HDD lifespan

Forum Storage : Hard Drives HDD lifespan

RunCore

Hello,
Are there any discussions concerning the overall quality of one HDD Mfg. over another?
I'm looking for a reliable 1-1.5 GB SATA HDD.

Reply to DannyBoy_1

It's difficult to do because most of us only have anecdotal evidence; unless there's a disaster like the IBM Deathstar drives where a very high percentage failed, you really need to study thousands of disks to determine what's actually reliable and what's not. I guess one option is to compare the warranty periods on offer, as the manufacturers obviously don't want the drives to fail before the warranty expires.

Personally my WD Caviar Green 1TB drive recently hit 10,000 hours in operation and is still working fine, so I'm sticking with WD for the forseeable future; but others haven't been so lucky with them.

Reply to MarkG

I have never seen anything other an anecdotal evidence. So basically, it totally depends on who you talk to.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to sminlal

sminlal wrote :

I have never seen anything other an anecdotal evidence. So basically, it totally depends on who you talk to.

Google released a disk lifespan study a couple of years back but it's not really relevant to disks that are available today. Also I don't think they actually named the manufacturers of the disks they used, just showed relative reliability between manufacturers.

Reply to MarkG

The seagate consumer level drives have a higher chance of failure from what I have seen and experienced with them.

Western Digital on the other hand makes quality drives. My SE16 drive from 6 years ago is still working. Though I have gotten many drives from them since then. I have two sets of RE2 and RE3 drives. I just replaced them with spinpoint F3s (still wondering how those will go).

So if you want reliability im going to recommend WD RAID edition drives. They are a little expensive but may be quite worth it. Data loss is a terrible thing, sensitive data or not. The RAID editions sports 1.2 million hours mean time between failure. Double that of consumer level drives.

Also DOA drives are not a measure of quality. They are designed to handle micro vibrations and minor movement, not designed to be thrown around in boxes during transit.

Reply to rofl_my_waffle

It is generally accepted that Western Digital's Enterprise Class hard drives are the most reliable drives based on statistics. However, they are also more expensive since they are generally geared towards businesses than individuals.

I remember dishing out around $200 - $230 for every OEM WD RE2 1TB FYPS series hard drive I bought a couple of years ago.

Quote :

The seagate consumer level drives have a higher chance of failure from what I have seen and experienced with them.

And of course I disagree. I have several 7200.10 drives that work just fine. I've lost two WD drive (AAKS and I think a JS) in the last 12mo. As mentioned it depends on who you talk to. The most recent "deathstar" drives might be the larger 7200.11 drives. Had a bad firmware so they got bricked. (750GB and up) But other then that I haven't heard of mass deaths from recent disks.

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