

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 21, 2005
Messages
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I bought a 150GB Raptor (no window) with my "super" gaming build in May 2006. It failed within weeks, beginning with me being unable to power down the system with the drive installed (it would "power down," then thirty seconds later it would come back on). Then the drive started throwing errors. I got it RMAed under the warranty. This was in June 2006, roughly.

Fast forward to October 2009. My replacement Raptor has died. I took the box to the UPS store this morning to ship, having been approved for advance RMA.

Now I'm not trying to blame anyone, or anything, I'm just trying to figure out if anything I've done would be correlated to a hard drive dying.

One friend suggested my Raptor got too hot. Anyone else "cook" a Raptor just from 24/7 use in a decently-well ventilated case (mine's a Thermaltake Armor)? I also wonder if switching from Molex to SATA and back again during rewiring might have killed it, or if the PSU might be killing the drive (it's a PC Power and Cooling 850 SSI). I never plugged Molex AND SATA in at once, though. There are three other hard drives in the system; one failed early (months after I got it), the other's been going strong. These drives are Caviar Blue 750s.
 
My first one died within a month. The replacement has been running for 3 years now without problems. I have an Antec Super Lanboy.

I know this may be a shock, but computer parts will eventually die. ;)
 
When your dealing with mechanical drives, there is not set life span. I still have an original 36GB Raptor that is still kicking.

I have a maxtor HDD that is over 10 years old

I have a seagate that failed after less than a month.

There is just no way to predict, the raptors are a top quality drive though
 
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but my experience has been that keeping a drive on 24/7 is actually better than turning it on and off every day.

And how hot did it get? Google's paper (http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf) suggests that new drives would rather be too hot than too cold, while older drives (>= 3 years) prefer the reverse.

But yeah, like everyone said, HDs are just unreliable. Especially 3+-year old ones. They have a good chance of dying any given minute.
 
i have my raptor 150 with window in one of the rubberband suspension things with a 80mm set on low voltage blowing some air @ it.... been chugging along just fine for the past 3 years when I got it as a RMA for 1st window drive that died after a year.
 
my 150gb raptor lasted me about 2 yrs before it croaked. it stopped spinning up.

i have barely even used the replacement so i cant say anything about that one.
 
I'm just asking because the Raptor has been the least reliable part in my system as measured by "number of times I've had to replace this part."

So far, I've replaced...
150GB Raptor - Twice
K8N Diamond Plus - Once. The replacement's floppy controller failed while flashing the BIOS--got a refund and purchased a diff. board after MSI led me through two months of not having my computer working and me going at them through the Better Business Bureau.
WD Caviar 750GB - Once
7900GTX (the "7900 self-cooking" bug) - Once per card (two in SLI)

I hope this can end now...
 
I've had 8 Raptor drives and I've had to replace more than half of them multiple times. Fortunately I've gone to SSD's and haven't looked back.
 
Dan_D said:
I've had 8 Raptor drives and I've had to replace more than half of them multiple times. Fortunately I've gone to SSD's and haven't looked back.
Click to expand...

If only I weren't a budget-constrained college student...I'd have SSD RAID0 by now.
 
Sounds like the 150Gb's are more likely to die just from hearing a few people chime in here. But there's probably a lot of people who didn't chime in who have perfectly working drives..... so skewed stats I'm sure!

My 74Gb Raptor works great still at 5+ years and I've had it in a harddrive enclosure about 1/2 of that time which makes the temps a few C higher!

I think one of the many things that the Velociraptor 300Gb was supposed to improve upon was reliablity. Maybe the 150Gb's were prone to dying.
 
I've had problems from almost the entire Raptor line:

Death Toll (Includes replacement / RMA drives)

4 74GB Raptors
2 150GB Raptors
1 300GB Velociraptor

Total Drives Purchased:

2 74GB Raptors
4 150GB Raptors
2 300GB Velociraptors

I've also had one Western Digital SE16 500GB drive die on me right after owning it for about a year. It is one of two that I own.
 
I bought my 74GB from a HF member about a year ago and its been good since then. I believe its about 5 years old.
 
I've about had it with Western Digital drives. I'm switching to Seagate most likely. For performance drives, I'm all about Intel SSD's.
 
Dan_D said:
I've about had it with Western Digital drives. I'm switching to Seagate most likely. For performance drives, I'm all about Intel SSD's.
Click to expand...
Huh. Really? Have you had better success with Seagate? I've got a 1TB Caviar Black in my cart right now. :(
 
ya, i also had a 500gb WD die after 1 yr of use. cool thing is WD has great customer service, so i never had an issue with replacement.
i am also switching to SSDs... about to pull the trigger on 2 intel G2s....
 
TheQuestian said:
Huh. Really? Have you had better success with Seagate? I've got a 1TB Caviar Black in my cart right now. :(
Click to expand...

Actually Western Digital has been my go-to hard drive choice for almost 15 years. Seagate was only my choice in SCSI drives. Their IDE drives used to blow goats. In any case all I've had were Raptors for the last few years and the occasional larger capacity drive for WD or Maxtor. I've avoided Maxtor since Maxtor bought Quantum and WD has been shit for me the last few years.

So I'll give Seagate a try.
 
Is anyone aware of any actual statistics on HD failure rates by manufacturer? This type of thing would surely be very easy for any large company or data center to compile. Everyone has anecdotes about this manufacturer or that manufacturer producing drives that fail but they're all pretty worthless because you can find enough people saying bad and good things about all of them. We need some statistics!
 
TheSpoon said:
Is anyone aware of any actual statistics on HD failure rates by manufacturer? This type of thing would surely be very easy for any large company or data center to compile. Everyone has anecdotes about this manufacturer or that manufacturer producing drives that fail but they're all pretty worthless because you can find enough people saying bad and good things about all of them. We need some statistics!
Click to expand...

Not really. I think Google did something like that but I think it was between commercial and consumer drives, high heat, low heat, etc. I don't think it was broken down by brand. The problem is that it's hard to get these statistics together because the company's don't publish enough data on the subject.

In my experience Maxtor declined in quality after buying Quantum. Quantum pretty much always sucked and had some really aweful drives. That being said, like Seagate Quantum had some good SCSI drives, but lousy IDE drives. Since these companies started producing SATA drives things have changed. Western Digital has always been a solid manufacturer up until recently. (Just my experience.) The rest of the decade plus I've been working in this industry I've seen pretty good results from them in general. Their SCSI offerings (when rarely available) have been bad but their IDE/SATA drives have been excellent. IBM drives sucked balls outside of the laptop market. Now they are Hitachi and while they are better, they are still plagued with bad firmware. Samsung Spinpoint drives seem to work well. I've got some on my test bench that have been abused for a few years now and are still going strong. Fujistsu, NEC and others have generally sucked. They aren't bad mechanically but their firmware could use some work.

Seagate has had some recent firmware issues of their own as well.
 
Yeah I saw the Google paper. It's very nice, but it's really a shame they didn't break it down by manufacturer. Must be some political-type reason.

For the record, the only HD that has ever failed on me was a Samsung.
 
Well, most people that I've seen that get disgusted with a certain manufacturer, it's pretty much the only one they've been using, for a while. Sure, you're going to get a bad drive once in a while, it's fact of life. If you only have drives from one or two manufacturers, you're going to see more of those drives go bad... and it's going to bias you.

I've had a couple of Maxtor drives and 3-4 Western Digital drives fail on me. But I haven't used much else, the occasional Seagate and IBM drive. Oh, had a couple of Deathstars fail on me back when they were the crap drives, too.

So far, Raptor reliability has been good (knock on wood). 2 x 74's in my main rig for ~5 years now. I recently picked up 3 150GB VRaptors on here, a couple used, one new. All seem good so far.
 
TheSpoon said:
For the record, the only HD that has ever failed on me was a Samsung.
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+1, the only drives that have failed on me in the last 10 years have been Samsungs. A 750GB F1 (lasted few months) and a notebook drive (lasted few days). I've been using lots of Seagates and WD without issue. I've had a few maxtors and Hitachi's that have been fine too. Old drives seem to get louder or maybe new drives just keep getting quieter.
 
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one dead 500gb WD SE16 drive also (a month ago)
3 drive 74GB raptor raid 0 as OS drive, going very strong even 2 years later. i do find it odd that my write speeds are faster then my reads, but whatever.
 
I bought my 74GB Raptor in January of 2006 and it's been my boot/windows/game of the month drive ever since, no problems. The computer is on 24/7 (folding, of course!). Come to think about it, I don't think I've ever had a hard drive fail, though I'm sure I don't purchase as many as a lot of folks around here.
 
storagereview.com attempted to build a reliability database before the site went moribund, otherwise I don't know if any reliability data or even attempts to collect some.

My impression, anecdotally, is that the 36GB Raptor was one of the most durable mechanical drives ever made, and each subsequent generation has remained reliable but incrementally less so than its predecessors, and that the 300GB models are still too new for there to be much evidence about its reliability.
 
Wow. I've had the following Raptors with no problems:

2x 36gb Raptor
3x 74gb Raptor
1x 150gb Raptor
1X 300gb VR

Are all of yours adequately cooled?

I handle building systems here at work and build systems on the side. In the last 5 years I've installed over 100 drives in builds and upgrades. I've used WD, Seagate, Maxtor, and Hitachi - in that order of most to least. From memory, I've had to RMA one Seagate 7200.9 that was DOA from Newegg and one older 160gb WD drive.

I guess I got all my bad drive karma cleared out during the IBM Deskstar fiasco when I had to RMA four drives 3 times each.
 
[LYL]Homer;1034747785 said:
Wow. I've had the following Raptors with no problems:

2x 36gb Raptor
3x 74gb Raptor
1x 150gb Raptor
1X 300gb VR

Are all of yours adequately cooled?

I handle building systems here at work and build systems on the side. In the last 5 years I've installed over 100 drives in builds and upgrades. I've used WD, Seagate, Maxtor, and Hitachi - in that order of most to least. From memory, I've had to RMA one Seagate 7200.9 that was DOA from Newegg and one older 160gb WD drive.

I guess I got all my bad drive karma cleared out during the IBM Deskstar fiasco when I had to RMA four drives 3 times each.
Click to expand...

Yes, all of mine were more than adequately cooled.
 
Had good luck with the 36GB raptors, still have a 74GB raptor(backup drive if SHF(shit hits fan), recently had 2 150GB raptors fail, (RMA'd them and put the recert's on ebay). Just glad they gave them the 5 yr warranty. I still have a 10 yr old Seagate 80GB IDE running strong, and my 320GB cuda.10's have been flawless since release.
 
I've been using my 150gb Raptor X (window) for about 2+ yrs with no problems.
 
I've only had one raptor out of 7 fail. It was a 1st gen 150GB Raptor that had bad sectors. The other drives have each survived at least 2 years of numerous start/stop cycles and constant use.
 
I've been running two 36GB raptors for 2 years, constantly powered on with only reboots for patches, and shutdowns for hardware upgrades and cleaning. No problems here.
 
I had two 36 gig raptors in a raid and one of them developed a bad sector after a year or so. Since then I've had a 74 gig and a 300 which are both still running fine.
 
Had a RAptor 35GB when it firt came out... Read speed degraded over time, so i had to pull it out of my system.
 
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Well my replacement Raptor seems to work "just fine" even though it's a refurb. Let's hope it stays that way.
 
i have raptor 150s and they work fine. i have 2 in a family members machine and they running fine to. <shrug>
 
Storage Review has the largest reliability database I know about from actual users. You gotta register.
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I've owned a half dozen of the Raptors starting with the 36GB and haven't lost a single one.

FWIW the difference between buying OEM drives that are repackaged for shipment and retail package drives. A lot of etailers don't handle drives properly and don't package them for shipment properly. This is a recipe for a lot of DOA's and shortened service life.

oc
 
I've had eight raptors so far, 4x 74GB 3.5" variants and, currently, 4x 80GB Velociraptors. One of the old 74GB raptors was a first gen model and it's still going strong in my buddy's machine (along with the other 3). Zero issues with any of my raptor drives, ever. Luck of the draw, I suppose.
 
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