Who Makes The Best Hard Drives?

Doesn't really matter what brand you choose.

More than likely all the chips come from Foxxcon.
 
Krenum said:
Doesn't really matter what brand you choose.

More than likely all the chips come from Foxxcon.
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Isn't Foxxcon primarily an assembler? I didn't think they did much in the way of IC manufacturing...

And why do we even care where the "chips" come from?

Mechanical systems will always be orders of magnitude less reliable than electrical systems. When a hard drive fails, I'd bet 99 times out of 100, it's because of one of the moving parts, not because of the controller board.

Now SSD's are another story...
 
The only drives I personally experience failing on me were 2 wd greens - just when they came out.
And a 1.5tb seagate that took my raid 0 down - didn't care that much about loosing a bunch of Mkvs
 
LOCO LAPTOP said:
I knew Seagate were bad. But damn... That is worst then I expected.
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You obviously haven't had to deal with Toshiba/Fujitsu drives. I was surprised to not see them in this study. They're so bad they make Seagate drives look good.

I had 12 servers that came in with 17 Fujitsu/Toshiba 146GB 15k rpm enterprise level hard drives each back in 2010. Of those, I have recorded 183 replaced within the 3 year warranty period, plus have had to purchase an additional 65 in the year since they went out of warranty. Thankfully, last week I replaced the last one. Most of my warranty replacements came in as Seagate drives, the few that did come in as Fujitsu drives got replaced again later. Now, every one of those machines is completely decked out with Seagate Saavios.

In less than 4 years, every single one of them went bad. These were supposed to be Enterprise level hard drives for servers. MTBF is supposedly over 2 million hours, but these fell far short of that.

My company specifically requests our suppliers exclude any Toshiba or Fujitsu drives.

I've heard from the guys at a certain retail outlet (I'd rather not get them in trouble with management) that the desktop Toshiba drives are at about a 50% failure rate within 30 days. They sell two pallets per week of 1TB drives at $60 each, only to send back one pallet a week in RMAs. It's actually hurting their bottom line.
 
I've had all brands fail on me. Maxtor was the worst, followed by Seagate.
I currently run WD and Samsung F4 drives in my system for storage and a pair of crucial SSD's for OS, apps, and games.
 
I don't understand. It's not like hard-disk drive technology is new. Its been so many years since hdds were invented, that by now these drives should have high reliability.

I had a Samsung drive start showing signs of failing. Me being smrt, I quickly backed up my stuff and proceeded to fill out RMA forms at Seagate's site. Seagate sends me the replacement drive. I put all my stuff back, no SMART errors. No signs off a problem. Deleted the backup. Then one day the replacement drive failed without any previous signs of a problem. Boy I was pissed. Still am.

I have avoided Seagate products for several years now. This article simply reaffirms my decision. Hopefully this article makes people avoid Seagate products.

"Green" drives. What is so green about using up resources to create a hard disk drive that will later fail and find itself in a land-fill.
 
What is so green about using up resources to create a hard disk drive that will later fail and find itself in a land-fill.
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All hard drives will fail over time.
 
I don't understand. It's not like hard-disk drive technology is new. Its been so many years since hdds were invented, that by now these drives should have high reliability.
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Manufacturers are more concerned with cost and squeezing more bits into basically the same hardware than making a drive that is expected to last decades. And if they made such a drive would you 2 thousand dollars for a 2TB drive with a 10 year warranty?
 
Zarathustra[H];1040564067 said:
Isn't Foxxcon primarily an assembler? I didn't think they did much in the way of IC manufacturing...

And why do we even care where the "chips" come from?

Mechanical systems will always be orders of magnitude less reliable than electrical systems. When a hard drive fails, I'd bet 99 times out of 100, it's because of one of the moving parts, not because of the controller board.

Now SSD's are another story...
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Foxconn is an assembler and connector maker. Most of the CPU sockets and slot connectors on motherboards sold today are Foxconn. (Asus actually specifically avoids their parts. I haven't seen a Foxconn part on an Asus board in over a decade.) They manufacture and assemble parts for many PC and server makers, like Dell, HP, and Intel. They also make the rack rails for HP and Intel servers.

They do not make any chips (ICs) at all. You're right there.
 
drescherjm said:
Manufacturers are more concerned with cost and squeezing more bits into basically the same hardware than making a drive that is expected to last decades. And if they made such a drive would you 2 thousand dollars for a 2TB drive with a 10 year warranty?
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My company probably would have a decade ago. Not so much these days. Many companies do spend a lot more for reliable hardware, especially during good times. During bad times for a company, this is one area where they will definitely cut.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040564067 said:
Mechanical systems will always be orders of magnitude less reliable than electrical systems. When a hard drive fails, I'd bet 99 times out of 100, it's because of one of the moving parts, not because of the controller board.
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You'd be surprised. I've fixed a number of hard drives by removing the circuit board and doing a heat reflow with a heat gun. Heat reflows don't work too well for very long, as no hard drive that I've done that lasted. Just enough to get the data off the drive before it's trashed. But yea, the circuit boards are a huge problem for drives. You just can't easily tell if it's a mechanical failure or electrical.
 
This is why i'm still running my spinpoint f3.i think ill give Hitachi a look though
 
SirMaster said:
....
I just wonder if the high failure rate is due to improper usage of the consumer Seagate drives where in a more proper home usage setting they might have a more similar failure rate to Western Digital.
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While I agree that maybe if the Seagates were in a gentler environment they may have lasted much longer, it does show that the other drives in the same environment can hold up longer in those harsher conditions. I'd read that at the others are more reliable, even if they'd all fail at the 6th year mark in a casual home environment.
 
drescherjm said:
Manufacturers are more concerned with cost and squeezing more bits into basically the same hardware than making a drive that is expected to last decades. And if they made such a drive would you 2 thousand dollars for a 2TB drive with a 10 year warranty?
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I think the drives should be "lifetime warranty" (not infinite years). But it will be at the hands of the consumer to dispose of the drive, before it fails, rather than having the drive fail while in active use.

I have hd drives that are old, still work (non-seagate) -- old IDE hitachi/wd drives, but their capacities don't meet my needs any longer. It is my choosing to get rid of them (garbage, sell, give to friend, etc). The hardware was sound, it didn't fail on me. I consider that good value, good quality. That's what I go back to when I shop for drives (consumer level).

It's not like I'm rapidly reading/writing constantly. These drives should be able to handle consumer level operations with ease without fear for data loss.

If Seagate is going to choose to go the cheap route, they should build systems in the drive that will detect a potential failure and inform the user to take action to prevent data loss.
 
Steve said:
....what I mean is "HOW THE HELL CAN A HARD DRIVE HAVE A 120% ANNUAL FAILURE RATE?" (not how they calculated it)

;)
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Say you have 100 drives total (to make things simple). Every one of those drives fails and is replaced with the same model drive. Now 20 of those replaced drives fail in the same year that they are keeping track of.

That is how you get 120% failure rate.
 
had 3 seagates fail on me last year all just out of warranty. 1 just out of the 1 year warranty, and two just out of the 2 year warranty. I havent bought anymore and I havent had any fail yet. I am done with seagate as far as that goes.
 
I stopped using Seagate years ago after having 3 disks fail on me within 12 months. They're fucking rubbish these days.
 
InternationalHat said:
I miss Samsung. Seagate make the hard drive equivalent of early 90's Hyundais.
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Me too. I bought several F3 and F4 1 and 2 TB drives when they were what everyone was talking about. All of them are still going strong. I remember getting them for really good prices too.
 
I almost forgot about Maxtor. Kind of fitting that they were acquired by Seagate. I never had to deal with them on a commercial scale (like I did Seagate drives being in mid 90's Dell workstations) but they had an awful reputation going back as far as I can remember.
 
The failure rate implies within the warranty period.

Normal HD listed for 500k MTBF expects a 3% failure rate per year.

Seagate would be seeing 24% drives failures a year on a 5 year warranty so that 120% of the drives expected to fail, had failed by year 5. Seagate expected a 20% failure rate by that same metric.

But by the advertised MTBF they are closer to 15 times worse than the rating....but this isn't anything new. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=6404
 
Ironically, my 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 died a year or so ago. I got it replaced, and that replacement died Saturday after about 50 hours of powered up time.

Bam. 200%
 
I've had god awful luck in my Data Center with the ST3200 Seagates.

WD's very rarely give me issues, but Seagates go bad on me with an average of 2 a month.
 
One interesting thing I see in these results is even though the 1.5 TB Seagate drives had high rma rates BlackBlaze purchased 5199 new 4TB Seagate drives in the last quarter of this study.
 
I am DONE with Seagate. Out of 6 drives in the last 5 years I have RMA'd 5 of them. When they come back they go on ebay, I won't touch them again. The last of the Barracudas (a 1.5tb, but I have used 500gb, 1tb's and 1.5tb's) I have is in an external enclosure and works ok for backup but I don't use it frequently. It's got to be out of warranty by now so when it goes it hits the trash can.

WD is king.

When I worked in a data center we replaced hard drives every single day. Almost all of them Compaq/HP branded Seagates.
 
Seagate have been a POS before they even bought Quantum (and I'm not sure why the heck they bought them), over a decade ago.

Hitachi, Western Digital, or the Samsung hard drives prior to Seagate taking that section over. Choice is pretty limited now.
 
I've been running Seagate hard drives for years without any issues. I have some old 40GB drives that still run like they're new, and the 500GB HD's I've been running heavily for the last 5 years havn't had a single issue. I've never had to do a single warranty replacement on a Seagate drive. I went through several WD drives back when 15-20GB was the normal range. That's when I switched over to using Seagate drives. I suppose everyone's experiences are different. Maybe I'm the exception here, or I'm doing something different? I do keep a massive amount of airflow on my drives to keep them cool. Maybe that has something to do with it?
 
Steve said:
....what I mean is "HOW THE HELL CAN A HARD DRIVE HAVE A 120% ANNUAL FAILURE RATE?" (not how they calculated it)

;)
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The hard drive breaks, it gets fixed and then breaks again.

Either that or it has a really steroetypical P.E. coach that exhorts the drive to give more than everything its got at being awful.
 
I should add that over the past several years I have not had a single Seagate drive fail on me... although that may have something to do with not having owned a Seagate drive.
 
westrock2000 said:
When they give you a "replacement", they simply replace your bad drive with someone else's. They always say "of equal or greater value", some people get equals.
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Kind of like what PNY did with the Nvidia cards a while back?
 
Funnily enough, outside of high vibration environments and RAID, Seagate's consumer grade drives are pretty reliable. Well, their Green drives and LP drives still suck ass.

Remember people, this data is only relevant if you're expecting your harddrives to exist in a similar environment to BackBlaze's test. That is why Harris said he'll still be buying Seagate harddrives.
 
I have had Seagate, Samsung, and WD in the last 5 years. None of them have been really 100% for me. Then again, they have not been outright bad. The only drive I ever had bad out of the box was years ago, it was a Hitachi. They replaced it, and all was golden with that drive. In fact it ran at least 7 years I know of for sure.
 
Hitachi and WD drives that I have are still running strong after 2-3 years of use. I mostly use the Hitachi for steam game space. With all games installed it's 500+/- GB of data. I've read a lot of bad things about seagate drives so never used one. In the future if that changes I will give them a run through.
 
Strange results compared to my experiences with drives. In my experience Hitachi drives fail constantly. Admittedly most of my experience with Hitachi drives has been with laptop drives though.

It's too bad they didn't include WD Black drives. They have been the most reliable drives by far for me, even if they do come at a price premium. I've literally never seen a WD Black drive fail in any computer I've built (for myself or others). I had to retire a 80GB a few years ago (after 8+ years of use) because it was just too small/slow for modern tasks, and I still have a 250GB Black PATA drive in a secondary PC from around 2005.
 
FFFFFffffuuuuu.

The Seagate Momentus Thin in my Ultrabook shit the bed after a little over a year. I attributed it to being dropped/knocked around a few times. Though, I've never had a laptop drive fail before.

Guess what just I bought to replace it yesterday. A Seagate Momentus Thin. :facepalm:
 
Herpa derpa I have a drive XYZ brand and it died after a couple months therefore XYZ brand sux, potato.
 
I used to get Seagate drives with the 5yr warranty. Had one 500GB model crap out on me after a little over 3 years of use; this was around 5-6 years ago maybe? Filed the claim on their website, they issued an RMA number, sent me the pre-paid packaging kit, and about a week later I received a brand new unit. Smooth as glass and by far the most easiest, fastest, and memorable warranty RMA I've ever gone through.

Unfortunately, I lost a lot of faith in Seagate drives when they dumped their 5yr warranty and scaled it back to a 3yr, then eventually to only a 2yr while seemingly more and more stories of product failures and CS nightmares were cropping up.

Along the way, I've also had experience with Toshiba, Quantum, Epson, Maxtor, WD, Hitachi, Samsung, Fujitsu, JVC, Conner, Mitsubishi, DSI, and probably a few others I'm forgetting.

The worst, for me, were the Quantum Bigfoot drives and any drive bearing Conner or Maxtor.
 
I posted in one of these threads a while back that Seagate drives have never given me problems. Since then, I've had two of the 7200.11's crap out on me, the first in warranty and the replacement out of warranty. I'm going to attempt the fix that I found, but not worried if it doesn't work.
 
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