Word on the street about hard drives.

[NJC]

Since Samsung consumers drives aren't being sold in Canada, I went with a Western Digital 80GB ATA 8MB cache. Made in Thailand.

My work PC, purchased Nov 1994, also has a WD 40GB drive and has spun 9hrs/day 5 days a week since. Hopefully I'll get similar mileage.

 

[Cutehumor]

wow, I've owned pcs since 1996. haven't had a hard drive failure yet (knock on wood) had maxtor hard drives in a couple sony vaios. not sure what my old 1 gb hd ibm aptiva had back in 1996 had, what a piece of junk!

 

[blueiedgod]

Originally Posted By: NJC
Since Samsung consumers drives aren't being sold in Canada, I went with a Western Digital 80GB ATA 8MB cache. Made in Thailand.

My work PC, purchased Nov 1994, also has a WD 40GB drive and has spun 9hrs/day 5 days a week since. Hopefully I'll get similar mileage.





Wow, 1994 PC, does it have 486, Pentium or Pentium Pro?

I didn't think IDE controllers back then even supported drives larger than 32 Gb.

As to the hard drive life: If you keep it cool, they last a long time. I have a 3 Tb Home Server, and I keep fans blowing on 3 hard drives at a time. I used to have just one fan, and drives outside of its range would eventually fail after a year or two of 24x7 operation. Ever since I built new case from sheets of plexiglass to accomodate 11 drives, and 5 fans (total) 3 fans on HDD's alone, I have only had one failure, and it was DOA, not from use.

If you are building a PC with a comercially available case, then make sure that you install that front panel fan and place the Hard Drive(s) right behind the fan. You are almost guaranteed very long life out of those.

I prefer Seagates my self, but sometimes there are deals on Western Digitals, that are hard to pass by. Most of the OEM WD's now come with 3 year warranty, so do Maxtors (rebranded Seagates), but you can not beat Seagate's 5 year warranty.

 

[NJC]

Originally Posted By: blueiedgod

Wow, 1994 PC, does it have 486, Pentium or Pentium Pro?

Sorry, a bit of d'uh on my part - 2004, not 1994.

Originally Posted By: blueiedgod

As to the hard drive life: If you keep it cool, they last a long time.

I was surprised to see how cool the 80GB drive (I bought) does run.

 

[Iain]

Originally Posted By: JustinH
.........

Hard drives are very sensitive to heat. Especially the 7200RPM SATA drives. They get super hot. Install a 80mm case fan blowing air across your hard drive array, and that will keep them alive. If you monitor the temp, you want the drive to be under 100F all the time. If it gets too hot, it will eat itself.

..........

From what I'm reading on this thread, my plan to upgrade internal laptop drive to this:
Seagate Momentus 7200.2

...from this:
Toshiba MK1637GSX once my new laptop is out of warranty, isn't a good idea?

Just wondering if Seagate would roast CPU as well?

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Make sure you remove the jumper to enable SATA-2 operation on those Seagate drives.

 

[punisher]

Originally Posted By: Iain


Just wondering if Seagate would roast CPU as well?


I think the post you were referring to was in reference to desktop 3.5" drives.
You need to look at the wattage specs for the drives. Many of the 7200 RPM 2.5" drives pull just a fraction more wattage than the 5400 RPM. I swapped a 100 gig 7200rpm Hitachi into my old notebook, replacing a 60 gig WD 5400rpm. The new drive actually ran 5F cooler. Just for reference, my drive hangs between 97F to 106F during normal usage. The additional speed makes a difference.

 

[Rabbler]

I've had Maxtors, Quantums, Fujitsu, WD, and Seagate.
The only ones that have ever failed on me were Seagates X3.

Not big on Seagate

 

[MGregoir]

Every hard drive I have ever had fail was Maxtor. No issues with WD, Seagate or Fujitsu. Fujitsu are good but for enterprise type applications. Noise issues with Hitachi. Samsungs from what I have seen are not all that fast.

Cooling and care and 3-5 years is a reasonable expectation for drive life.

 

[OVERKILL]

I've got boxes of dead hard drives in my shop that I keep around for board/part swaps when I'm doing data recovery.

My experience with hard drives (and, as is the norm, it differs from others experiences) has been:

1. Excellent results with WD. I have the lowest rate of failure with WD drives. Their RE2 drives are excellent quality, with a 5 year warranty. I have had ONE die in the last year, and it was within a few weeks of deployment, and was actually the mirror drive on an array. WD's Notebook drives have been excellent as well.

2. Excellent results with Fujitsu's Enterprise SCSI drives. Not so excellent results with their old desktop drives. I remember their 20 and 40GB 5,400 and 7,200 IDE drives failing by the bucket load, all within a relatively short time frame. This was shortly after they stopped producing desktop drives. Their notebook drives have about the same failure (or the lack thereof) rate of the WD Scorpio Notebook drives.

3. Seagate drives have been good to me. Very low rate of failures. I was sort of disheartened when I found that they had purchased Maxtor, as I have always regarded Maxtor as a sub-par drive, as they have, besides the Fujitsu fiasco with the desktop drives, been my highest rate of failure drives. The majority of drives in my parts boxes are of the Maxtor variety. Seagate's Enterprise SCSI drives, such as the Barracuda and the Cheatah have a spotless track record with me. I still have a number of these things kicking around. They were LOUD, but reliable. Only had a few Seagate notebook drive failures in the last year or so.

4. Maxtor. As mentioned above, not great results. They purchased Quantum, who also used to make some rather sketchy IDE drives. Their (Quantum) Enterprise drives I had very good luck with back in the day though.

5. Hitachi. Pioneered the 12,000RPM drive after Seagate was cleaning up with their 10,000RPM Cheatah drives and hadn't done the 15K drive thing yet. Good luck with their Enterprise stuff, recently had a number of failures with their larger laptop drives. Better than Maxtor, but not as good as WD in my books in terms of notebook drives.

 

[Anduril]

Whatever came in my laptop for booting Windows and running programs off of, and a 750 gb Seagate external drive for everything else. Picked it up on sale at Fry's for $160.

 

[NJC]

Guys: Thought I'd update this thread - since my original question in 2007, I've bought the following 4 Western Digital drives:

80GB PATA
320GB Blue SATA
640GB Black SATA
1TB Blue SATA

I have been VERY impressed with this Western Digital product line. The current batch seem excellent and I'll continue buying until the quality changes.

 

[javacontour]

Hard drives fail, humans delete the wrong file, one needs many layers to provide data security.

Mirroring or other RAID solutions protect against some risks, but not all. Off site backups offer protections as well, but are not real time backups.

The real question is how much risk are you willing to live with, not which hard drive manufacturer is the best to go with.

They all fail, the question is simply, when?

Humans make mistakes, the question again is, when?

Looking at the most reliable hard drive is addressing only one factor in the data security question.

 

[tmorris1]

Originally Posted By: javacontour
Hard drives fail, humans delete the wrong file, one needs many layers to provide data security.

Mirroring or other RAID solutions protect against some risks, but not all. Off site backups offer protections as well, but are not real time backups.

The real question is how much risk are you willing to live with, not which hard drive manufacturer is the best to go with.

They all fail, the question is simply, when?

Humans make mistakes, the question again is, when?

Looking at the most reliable hard drive is addressing only one factor in the data security question.


Well said. Buy the HD with the size and performance you want and have a back up plan and stick with it. Even the best HD can fail.

 

[JustinH]

Another tip for the general consumer. Get a good backup plan. Including off-site backup.

Those photos of your kids will be gone when your houses catches on fire, or the hard drive dies.

I've been using carbonite for the past couple years now, 50 dollars per year. That is the cost of one hard drive, and they backup what you want online. I have about 150gb backed up on their servers.

I'm now using a western digital green 1tb drive, dead silent but noticeably slower than a 7200 rpm drive. Not a great main HD, but works for me..

 

[Nick R]

I had to replace the same Seagate FreeAgent Go 80GB 5 times through RMA before I finally gave up. After a few weeks they would give the dreaded click-beep of death. Yes, using both USB cables.

I have a WD Cavaiar WD2500JD that has over 30,000 hours on it, no problems. My WD 6400AAKS has 14,500 hours on it.

 

[Colt45ws]

I never had trouble with Seagate until the 7200.11 series. I have 5 of those suckers, and everyone of them have been RMA's once. Then I have two of the RMA units trying to die. One has maybe 500hours and 25 realloc sectors. Its not in a critial app at the moment, so Im just letting it go. Then I have a drive in my RAID that keeps dropping sectors. Luckily it gets caught and repaired, so I have not lost anything, but still annoying.
As soon as possible Im moving to four Samsung F3R 1TB drives in my RAID.
I do now have a pair of WD green 2TB drives that I use for redundant backups of my RAID. One of them Im going to place off-site once I can find a suitable location.

 

[Iain]

Originally Posted By: Colt45ws
I never had trouble with Seagate until the 7200.11 series. I have 5 of those suckers, and everyone of them have been RMA's once. Then I have two of the RMA units trying to die. One has maybe 500hours and 25 realloc sectors. Its not in a critial app at the moment, so Im just letting it go. Then I have a drive in my RAID that keeps dropping sectors. Luckily it gets caught and repaired, so I have not lost anything, but still annoying.
As soon as possible Im moving to four Samsung F3R 1TB drives in my RAID.
I do now have a pair of WD green 2TB drives that I use for redundant backups of my RAID. One of them Im going to place off-site once I can find a suitable location.

I spent several months researching replacement disk drives in early 2009 at:
this forum
.... and as a result, came away with the feeling that the then newly released 7200 rpm Seagate drives were something to seriously avoid.

A few months later Hitachi came out with:
Travelstar 5K500.B laptop drives
Users at that forum were quite impressed with it so I bought the 500 Gb model. It replaced the Hitachi 160 Gb drive which went into a USB case and is now used for secondary backups. Both are quite reliable.