HDD drive failure

[Mervin]

my 5th Western Digital HDD failing this year 2x 500G 2.5 inch and 1 x 500G 3.5 and 2 x 1TB 
It gets replaced but damn...

[dotVIBE]

youch,

thx for sharing. will steer clear then. not in the same machine though, eh?

[Mervin]

Nope, laptop, external drive, development machine, NAS RAID device, and music source for my network.

[LAV]

Quite unusual, but still scary.

[GearSlave]

And people could never understand why I would avoid WD like the plague.

In around 2004 WD had a serious issue with their 120GB drives and we ended up having 28 replaced in the same storage cloud within 3 weeks. They denied any issue, unlike IBM did with their 80GB drives a few years before then. We haven't touched WD drives since. When Seagate had an issue with their 1TB 7200.11's, they brought out a firmware patch to resolve the issue, at least they addressing issues and not just being shtum.

My current fav's are Seagate and Hitachi. In fact, we completed a 1100 drive array using 500GB Hitachi drives 2 years ago. We had 2 failures in the whole array so far.

[Prince]

 

That's sad. I had one of my Seagate 500gb SATA II drives fail on me this year, only after a year in use. I discovered that the "reallocated sector count" failed because of the SMART monitoring, which causes the drive not to start-up. If I disabled SMART on the drive it was still ok, but discovered the drive was running in 16bit mode compared to the 32bit mode it was supposed to run in.

The problem stems from when bad sectors were still marked manually with debug. (alphabet will remember these drives)
  These days the bad sectors are built in and automatically marked and reallocated, if a problem occurs on the hard drive with a bad sector. What happened in my case was that the "reallocatable sectors" ran out, thus the drive failed. I was lucky though, I could recover the data.

I also suspect because of the high platter speeds of 7200rpm and up on the bigger drives that this seems to cause instability, which results in the failures, I have seen.

I recently received a 2.5" external 1tb drive from work for backup. It lasted a week and I never dropped or knocked the drive. Yes, and it was a Seagate!! In, similar vein I bought a Samsung 2.5" external drive from Sahara, that only spins at 5400rpm and to date it has been rock solid.

I use a program called crystaldiskinfo, which monitors the hard temperatures and other relevant hard drive info and its free.
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

just my humble opinion.

[ara]

I have had a good run with WD drives with 1 falling out of 16 drives (1TB and 1.5TB drives). Each drive though have its issues.
Like WD currently have a load cycle problem which can be fixed with one of their utilities (internal drives green drives that parks the head to often)
A year ago Seagate had problems with drives being bricked left right and center that caused a big "scandal" on the internet.
I lost like 4 out of 8 Samsung internal drives because of a bad batch of drives and probably bad transport
I have not heard anything bad on Hitachi but they are so difficult to get in SA (anybody knows where to get them?)

Moral of the story is to backup important stuff. HDD don't last forever .

[GearSlave]

Hitachi but they are so difficult to get in SA (anybody knows where to get them?)

Asbis are the Agents, we get Hitachi from them. I notice Esquire bringing them in as well, but only the desktop drives, not the raid ready ones

[Gerhard]

Haven't had joy with Seagate myself. I recently read a review on the best HDD for different price brackets and Samsung won nearly all of them. I don't have much personal experience with them myself though.

Seems like SSD's are the way to go. The technology has matured to the point where it can be taken seriously - provided you buy the right drives.

I am getting my Corsair F120 tomorrow

[chrisg]

I have following:

2 x WD 320 GB 2.5" for about 2.5 years

2 x WD 500 GB 2.5 " for 1 to 1.5 years

2 x WD 1 TB 2.5" for 5-6 months

1 x Seagate 640 GB 2.5" for 1 year

all for personal/professional use as laptop backup drives and for music and movies. No bad sectors or any other problems. I travel quite frequently  and make sure the HD have enough room in hand luggage. Sometimes use extra foam padding. Never place them in tight places where they can be distorted or bent - pretty obvious. So far so good (knocking wood

[GradoMan]

I remember the Hitachi Deathstar all too well.  Have also had WD, Maxtor and Seagate fail me in the past.

Changed over to all Samsung around five years ago and have yet to have a drive bugger out on me.  The (HD103UJ) 1TB drives are also the coolest running and quietest 1TB drives I've ever had in my rigs, which is a major plus.

[Mervin]

I thjink my problem is that many of my drives are used more than a standard user's, many of my machines are 24x7 on and high activity due to forensic analysis.  I will look at the high availability drives with a high MTBF value.

[chrisg]

In IDE/PATA days SCSI drives were kings. Are they replaced now entirely by SATA II in Raid arrays?

[Robert_E]

SCSI's been mostly replaced by SAS,  Serial attached Scsi in servers

[egd]

Haven't had joy with Seagate myself. I recently read a review on the best HDD for different price brackets and Samsung won nearly all of them. I don't have much personal experience with them myself though.

Cheapest and definitely nastiest drives around.  I will NEVER, EVER buy a Samsung HDD again.  I had 5 x 250GB SATA II and 4 failed inside the first year.