Who Makes The Best Hard Drives?

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.

Oh I had to deal with them. Yes they are worst... by a long shot.
 
I have a Western Digital Caviar Blue HDD as well that has lasted about 2 weeks so far... That's good I guess...
 
Backblaze is using the drives in an environment they were neither designed nor rated for; the fact that the WD drives are capable of operating beyond their rated specifications does not mean that Seagate drives are crap; only that they aren't as over-engineered. But since Seagate doesn't advertise their consumer grade hard-drives as being suitable for a high-vibration, high-temperature 24/7/365 server environment, it is not a problem.

I'd be more interested in seeing statistics from say, Dell or HP on warranty returns for various makers of hard drives. That would be far more useful in determining overall reliability.
 
I don't believe that at all. Toshiba is, by far, the worst drive on the planet. They almost always fail after 1 year. We have been selling Seagate for the past 2 - 3 years and haven't had one fail yet to my knowledge.
 
Oh and, of course it's going to fail if it's a GREEN drive. That's the worst idea for a drive. Lets make this hard drive constantly turn on and off to save energy and reduce life.
 
No one who manages a large number of machines/servers is surprised by this.

Back up your stuff, regardless of which drives you use.
 
Interesting study. Curiously, I have friends who like to give me old hardware, including hard drives. Maxtors and Seagates are usually fucked. Either they're dead or have some other physical problem. All of my old Western Digitals work no problem. I've had two Hitachi drives - one desktop, and one notebook. The notebook drive is kicking, desktop not.
 
I've mainly only had 2 bad experiences with Seagate drives

-One being a 5GB my bro bought back in the 90's that had bad sectors
-Second being a 500GB Hybrid drive that was bad from newegg. Had a Dent in the top. RMA'd with Newegg and sold it.

Currently got a like 3x 320GB perp drives that were all working when pulled.
2x 2TB ST2000DM01 from external USB3.0 with no issues
1x 2TB ST2000DL003 LP bought just before the floods and I mean just before! According to HD Tune it has 488 Days running strong!

I pulled a ST2000DM01 from its enclosure after copying a WD640GB Black and can say it was HOT! I'm sure that would shorten its life and if you got stacks of NAS that doesn't help.

Still got a working 500MB IDE Seagate that still works :cool:
 
Have had 5 hard disks fail on me in the past decade

1 was an IBM deskstar
4 were seagates (including two 1.5tb drives that died the year the warranty expired)

though the deskstar was the only one to go out spectacularly (never had a hard disk explode on the inside, it sounded like a million tiny pieces of glass shaking around)
 
Have had 5 hard disks fail on me in the past decade

I have had 5 fail so far this year. Although I have about 200 spinning 24/7/365 and the failed drives were all 5+ years old.
 
How in the hell can a hard drive have a 120% annual failure rate?

I suspect he is counting in repeat failure rates. Basically, for every 100 they move 120 fail (including replacements for the first 100).

Something like that :)

Kinda like the XBOX 360 and the RROD :). My neighbor has been through FOUR of them. If you look at just him, that is much higher than a 100% failure rate.
 
Over the last few years, I've tested 8-10k HDDs.

Only thing I've learned is that certain series tend to be terrible, more so than any particular brand.

The hourglass Samsungs, and WD SEs (especially the black chassis), Hitachi Deskstar (run hot) are trash. Some WD blue die way too soon.

Maxtor I test for giggles, sometimes one will surprise me with 70k hours and not one bad sector.

WD black generally pretty good, and I've not come across any one Seagate that's just awful, but they all seem to fail a little more than the good stuff from other makers.
 
though the deskstar was the only one to go out spectacularly (never had a hard disk explode on the inside, it sounded like a million tiny pieces of glass shaking around)

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of sectors suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

There's a reason they called those drives "deathstars". :D
 
The funny thing is I had dozens of deskstars at work running 24/7/365 and I believe I had only 1 failure total and all the rest got retired because they were too small not even old age. Luck comes into play with a small sample size.
 
I almost forgot about Maxtor. Kind of fitting that they were acquired by Seagate.


My office had a lot of old pentium systems, and almost every drive that failed in them over the past 6 years was a Maxtor. About 1/2 the system are still in use (consolidated the best parts and upgraded to Windows 7). I made sure I didn't keep any of the few remaining maxtor drives that still worked.

I've had several of the Seagate drives in newer laptops fail the last few years. WD and Hitachi have bothe been great, both in the desktops and servers.
 
My Samsung Spinpoints have been some of the best drives I've used. Got 6 of em in my rig right now 4x1TB, 2x2TB. Why'd they go and sell to Seagate?
Mine are all working great too. My home pc as well as my company pcs all have them
 
WD SEs (especially the black chassis)[/QUOTE said:
Do you mean the old Caviar SE drives or the new SE enterprise drives?

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Pre SSD I used to run RAID 10 in my two computers. I've had six of the eight die in two years. Five WD and one hitachi. I learned the RMA process really well and to keep the proper boxes on hand.

I don't miss platter drives at all.
 
Just had my first hard drive die this past month. Was a 2 TB Seagate that was 26 months old (just outside the 2 year warranty ffs.....). My 3 year old Samsungs (1TB 7200 XXXXSJ and 2 TB 5400 RPMs) are still going strong without issue. All of my drives are kept well cooled and stay around 32-35C.

Replaced the dead Seagate with a Toshiba drive (Toshiba bough Hitachi HD 3.5" division in 2012). Heard bad things about Seagate, but took a chance on one for $65, never again.
 
Pre SSD I used to run RAID 10 in my two computers. I've had six of the eight die in two years. Five WD and one hitachi. I learned the RMA process really well and to keep the proper boxes on hand.

I don't miss platter drives at all.

I'm just amazed at this. In 20 years and countless hard drives of building computers, including the last few years of my FreeNAS ZFS box with 8 drives, I have never had a single hard drive fail.

I've had partitions become corrupted resulting in data loss, but never a failure of the actual drive.

I have - on the other hand - had an SSD fail on me (first gen OCZ Agility)
 
Ahh good ol Maxtor. I had heard for several years about their bad rep but finally bit the bullet on one back in 2003 or so, a 120gb ide drive I think. It was a heckuva deal, I tells ya! The first one lasted maybe a year but it started having various errors after 6 months of use and took 6 months to finally croak. The replacement drive lasted no more than 6 months before it died. The 2nd replacement still sits in an old Duron 1ghz machine unused.

I've had WD and Seagate drives die on me, more WD than others but I use them the most. We'll see how long my various 1TB/1.5TB and 2TB seagate externals last. The one that did surprise me the most was a WD RE 500GB drive a few years ago, I haven't fired up its replacement drive in awhile.
 
Dunno about who makes the best HDs, but I put an OCZ(Samsung) 64G SSD into an ASUS G51s laptop while in Iraq, and they both still run terrific. I'm really glad too cause that little bastard cost me $1,000 too buy back then.
 
I wonder if the hybrid drives like Seagate momentus would have a better lifespan or a worse one.
 
Still got my 2 250GB Hitachi's from 2004 running, one of them is showing a SMART issue with vibration damage (not sure if it's the one that traveled with me, or went on the cargo ship for the 5000 mile journey in 2006), backed up everything just in case, will soon be replaced with a 2TB Samsung, or Hitachi.

Seen too many Seagates just up and die, or display SMART failures the week after the warranty expired, more so recently.
 
I would expect the USB stick part of the drive not to have much of an impact on the reliability of the mechanical part.

I agree, but I would expect that the extra caching would reduce drive seeking and so in theory, would reduce the amount of hard reads.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040572278 said:
I'm just amazed at this. In 20 years and countless hard drives of building computers, including the last few years of my FreeNAS ZFS box with 8 drives, I have never had a single hard drive fail.

I've had partitions become corrupted resulting in data loss, but never a failure of the actual drive.

I have - on the other hand - had an SSD fail on me (first gen OCZ Agility)

I'm with you on this one. I've never ever once had a platter drive fail, and I've personally used about 20 of them, and installed probably another 20ish into relatives computers. My very first SSD experience however was with a corsair M4 512 - and I had back to back drives (original and it's replacement) crap themselves and die within the first 24 hours of powerup. My thrid has been kicking just fine now for almost two years. Weird...
 
Probably doesn't matter if you don't buy in large quantities. There were some bad Seagate batches, but its been fixed, and I still have the 500GB Barracuda with over 52K hours and counting..
 
I'm with you on this one. I've never ever once had a platter drive fail, and I've personally used about 20 of them, and installed probably another 20ish into relatives computers. My very first SSD experience however was with a corsair M4 512 - and I had back to back drives (original and it's replacement) crap themselves and die within the first 24 hours of powerup. My thrid has been kicking just fine now for almost two years. Weird...

I have one Intel (four years old) and four Samsung SSD (mix of 840 Pro, EVO and non-pro) and never had one issue with them.

When I had the Hitachi drive die, I didn't want to dick with the RMA so I just ordered another WD, it was dead before it got to the desktop.

I made sure to never get a sandforce SSD or OCZ (samething at the time).

My favorite HDD were the IBM Deskstars, never had one of them die. Seagate drives are bad but nothing will come close to the crap that was Quantum.
 
I have a Maxtor 7.5GB I believe that I somehow managed to rack up almost 80K hours on it. It still works, just a few remapped sectors.

The Maxtor and Seagates that were made in Singapore were pretty durable. I still have a few pata Seagates that all work fine in a ancient rig.

As for today, Toshiba's are one of the worst if you read reviews, they are made in China at a old Hitachi factory.
 
I have a 100MB Quantum SCSI drive from 1988 that still works, it has all the software for my Atari MegaST computer on it. :eek:

The WD 640GB Black I bought in 2004 has been running almost continuously since then. :D

The 2 32GB 10K's and 2 150GB Velocirators are also running fine. :p

The 2 Corsair 120GB Force GTX's are fantastic. :cool:

The only blatant failure was the Seagate 7200.11 500GB, they replaced it, the replacement doesn't work, I basically gave up bothering to RMA it and will never buy from them again.
 
Have any of those drives cracked the 100K mark?
I recall a IT friend who swore by Quantum fireball's as being almost unbreakable.
The downfall of course is they were small.
 
I have one Intel (four years old) and four Samsung SSD (mix of 840 Pro, EVO and non-pro) and never had one issue with them.

When I had the Hitachi drive die, I didn't want to dick with the RMA so I just ordered another WD, it was dead before it got to the desktop.

I made sure to never get a sandforce SSD or OCZ (samething at the time).

My favorite HDD were the IBM Deskstars, never had one of them die. Seagate drives are bad but nothing will come close to the crap that was Quantum.

canon Agreed!!! I personally own 520 120gb which is of SF based same controller as OCZ, If SF works fine in intel why not for OCZ??? Also I think OCZ failures are more because of OCZ's quality issues - it is well known for it, Any way my 520 i never had any kind of issues till now believe me Intel works like clam!!
 
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