V.T. Eric Layton Posted April 16, 2015 Share Posted April 16, 2015 An interesting article from Extreme Tech: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives These results didn't really surprise me in the least bit. I had to smirk about the Seagate failure rate. I've maintained for years that Seagate drives SUCK! The one-and-only-one Seagate drive that I bought and paid for and installed in a system back in 2006 was screwy right out of the box. Even Seagate's tech support paid me to ship it to them so they could study it. I got a full refund, of course. I've always been a Western Digital fan... still am, actually. The Hitachi results were no surprise either. They are the hdd manufacturer of choice for most desktop and laptop manufacturer. There's a reason why. Hitachi makes the "Sherman Tank" of hdds. Unfortunately, they're often kinda' pricey in the aftermarket retail arena. Well, anyway... good reading. Oh, here's a related article that I found interesting, too... http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for I have drives on my systems (knocking on wood) that are substantially older than 4 years. They're still spinning up a storm. Of course, as many of you know, I do not waste electricity or incur useless wear and tear by leaving my systems on all the time. When I'm not sitting in front of my computers, they are OFF and disconnected from power completely. No electricity vampires at my house. It's H3LL to be anal, huh? 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Posted April 16, 2015 Share Posted April 16, 2015 What about power on and off cycles and if the plug is accidentally pulled (or the power fails) while the HD is writing? I think that's what kills my hard drives since I get nothing like the hours of runtime they do. I've even lost a couple of HD's when the power supply failed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted April 16, 2015 Author Share Posted April 16, 2015 (edited) If a drive loses power during writing, all that's going to happen is data loss, fragmentation, and unassigned sectors. There should be no mechanical/electrical damage due to power loss. As far as on/off power cycling goes... as an electronics technician with 25+ years experience, I've NEVER bought into that old wive's tale about powering something on or off damages it in some way. That's pure BS. The bottom line with any device (electrical or mechanical) is that when it's not in use (off), it's not wearing and tearing. When it is on and not being used for some purpose, it's just wasting electricity and losing lifetime. In all my time working with computers, I've only had one drive fail and that was 100% my fault because I dropped it while installing it in the case. The 150 Gig WD VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM drives (2) that I've been using in my main system for the past 15 months or so have been in continual use (in three different machines) since 2009. The 320 Gig WD Caviar 7200 RPM drive also in my main system is even older than the Raptors. Proof's in the pudding. Edited April 16, 2015 by V.T. Eric Layton 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted April 17, 2015 Share Posted April 17, 2015 Nice article, thanks for sharing Eric 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted April 17, 2015 Share Posted April 17, 2015 Agreed, great article. Thanks for sharing it Eric! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zlim Posted April 17, 2015 Share Posted April 17, 2015 I had power go off during a write cycle on a laptop. Unfortunately, the battery did not hold a charge so there was no backup power supply. I grabbed an image, restored it and used that laptop for quite a few years after that incident. No harm done to the hard drive that an image could not fix. The only hard drive failure I had was in my first IBM computer. I think that hard drive was replaced 3 times. It must have been the drives that were finally dumped into the ocean because the entire lot was bad. I own 5 external hard drives; all Western Digital. It's the brand I depend on. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewmur Posted April 17, 2015 Share Posted April 17, 2015 (edited) Hard drive brand names are bought and sold like commodities. Who knows who's actually manufacturing a given brand name? I know Seagate has been bought and sold more times than I can count. Us old timers remember it as being one of the first names in HDDs back when 10mb was the standard size. (We used to reformat their 20mb MFM drives as RLL to make them 30mb. Seagate claimed the drives weren't "certified" for RLL but we never had any problems with them.) I also remember even earlier when it cost over $400 to SHIP a 10mb drive. They were so delicate that you had to insert locks on the heads and platters just to move them from one desk to another and they could only be shipped via air freight. Edited April 17, 2015 by lewmur 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted April 17, 2015 Share Posted April 17, 2015 (edited) So true, lewmur. It's a real research project to decipher who actually makes a given drive. TRUE Seagate before all the re-imaginings through buyouts, was awesome back in the RLL and MFM drive days. And you could actually low level format your own drives back then too which fixed a world of hurt. Today, the manufacturers seem to tradeoff who does a good job like an old suit by the month or by the year. You have to keep up on that if you want to make sure you don't get one from a bad batch. Edited April 17, 2015 by LilBambi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted April 17, 2015 Author Share Posted April 17, 2015 Back in the days Lewmur is referring to when you guys were using those 10Gig Seagates, I was a fan of Maxtor drives. Unfortunately, Maxtor got bought by Seagate and that was the end of that love affair for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted April 17, 2015 Share Posted April 17, 2015 Same here Eric. My first drives were Maxtor also. But later, Seagate. I started with a 10MB hard drive back in the day on my DOS computer. Then 20MB, then 50MB, 180MB, then nearly a 500MB by the time I was in Windows! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goretsky Posted April 18, 2015 Share Posted April 18, 2015 Hello, The failure rate for all hard disk drives is 100%... eventually. There's certainly no denying that Seagate's drives have had some reliability problems, and the BackBlaze analysis of the Seagate 3TB HDD failures is certainly very telling. It is important to keep in mind, though, that any HDD can fail at any time, and if you're really concerned about brand or model-specific failures, it might be a very good idea to use different HDDs in each device. This doesn't apply to RAID arrays, where you want to have the same drive models for performance reasons. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lewmur Posted April 18, 2015 Share Posted April 18, 2015 Back in the days Lewmur is referring to when you guys were using those 10Gig Seagates, I was a fan of Maxtor drives. Unfortunately, Maxtor got bought by Seagate and that was the end of that love affair for me. They weren't 10gb. they were only 10mb. That was before Bill Gates posed the now infamous question "Who'd ever need more than a megabyte of RAM?" Back in 1985, I wrote a system for a Men's Store that supported an inventory system with 10,000 items, an accounts receivable system with 1000 customers, an account payable with 500 vendors and a general ledger system. And that all fit on a 20mb HDD. It ran on an 8 bit computer system that had three "dumb terminals", each of which used 64kb of RAM. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Capt.Crow Posted April 18, 2015 Share Posted April 18, 2015 Just for interest . There is a c64 here still working . *off line* Just a 1.023MHz processor 64Kb ram. And that little tyke could print play games connect to internet and interact with any other computer on the line What else it could do is legion . It was a great way to learn code ,dos,ascii,chr$,basic etc.. I wonder how long it would stay viable on the net these days. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted April 18, 2015 Author Share Posted April 18, 2015 Some people like Fords (Seagate). Some people like Toyotas (Hitachi). I'll stick with my Chevy (Western Dig). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted April 19, 2015 Share Posted April 19, 2015 I let the percentages (today) work for me and check again in 6 mos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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