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Hard drive reliability stats

6K views 20 replies 13 participants last post by  ExDilbert 
#1 ·
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#5 ·
Reliability is often a per-product thing, not a per-company or per-brand thing. There have been hard drives that were released that were horrible from a reliability perspective from many (all?) HDD manufacturers at some point. Remember the IBM Deskstar (aka Deathstar)?

I've got a bunch of Western Digital and Seagate drivers, and I've had drives of each brand "go bad" on me. I've had quite a few WD 2TB "green" drives go bad on me, but I think my stats are skewed because I've purchased so many of them, and I think 4 of the drives I purchased in the same time were part of a bad batch. But they were eventually all replaced under warranty.

One drive I'm still using is a Samsung Spinpoint F1 (1TB), that drive is a real trooper. It gets lots of read/writes over the past 6 years, and hasn't given any SMART errors yet.
 
#7 ·
I've had over 50% of WD 1.5TB and 2.0TB Green drives fail in under 3 years. (About half a dozen drives.) Most failures were in the 2-3yr lifespan. WD has since reduced their warranty on these drives to 2yr. Their 1TB and 500GB drives were rock solid and I still have several WD Green 1TB drives.

I stopped purchasing Seagate drives a few years ago when they shipped a large number of drives with bad firmware and did a bad job of correcting the issue.

Also, similar issues with IBM Deskstar many years ago. They were top rated but IBM suddenly produced a large number of bad drives for no apparent reason. Three out of 4 failed under warranty. The IBM disk drive division was sold to Hitachi. Tried a couple of Hitachi drives but they ran really hot. They may be better now.
 
#8 ·
I've mostly had experience with WD drives in most of my computers. From my experience, they have been very reliable.

With regards to WD, my work has a NAS which had paired WD Green drives since 2009 in RAID 1, they lasted 4 1/2 years before one failed (the other kept running), we replaced them both with WD Red drives. Can't fault WD there, lasted way beyond warranty in a heavy-usage scenario.

On the other hand, my boss got a new Dell last January. They put in a Seagate instead of a WD; it lasted 3 months before it failed. When it failed, the PC unexpectedly rebooted and the drive wouldn't even detect in the BIOS. Dell replaced it, I think with another Seagate, which has been working fine since then.
 
#9 ·
The message here is clear: no matter which drive you buy, there is a likelihood of failure, so implement and maintain a backup policy from day 1 !

It's also interesting to note that Seagate and Toshiba are the least expensive ($0.04/GB) providers today followed by WD ($0.041/G) and Hitachi are significantly more expensive at $0.072/G.

The worst (by which I mean most unexpected and catastrophic) failures I've ever had were with Fujitsu and Samsung drives.
 
#12 ·
...experience with over 27,000 consumer grade hard drives.
That chart can be misleading and is incomplete. For starters, why is there no information for WD and Seagate 2TB drives or Hitachi and Seagate 1TB drives? One company may have fairly flat failure rates over their entire product line. Another may have very high failure rates with one particular line or model of drives and very low rates for others. Another may have high failure rates for a particular production facility and not another. My experience is that drive makers often produce 'lemons' at one time or another. The charts need to be broken down by product line, drive model, drive revision and/or production dates to provide any useful information that is useful to consumers.
 
#13 ·
How does not using (and having nothing to say about) 1TB Hitachi drives reduces the value of the data for 2/3/4TB Hitachi drives?

The anecdotal evidence: I never doubted that consumer Hitachi drives are better than Seagate (from my 10-20 drives experience).
Even without taking into consideration the bad runs every manufacturer has from time to time...
 
#20 · (Edited by Moderator)
Internal HDD's (Seagate vs Hitachi vs WD)

Just bought a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB hard drive from a local store and am starting to have second thoughts after reading reviews online and a report on Backblaze (if you want to find it, search "What Hard Drive Should I Buy" in google and it should pop up). Backblaze seems to indicate that the particular drive I now own has an annual failure rate of about 10%, Wondering if any of you have insight on whether or not my fears are justified, and whether or not you have any experience with Hitachi or WD internal HDD's. If you have experience with another brand, feel free to share.

I read a comment on another forum which seemed to indicate that the 11th and 12th generations of the Seagate Barracuda drives were terrible and that the 14th gen had been improved. Any truth to this? How do I find out which generation I have? My seagate drive was manufactured on 04/13 if that helps any.

Thanks!
 
#21 ·
All makers have good and bad drives. At one time, IBM had the best drives and then they made the Deskstar (AKA Deathstar) line. (I has 2 out of 4 fail.) It killed their reputation and their drive division as well. Similarly, Seagate was good until several years ago. Soon after, Western Digital went downhill with their 1.5TB and 2TB Green drives. I've had failure rates of about 50% with those. (Their 1TB Green drives were great but not the "upgraded" larger drives.) WD's response was to shorten their drive warranties. I had one of their shorter warranty drives fail just after the shortened warranty expired. It would have been covered under the longer warranty (surprise, surprise.)

Whatever you buy, make sure it has a good warranty, at least 3 years, and is suitable for the purpose in terms of speed, power consumption, noise, MTBF, etc. Above all, make regular backups. All drives will fail eventually.

You might want to check out earlier posts in this thread.
 
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