Hard Disk Drive Failures

Martyr

Has anyone got preference when it comes to buying hard drives these days?
Manufacturers, capacity, type of setup..

I'm fed up buying new drives only for them to fail after a few months of use.
Last drive I bought couple of months ago was a 1TB model by Hitachi, which has only half its capacity used so far yet has already started to show controller errors in the event logs (windows).

Seems like there hasn't been many reliable drives since an 80GB i bought..lasted 3 years before giving up.

how common is it these days? alot of people i know complain about high failure rates in 500,750 and 1000GB drives.

has anyone here had same experience? is there a better way to backup large amounts of data without having to worry much about the disk failing?

godskitchen

I have had a fair few drives fail in the past, no one manafacture is more guilty than the other for me.

A friend of mine has a 20TB set up, he gets/expects about 2 drives to fail per year. he has already had 2 go so far this year. they are 1Tb Samsungs.

I am not sure if failures are happening more now than in the past, I would partly put it down to more people adding extra drives. Up until recently very few people ever upgraded/replaced hard drives.

Solitaire

Irony. Two most popular, high-performing and reliable OEMs recommended here just got biatch-slapped in the first two posts

Err... Western Digital?

Probably preaching to the converted, but... aside from the dangers of a magnetically "noisy" environment modern 3.5" HDDs get a wee bit hot under the collar in certain case configs, near other heat sources and most certainly in arrays and server configurations. Well-placed fans and other cooling solutions are your friend

meglome

I've had two 250gb Western Digital sata drives fail in the last few months. Not exactly the same drives nor the same batch. Very lucky not to lose data so no more Western Digital for me. Got two Samsungs instead.

Solitaire

Yay! All I need are some dead Seagate's and Maxtors (that won't be hard...) and we'll have a definitive answer: ALL hard drives are made of fail

godskitchen

Solitaire wrote: »

Yay! All I need are some dead Seagate's and Maxtors (that won't be hard...) and we'll have a definitive answer: ALL hard drives are made of fail

Do not even get me started on Seagate..........

I have had a 320Gb Maxtor, a refurbished one at that, that has lasted me 4 years now without any problems. Fingers crossed so far anyway.

darealtulip

I had a lot of problems with samsung 1TB hard drives. Specaily when you run the OS from them. Have a velicoraptor for OS now and the samsungs are for data and that works fine.

Had a seagate drive dying on me aswell. and earlier (like 4 years ago) a maxtor.

My friend build my maws comp with a samsung aswell (1TR) and again problems. I think you get what you pay for in the end. If they get cheaper they probaly get less relaible.

thepcgp

Yes, you've discovered one of the hidden pillars of data storage - the failure rate of hard disk drives is 100%! It's simply a question of when!

I use a data recovery partner in Dublin, who have told me that they have definitely noticed a higher failure rate among the higher capacity drives, in particular 500GB, 750GB and up. I suppose the reason for this is probably the higher number of platters and read heads, which naturally up the likelihood of component failure (more parts = more problems). Also with multiple platters spinning away this increases the centrifugal inertia of the drive, applying mysterious "wobble force" to the components (although I may be imagining this - I'm sure a super geek can confirm/deny it).

So if you want stability, you're better to go with lower capacity drives and configure them in a RAID array that allows you to combine multiple drives into a single logical volume. This may or may not increase overall cost, as the prices of lower capacity drives are dropping significantly with the popularity and proliferation of large capacity drives flooding the market.

Here are a few tips to help extend the life expectancy of your hard drives:

1. prevent motion or shock while the drives are spinning up, down, or round and round
2. use a smaller, cheaper, more disposable hard drive for your swap file (configurable in advanced system properties in Windoze) - this will reduce read/writes on the drive
3. use a UPS - this helps to reduce minute (or not so minute, depending on the quality of mains power supply in your area) power fluctuations, as well as preventing power outages - major killer of hard drives
4. use shock absorbing mounts to fix your drives in place
5. use an earthed static strap when installing your drives
6. make a regular offering to the gods of I.T. - they prefer caffeine and nicotine based products, although junk food seems to work good too

All obvious stuff, but I hope it helps.

Bebop

The failure rate of everything is 100%, eventually!
I have disposed of 10 year old Dells and their HDD's were still spinning..right up to the time the plug was pulled, but the point is valid; old 20Gb to 80 GB IDE drives were a lot more reliable than the new high capacity devices, and its not just down to the hardware- new high capacity SATA drives do not always have more platters..more data is being squeezed into smaller and smaller sectors as the technology improves and this leads to a lower fault tolerance, the important thing is to back up your music, photos and other data to an inexpensive external drive, dont forget stuff like your favorites and e-mail passwords, Firefox can this for you with Xmarks, plan for HDD failure..you will not be dissappointed!

thepcgp

Yes, always have a backup. Many of us have learned this the hard way.

I think spec being equal the best hard drive to buy is the one with the longest guarantee.

I agree the older hard drives were far more reliable and long-lasting.

Inquitus

I have had a few 500Gb ---> 1TB Samsungs and Hitachis fail on me in the last 6 months, none were much more than a year old, until the past 12 mths I was never really that inconvenienced by HD failures, but 4 in a 6mths is a pisser.

Nothingbetter2d

If you are using vista x64 on an nvidia based chipset then welcome to hard drive hell.......... nvidia vista x64 controller drivers suck balls bigtime.

u have several options... linux .... try windows 7 rc.... or go back to using xp

i have had numerous hard drive/ dvd drive sata controller failures due to nvidia's crappy drivers... the drives themselves tested fine on an intel chipset based pc.

darealtulip

Nothingbetter2d wrote: »

If you are using vista x64 on an nvidia based chipset then welcome to hard drive hell.......... nvidia vista x64 controller drivers suck balls bigtime.

u have several options... linux .... try windows 7 rc.... or go back to using xp

i have had numerous hard drive/ dvd drive sata controller failures due to nvidia's crappy drivers... the drives themselves tested fine on an intel chipset based pc.

Yep had the same problems, I flashed my bios and then it was sorted though. Saw that a lot of the updates were for bigger hd's (gigabyte motherboards)

requiem1

I've always been a fan of western digital drives mainly cause i've own and have owned a good few raptors in the past and they've never failed.

The reason people go for samsung is because they have great return policies and get stuff fixed or replaced lightning fast. I had a spare 160gig harddrive that died when I was moving it from one pc to another. Samsung collected the drive, recovered as much data as they could form it, transfered it to a new drive and got it back to me in a week. that's service imo.

I think seagate tend to get a bad rep cause they provide harddrives for the xbox and ps3 etc and because of the large number of failures of them people started to doubt them. I have two of their drives in my dads rig and they have been there for years with no issue.