HHD Too many failures in reviews

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I have been looking for an internal HHD drive in the 2+GB range and I am not finding drives I feel confidence in. Too many failures in reviews. 5 star reviews are hard to find. Yes I know folk w/ bad experiences are more likely to write reviews than ones w/ good experience but I have always looked for 5 star reviews in a time frame of the last year
or so. Some of the Seagates seem to be a possibility or maybe a mirror raid but I thought I would ask some pros here what they look for themselves. :mellow:

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Stop looking at non professional reviews wavy, they’ll rot your brain.

I’ve been using 2 and 3 TB drives for years now with minimal problems.
Sure every now and then you get issues, but that goes for EVERYTHING ever made.

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Wavy,

+1 what CLiNT said. I’ve been using WD as my preferred brand w/nary a blip and I keep my machines for 5 years minimum and rarely switch drives unless it it to put a SSD in for the OS then I move the HDD over as a secondary drive for my Data and other uses. HTH :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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I think that you will find this enlightening.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

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I think that you will find this enlightening.

Thanks Calimanco, I actually had read those two articles…. and completely forgotten. I do remember not being absolutely certain they were really comparing apples to apples, but having reread the article I am a bit more comfortable w/ the general gist of it. Ironically IIRC, the only drive I ever had fail was a Hitachi except for that it has been WD black. I had a Seagate drive yeas ago and always had trouble with the Seagate software in windows. The failure rates seem high, 20 % dieing in 4 years does kinda say “It IS gonna happen to YOU”

mrjphelps
I had a Seagate drive yeas ago and always had trouble with the Seagate software in windows. The article CERTAINLY did not favor them for reliability. The reviews did look better but Clint does have a point. A 5 star review with lots of reviewers is an indicator when there just aren’t any well …
All of which says Redundancy Rules! maybe its Raid time.

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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I prefer Seagate or Maxtor internal drives, because if you have either, you can use the free Seagate DiscWizard backup software.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

data newish from Sept. reading now.

One thing I will be looking for : how well can disk monitoring type programs predict failing drives.

Note that HDDSentinal program is sounding better…

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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The best you can do is:
1. Choose a drive from a well known company that has a decent warranty
and a good RMA process.
2. Monitor the drives SMART values frequently.
3. Fine tune your backup regimen, even if that means backing up your backups.
4. RAID (backup type array) is not a bad idea too.

I have backups, both image based and hardcopies, that are also mirrored to a 3rd drive, a 4th in some instances.

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Re: the “BackBlaze” webpages linked from this thread.

Can this company’s experience of HDD failures in their data centre really be taken as relevant to HDDs in our PCs? They have many thousands of HDDs in their arrays, which is quite different to having one, two, or even a few more, in a PC.

I have replaced hundreds of failed (or failing) HDDs in customers’ computers over the years. About half of these have been 2.5inch Hitachi HDDs in laptops. Toshiba and Samsung 2.5inch HDDs seem next most prone to fail, while Seagate and WD laptop drives seem least likely to fail.

Desktop (3.5inch) HDDs seem considerably less prone to failure. I rarely see a desktop with an Hitachi HDD, most of the desktops I have worked on have had Seagate or WD HDDs, and some Samsung drives. From what I have experienced it is fair to say that if a desktop HDD is going to fail it is most likely to do so within the first eighteen months (or so).

I have a 2TB Seagate in my “Internet/production” PC, a 1.5TB Seagate in a “workbench” PC, and a 1.5GB WD in a 2nd “workbench” PC. Both 1.5TB HDDs are about 4 years old now without any problems so far. I also have four 3.5inch USB enclosures with 2TB Seagate HDDs. One is for storing backup images, another two are for backing up userdata from customers’ HDDs, and the other is for general storage.

The only significant problems I have had with any of my HDDs has been a 40GB WD that failed suddenly (total failure) about 2001, and the 2TB Seagate in my “Internet/production” PC. I fitted this 2TB Seagate about two years ago; about six weeks later I noticed a large number (240+) of “a controller error has been detected on HD1” (event 11) errors in the “Event Logs/System” log. I downloaded and applied a firmware upgrade from Seagate, the errors went away, and I have had no problem with that HDD since.

When I checked out my other HDDs I found that one of the 2TB Seagates in a USB enclosure also needed a firmware upgrade.

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