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Reliable HDDs

C

carlmart

Gawd
Joined
Sep 17, 2006
Messages
691
As I have just had a crash from a 2.5" 1Tb Seagate HDD, that I was using quite intensely to download films & videos, I've started wondering on how reliable certain HDDs can be.

In this case, this HDD was housed on an external Welland box, so I wonder if heat dissipation was not an issue.

But I guess the power supply, coming through the USB cable, might not be an issue too.

It's not long since I bought that HDD, certainly less than a year, and I don't remember having an HDD that died so quickly. I will still send it to Seagate, if the warranty is valid, but doesn't solve the reliability problem.

My idea, at least for that application of downloading films & videos all day, is to go back to internal HDDs powered from the PC power supply, as I don't trust external boxes power supplies.

Am I exaggerating or do I have to try getting things to work reliably?
 
I have bad luck with cheap, no-name external enclosures and don't generally like them. But, with factory externals or good external units, I've had about the same luck as with internal drives. Some people say internals are more reliable, and my sample size is too small to mean anything.
 
I don't trust Seagate drives much at all. I've had way too many of them fail.

The most recent was a brand new 500GB that lasted a few days before Windows corrupted on it. Then when I went to re-install Windows, it started telling me that the drive was failing and to backup my data immediately.

Also have had multiple Seagate drives fail in a couple of SANs, and some Seagate drives fail in other desktops and laptops.

WD seems to be a lot more reliable from my experience.
 
My question is more about 2.5" HDDs vs 3.5" HDDs, and using them internally or externally.

I have already seen that brands are not necessarily an absolute "truth", as people talk based on the luck they had with certain brands in a specific country.

Where I live (Brazil), WD HDDs are more expensive than Seagate and not necessarily more reliable. I've had both, and had more luck with Seagates than WDs. Seagate's warranty is also better enforced than WD's. Just as an example, I bought a 2Tb WD through Amazon in 2009 when I was in the US, and brought it here, as some people thought HDDs which were sent here were refurbished or second class ones.

Well, my 2Tb WD failed two months later, and I sent it to WD here. They couldn't find the problem and instead of sending me another one, as Seagate did, they sent the same unit, unrepaired. It never worked again. So I am not a WD supporter really.

In spite of that I did buy a 1Tb 2.5" HDD some months ago, just to prove me wrong, but I use it incidentally.

My concerns are really for external cases, which might be ruining the HDDs, particularly due to poor power supplies.
 
I had issues with a cheap external enclosure too. It was sold empty to fill in your own hdd, but every now and then the connection would drop and instantly reconnect.
Complete ext. HDDs from Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung and ADATA worked fine for me so far.

I don't think externals are worse than internal drives, except for the higher risk of being dropped while carrying or handling the drive. Cheap and crappy enclosures though might give you a hard time.

But there are no reliable drives. Every storage media will die, eventually. Even when you pick a drive from the most reliable series, you might get one that dies after a few months. And all the others produced on the same lane that day keep going for 10 years. It's just luck, especially when buying drives in small quantities, like for home use. You can only determine more reliable series by buying large numbers of drives, using them extensively and do the numbers afterwards.
 
But there are no reliable drives. Every storage media will die, eventually. Even when you pick a drive from the most reliable series, you might get one that dies after a few months. And all the others produced on the same lane that day keep going for 10 years. It's just luck, especially when buying drives in small quantities, like for home use.
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Very well said.

You can only determine more reliable series by buying large numbers of drives, using them extensively and do the numbers afterwards.
Click to expand...

Even this would be extremely hard to do since you would need 1000s of drives and have to run them for years. But then after you get a conclusion the drive is no longer being manufactured or it has different parts (higher density platters, different heads, different motors ...)
 
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drescherjm said:
Even this would be extremely hard to do since you would need 1000s of drives and have to run them for years. But then after you get a conclusion the drive is no longer being manufactured or it has different parts (higher density platters, different heads, different motors ...)
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Backblaze just released their reliability findings with 27,000 drives, some as old as 4 years. Is that enough of a sample size?
 
dubslick said:
Backblaze just released their reliability findings with 27,000 drives, some as old as 4 years. Is that enough of a sample size?
Click to expand...

Although in my field I work with statisticians on much of the work I do, I am not a statistician. However some of their drive models had very small sample sizes. I am not sure what they could conclude about the model with 51 total drives. I would not be very confident about conclusions drawn from that.
 
drescherjm said:
Although in my field I work with statisticians on much of the work I do, I am not a statistician. However some of their drive models had very small sample sizes. I am not sure what they could conclude about the model with 51 total drives. I would not be very confident about conclusions drawn from that.
Click to expand...

It is easily enough to say that Hitachi drives have statistically significant lower failure rates than Seagate. By a wide margin.

Now, you can always say that, "it is different this time...Seagate has improved on the new models". While anything is possible, that is not a smart bet to make.

Of course, HGST drives will probably be completely gone in a few months (there was an agreement to keep HGST going independently for a couple years when WD acquired them). I wonder if 4TB and larger 3.5" drives from Toshiba will appear soon (Toshiba ended up with the IP and equipment for HGST 3.5" HDDs).
 
Any enclosure without any fan is just asking to cook the drive.

I've had good luck with the Rosewill aluminum cases with the 80x10 fan for the past few years.

Granted they are 2.0 and recent reviews on the 3.0 are not very good due to the controller used which I believe is ASmedia.
 
S.M.A.R.T. should show temp stats, you can use that at least to get general idea if excessive temperatures are being hit.
 
missalaire said:
S.M.A.R.T. should show temp stats, you can use that at least to get general idea if excessive temperatures are being hit.
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This is true but without active cooling the drive will get hot especially if you are doing long transfers. It also depends on what type of drive as well, green low RPM, low power drives or high performance drives.

I always monitor temps with crystaldiskinfo.
 
Samsung no longer exists for HDD since being bought by Seagate.
The F3 was a great drive, shame it's gone.
 
ep0x73 said:
Any enclosure without any fan is just asking to cook the drive.

I've had good luck with the Rosewill aluminum cases with the 80x10 fan for the past few years.

Granted they are 2.0 and recent reviews on the 3.0 are not very good due to the controller used which I believe is ASmedia.
Click to expand...

2.5" HDDs, at least 5400rpm types, should run cool enough, or at least I thought so. But the failing one is an ST1000LM024, which IS 5400rpm, so I'm no longer sure about that.

Perhaps they should be used without the case, to allow the air to flow.

Is there any other controller for USB 3.0 that is not ASmedia?

I have never tried factory encased HDDs, but maybe I should try that path.
 
missalaire said:
S.M.A.R.T. should show temp stats, you can use that at least to get general idea if excessive temperatures are being hit.
Click to expand...

Speaking of temps. At home I have two 4TB HGST (new brand name for Hitachi storage under WD ownership) Touro USB3 externals. They have 5k4000 drives inside an external enclosure. Both drives have hit nearly 60C according to SMART.
 
Sounds about right, externals can get pretty toasty.
I have a 1TB WD passport and when I copy files to it for awhile it's peaked around 100F even while sitting on top of my case which has a 120mm fan blowing on it.
I'd hate to see what it hits without some active cooling.
 
carlmart said:
Am I exaggerating or do I have to try getting things to work reliably?
Click to expand...
I have a couple 2-1/2" hard drives in external cases. They bounce around a lot. But they seem to function well.

I think problems with heat or power are less important than just luck of the draw.
 
ep0x73 said:
Sounds about right, externals can get pretty toasty.
I have a 1TB WD passport and when I copy files to it for awhile it's peaked around 100F even while sitting on top of my case which has a 120mm fan blowing on it.
I'd hate to see what it hits without some active cooling.
Click to expand...

100f falls within normal operation tolerances for hdd's. 60c however is definately something I would not be overly comfortable with having an external hdd operating at for extended periods.
 
Depends on the drive, I have seen some 55C is the max. Also consider running a drive near it's max is going to kill it's longevity.
I try to keep my drives <95F
 
All drives fail regardless of brand, price, cooling/heat and model. It is UP to the user to mitigate data loss by scheduling backups in event of a crashed drive.

WD Blacks, Red and other enterprise drives (including VR's) are probably as reliable as you're going to get from the WD wagon.

Regular Seagate's are a hit and miss but they are improving (somewhat to an extent). IME the Seagate LP's are more reliable than the regular Barracuda's.

Samsung's old F3 line was pretty good but I've had 3 of them fail on me last year with bad sectors. Replaced with Seagate LP's and been running fine since with about 6000hours on them counting daily.

Least reliable: All 2.5 laptop drives excluding SSD's. Avoid Toshiba at all cost which are usually OEM'd by HP for there laptops.
 
Backblaze did not have much luck with the LP, high failure.

"Backblaze said it will stop buying Seagate LP 2TB drives and Western Digital Green 3TB drives, because they just don&#8217;t work in the company&#8217;s environment"

All my blacks are still working perfectly, blue's are in the middle, red's have a bad track record.
VR enterprise, RE, SE should be fairly durable.

Seagate ES enterprise appear to be durable, their consumer barracuda drives though are not as they once were, corners are being cut.
 
I went shopping for HGST drives and have given up in despair. Where do you find the legit ones? I guess the backblaze blog created a run on them.
 
I had a Coolermaster X-craft enclosure with no fans and it cooked my WD black. My own fault to be honest. Never really thought about HDD temps until a lot of my data became corrupt. Now I've become paranoid about it.
 
Enterprise drives is one way to go to get a drive which at least should be more reliable than the consumer-drives. But there is no guarantee, bad luck can strike at these enterprise drives as well of course even though it is less likely to happen. The warranty is as far as I know always 5 year for the EP and usually 2 for the consumer-drives.
My Velociraptor 300GB, the first WD3000GLFS, was my only drive in a rig which I built in 2008. 44000+ hours and still going strong.
However it is not the maindrive in that rig no longer as I needed a bigger drive and also one with faster I/O. So a few months ago I bought a Seagate Constellation ST2000NM0053 after a lot of reading. So far no problem wiht the seagate other than that AAM/APM not can be altered.
 
lazimutha said:
I had a Coolermaster X-craft enclosure with no fans and it cooked my WD black. My own fault to be honest. Never really thought about HDD temps until a lot of my data became corrupt. Now I've become paranoid about it.
Click to expand...

For tight external enclosures with no fans, you want 5900 RPM drives like the WD Reds. WD Blacks go in your computer case.
 
evilsofa said:
I went shopping for HGST drives and have given up in despair. Where do you find the legit ones? I guess the backblaze blog created a run on them.
Click to expand...

Legit, is somebody selling fakes?

Last I checked Amazon and Newegg has plenty of HGST drives.
 
I mean, I get the feeling that a lot of the HGST drives on amazon and newegg have been taken out of Touro external drives and resold for profit, and I'm also seeing resellers offering their own warranties on some of the drives. I see complaints in customer reviews about drives without valid warranties or even used drives sold as new. They're all bare OEM drives. I look for the retail kit drives listed on HGST's site, but none of those model numbers seem to match up with what's on the market.

It really gets bad when I look for a 1TB HGST 3.5" internal drive; I guess those just aren't made anymore, so I guess I'd be looking at just getting a 1TB WD Red.
 
You could always try to just copy and paste true part numbers from HGST into Amazon, Newegg and other places to see what kind of hits you get.

I guess that is one thing those latest NAS HGST drives have is they are retail so they won't be tampered with or as you suggested yanked from some external.

I'd suspect Amazon sells the real deal but I'd be leery of 3rd party sellers.
 
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