What HD seem to be most reliable?

Topic

New Reply

I’m thinking about a couple new 250 gig SATA drives, what seem to be the most reliable brand/model these days?

I’ve had a couple 1tb seagate drives that went south quickly. 😡

Reply | Quote

Replies

I’m thinking about a couple new 250 gig SATA drives, what seem to be the most reliable brand/model these days?

I’ve had a couple 1tb seagate drives that went south quickly. 😡

Hi “Jag” ,
Your going to get a bunch of opinions here … I”ll throw mine in See Thread Here My only other comment is the price seems to be coming down a bit from what they were a few months ago…:cheers: Regards Fred

Reply | Quote

Is it a big deal to install a SSD ? I use sata drives now.

Reply | Quote

Is it a big deal to install a SSD ? I use sata drives now.

Jag ,
For me the price and size of SSD’s ( as compared to SATA HD’s )are not at this time ready for “Prime Time” ….Oop’s should of put my “Woopin Helmet” on first:blink: Regards Fred

Reply | Quote

There are several threads on SSD drives as well. Try a search for SSD drives. There has been very mixed reviews here for them.

Reply | Quote

There are several threads on SSD drives as well. Try a search for SSD drives. There has been very mixed reviews here for them.

See also post #5 😉

Reply | Quote

My contribution to the thread Fred linked to : post #5

Reply | Quote

No need for whoopin helmet. My thoughts exactly on this one. And there have been some real problems with some.

Reply | Quote

Fred & Ted,

I’m with you. Unless you have an absolute need for speed and or excessively long periods on battery I’d steer clear of SSDs for now! YMMV.
If I was to install an SSD I’d most definately carry along a USB portable drive with a couple of images and maybe the old internal drive I took out for safety, especially if it was a business machine that I depended on. Thus, in an emergency I could restore the SSD if necessary and/or completely replace it if it went up in a flame of glory! 😆 Just my 2 cents worth. :cheers:

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

Reply | Quote

I have always been happy with Toshiba drives, never had one fail and have used then in both desktops and laptops. I would not buy a Seagate drive – every one I had failed, though Seagate is very good at honoring their warranty and replacing failed drives (their refrubished drives are much more reliable, haven’t had onefail.

Reply | Quote

I would have thought with all the disruption in the Far East because of the floods, any long-term trends on hard disk reliabiity must surely be up in the air!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Over the past 30+ years, more HD companies have gone under than there are in existence today.
Company mergers have nixed several more brand names that many of us used and relied on for many years.

Quantum, was bought by Maxtor and Maxtor was bought up by Seagate. Seagate has had some problems with the 1TB+ drives, but I rely on the lower MB drives for my own use and recommend them for drive replacements. (anything 500GB or less)

On my main system, I have a second HD for Win-8. That drive is a Seagate 500GB SATA III drive. It’s twice as fast as the common SATA II drive, which is twice as fast as the original SATA I drive.
My only problem right now, is that I don’t have a motherboard that is SATA III compatible. So that drive is now on a SATA II port on my mobo and is running quite nicely at SATA II speed. I’m really looking forward to the day when I get a new motherboard with SATA III ports on it so I can run that drive at full SATA III speed.

Years ago, Western Digital was a reliable brand name, but for the past few years their quality has suffered badly.
Most of the external drives that we hear about having problems are WD drives. I have several WD drives here that I got from dead or dying External Drive Enclosures. The drives do run OK, but I won’t trust them for anything important. I call them “Scratch Disks”.

Today, my main drive is a Samsung 1TB and it’s been running for about a year with nary a problem. I do run all my HD’s with Two-Fan coolers on them, so they always stay at room temperature. Preventing thermal shock, greatly enhances the life of any HD.

Several years ago, I was using a WD drive that had come back as an RMA Replacement. As I was working on the PC the drive screamed to a stop. I reached in to take it out and burned my hand, it was just that HOT!
When dealing with electronics, just remember one thing, “Heat Kills”.

When looking for a new hard drive today, I’ll look for Seagate, Samsung or Toshiba. WD is on my bad list and Hitachi is the old IBM Deathstar, named that for good reasons. They were just not reliable.

Good Luck and y’all have a great day now, y’hear?

The Doctor 😎

For those who don’t yet understand the different SATA speeds. I got this tidbit from Wikipedia.

3 Revisions

[*]3.1 SATA revision 1.0 (SATA 1.5 Gbit/s)
[*]3.2 SATA revision 2.0 (SATA 3 Gbit/s)
[*]3.3 SATA revision 3.0 (SATA 6 Gbit/s)

Reply | Quote

Yeah, I’ve had “2” bad 1TB Seagate 7200 drives, over the last 4-8 months they have sent me back with replacements but hesitant to use them for any real needy purpose.

I think I might throw them into an enclosure and let them run for duplicates backups for a good while 🙂

Reply | Quote

I’ve got several Western Digital 1 and 2 TB drives that have been up and running reliably for the last 2 years now.
I’ve only had to RMA 1 bad drive in my years of computing, and that was a WD 750 GB drive.

I also have a 1 TB Hitatchi that is approx 5 years old that is running reliably, it tends to run the warmest of the bunch though.

The 1 and 2 TB drives are great for storage but I would never recommend using them as operating system boot drives, simply because
one could do much better. A smaller 150-250 GB 10,000 rpm WD raptor would do nicely for that, better yet, a 120 GB SSD.
1 TB drives; great for storage of any data types.
2 TB drives and higher; best suited for very large data file storage types, like video.

The way Fred has his drives all placed together in his case is kind of an abomination, I would never recommend anyone doing that.
He has long ago been in need of a proper case replacement from the looks of it…unless you actually like to run with the side of your case open[??]

Any drive listed on the market today will have their naysayers. If you’ve had problems with one particular brand, then go with another.

Reply | Quote

I like the Crucial M4 SSD drives today. I just got a 128GB M4 for $149 on sale at Tiger and it really sped things up on a brand new Toshiba L745 laptop. I also upped the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB first which made little perceptible difference like the SSD did yesterday. Today I imaged it and loaded Windows 8 on it to play with the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview. It is way better than the developers preview was.
Seagate also makes the Momentus Hybrid which has some SSD on board and then the bulk is a mechanical drive, giving some of both worlds.

In reading about drives today I read about DOA drives for every brand in every size. The most reliable drive is the one you are still using 5 years from now. I have a couple of WD 1TB SATA drives that are five years old and started life out as my external drives in their My Book enclosures. The electronics in the early My Books was not Windows 7 compatible and WD was not writing anymore drivers for the old ones so both of them are now sitting in Thermaltake external drive docks and running fine as archival drives and image repositories. I even have an old 60GB PATA drive in an old aluminum external drive enclosure with USB 2.0 that really runs hot but is now about ten years old and all still works fine. Even with Windows 7.

If you get a good one it will stay a good one, until it isn’t anymore. 😉

Reply | Quote

I agree. I have used most of the brand names over the years and they come and go. I still use SCSI drives and along side Seagate SATA. I have had SCSI drives last more than 5 years and some lasted a year. Techs tell me to stay away from WD as they fail more than most. Speed is relative and complex to explain. My kids made a decision to move away from SCSI because SATA was simpler. The big issue for me is retrurn policy and warranty.

Reply | Quote

Seagate and Western Digital are the two biggest players. I only use them these days.

As DrWho says, heat is the killer.

Download the excellent HDDSentinel program – you can run it for free for 30 days, and in my experience for much much longer (I paid for it in the end because it was so useful to me and as a programmer I appreciate the work that went into it) and keep an eye on the temperature.
Also it gives you visibility to the S.M.A.R.T. data that your hard drive has but you can’t normally see. Don’t get caught out by bad sectors.

Reply | Quote

Download the excellent HDDSentinel program – you can run it for free for 30 days, and in my experience for much much longer (I paid for it in the end because it was so useful to me and as a programmer I appreciate the work that went into it) and keep an eye on the temperature.
Also it gives you visibility to the S.M.A.R.T. data that your hard drive has but you can’t normally see. Don’t get caught out by bad sectors.

I followed your advice. HD Sentinel is so good I purchased it on the spot! It told me something very interesting – see attachment. It seems I am headed for another meltdown in the next few days. 🙁

Reply | Quote

I agree with DrWho, Most are reliable with a few exceptions. Aside from archiving I run 500gb or less (IMMO the most reliable sizes) for OS installs. SSD’s give a little more latitude in high stress environments (ie. High heat factory) but I always keep a backup image.

Reply | Quote

Up until ’06 I’d only run Seagate and WD, with two failures, one of each. Recently another Seagate got retired – it was starting to look a tad flaky according to S.M.A.R.T.

Got a deal that year on a couple of Samsung 1.5TB drives; they’ve been running with nary a hiccup and generally better throughput than the faster Seagates and WDs.

YMMV, but, barring overall bad reviews on a particular model, I’ll be buying Samsung drives in future.

Reply | Quote

I’m a system builder and have been using the Samsung 1tb F3 Spinpoint HD103SJ drives for three years now without a single user failure. Before the flooding in Thailand I was getting them for $49 each, they currently cost 3 times that much. They are the fastest 7200 rpm drives in real-world applications. They also work well in RAID arrays. I also use 10,000 rpm Western Digital VelociRaptors and their Black Edition Caviar drives with great success over the past 12 years. I had several drive failures with IBM, Maxtor and finally Seagate. I will no longer use vendors that don’t offer reliable products. For my own systems I use Corsair Force series SSD’s for system drives with the Samsung F3’s for storage and backup. After getting used to sub-10 second boot times and instant application loadings I can never go back to mechanical hard drives. The TRIM feature in the latest SSD drives is wonderful and another thing I’ll never want to be without.

Reply | Quote

A discussion of hard drive brand reliability reminds me of the adage – generalities are always wrong about specifics. In my system builder days I saw success and failure with every brand that seemed to be related to the design maturity. The latest and greatest were somewhat problematic, but eventually design and production issues leveled out. Others have mentioned IBM’s Deathstar, which for awhile was a decent moniker, but I standardized on IBM (now Hitachi) builds with great success because of their reliability in service. Without recent experience, I would imagine that Samsung would be a good bet because of their attempt to grow their market. I would expect any drive manufacturer to quickly react to any design or production flaws. The real area for reliability has always been the server market. Most of us would not buy a Dell, IBM, EMC branded drive simply because you really can’t. Those drives are produced by major manufacturers to the server maker’s requirement, but they are not materially different from consumer drives except for harder qualification testing. Today I suspect all brands provide fine performance with Samsung the edge on price/performance. As one said, we will know five years from now .

Reply | Quote

I definitely would not rely on SSD drives for data, once a SSD drive fails the data is gone, no one can recover it. At least when mechanical drive fails there is a greater chance that the data can still be recovered, even if you need to take it to a data recovery place. A SSD drive is good to run your operating system and your applications, but do not rely on it to save your data.

Reply | Quote

We have Samsung 740GB, Seagate 500GB and 1TB, Hitachi 500GB and 1TB. All are 7200rpm SATA II with 16MB cache. The Seagate 1TB is approx. 8MB/sec.faster according to HD Tune. All are 3 years old or more and have been reliable in use. The Seagate 500GB is 6 or 7 years old and still running fairly quiet. All have been used in the past for Windows XP or 7, but are now used as data storage.
Over the last year we replaced first one then another and another with a small SSD (120GB Sandisk, 96GB Kingston and 64GB Kingston, all SATA II). These have also been reliable. Performance is definitely improved on all 3 PCs when using the SSDs. Another Kingston 96GB SSD was replaced by the faster Sandisk, and I hope soon to use that Kingston SSD to replace the 5400rpm drive in our laptop. You can make even the most basic dual-core laptops fly with an SSD ! And, if the laptop has a card reader slot, grab yourself a 32GB or larger SDHC card for extra storage. And, don’t forget you can use the regular hard drive you removed from the laptop as external storage if you just get a 2.5-inch external drive case.

Reply | Quote

I just tried my first SSD. It is terrific! I installed it in a less than one month old laptop and it runs much cooler and screams with ten second or less boots.

I don’t know where folks get the if an SSD fails all is gone because when a mechanical drive is toast all is gone too. While the data could be recovered from a mechanical drive for $10k of forensic data retrieval most folks won’t spend that, not even a thousand to retrieve it from the platters directly. If it fails I just load the image from the last week or day (depending on when in the week it failed, I do images on mine on Saturdays, when done for the night, and it works while I sleep so no time involved other than under a minute turning the dock on and clicking create a system image) and restore the image to the replacement drive whatever the technology of the drive. Critical data like banking and financial datum are backed up after each session to a thumb drive in less than one minute. It can then be restored, and has been, to the restored system image so all that can be lost are a few spam emails. Important ones can be requested again. How so fast? Automated USB flash drive syncs of any specified/selected once critical data is easy with today’s flash drive and portable software today.

Regardless of the stigma attached for some to using MS products, I stopped buying Ghost in 2003 ans switched to Acronis. I stopped using Acronis with Windows 7 and use the Win 7 backup and restore center “Create a system image” and the repair/boot disk creator for the boot CD which works perfectly for restoring whole disk images and is free. Want to backup critical data daily to a USB flash drive? MS has a freebie that works great: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=20034 Open source free: http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/quickly-backup-data-onto-or-off-a-usb-drive-with-drive-backup/

Or you can pay for it like this: http://www.usbflashbackup.com/index.htm Don’t buy that, it was just a quick search for an example. Find one with the level of automation and security you are comfortable with for your portable critical data daily backups. A 1 GB old USB flash drive backs up the last ten years worth of data onto it after every work session in under one minute. Twice we have had to upgrade our software and both times all accounts and data were restored from that USB drive in under a minute.

Data longevity comes only from backups, duplication, and a little self discipline. All drives will fail eventually. It is not if they will fail, but when. SSD or mechanical.

Ok folks, if you have no backups of system images, or at the least data, or both, and back up copies of programs and activation keys, and burned ISO images of your downloaded software, or archived the executables on another drive or DVDRW, and have a printed out list of your passwords in your safe or safety deposit box along with your last will and living will, well then you are going to lose every time life takes a very bad turn for you, in every way. :huh:

I keep images on two external 1 TB mechanical drives that are in two drive docks, one on each main desktop computer desk that are only turned on once a week to make images. I do not want daily mirroring as then any infections or data flaws will be in my back ups too. I keep my 275 GB of music from 2500 ripped original CDs to 320Kbps MP3 on my main computer drive for the access and network access (I am listening now) and on another 320GB drive for backup that is never turned on. It is kept in a static wrap and bubble mailer like all my 8 or so spare drives. I also have clones of each major drive on three spare drives (Notebook, and two Desktops) so I can get the clone and immediately be up and running in case of a failure. I restore the last image to the clone so the clone needs only the basics. I do take them out and test them and do all the Windows updates at least every six months.

Folks I image the SSD drives just like the mechanical drives. When I installed the mechanical drive I restored the image from the mechanical drive to it so I did not have to do all the installs, removal of crapware, and updates, from using a factory restore for the new drive. My laptop is less than a month old and my desktops are sold before they are more than 18 months to two years old. I take the hard drive from the new computer and put it in my old computer I am selling and factory restore it so none of my data can be recovered from it since none of my data was ever on it. I take the old drive and use it for the new computer once I cloned it to a new drive ready to install when it fails. I then do not have to physically destroy the drives or sell my old computers sans hard drives. As well my fast reliable drives continue to give service, I have a clone ready so no shopping panic with a failure, and no data panic as the image is then restored.

Lastly for those not following or have difficulty with images. I use images as they are faster. But the clones offer something with drive docks most are not used to having. Direct drag and drop access to the old files as they are not compressed and require no program to read them or work with them. When I already have a computer running and connected to the dock I can then turn the dock on with a primary drive on it, access the data on it, and copy whatever, and then turn the dock off with no conflict unlike when both are installed inside the computer.

Stating the obvious, that heat is the enemy of all electronics, not just hard drives is disingenuous. You see the hard drives contribute a lot of the heat inside a computer case. SSDs almost none. Many folks also use portable external drives in cases. Man do they get hot in there, much hotter then in external open air drive docks like the eSATA/USB 2.0 Thermaltake docks I use. SSDs really drop the heat down in a case.

Using SSDs with older computers and operating systems can be problematic. I will only use them in newer systems like my new laptop. I would not wait for a failure to get a spare drive. If you get a new drive or even a used one of equal specs to the one in the unit you run now, clone it and put it up, and have another drive that you copy the images made weekly to and use for storage to each computer with a dock you go a long way to peace of mind. Your clone drives and storage drives don’t need to be SSDs, in fact the storage drive can be a slow drive as it is not accessed for speed. The standby clone drive needs to be the same specs or close as the one it will replace in a failure or what is the sense?

To repeat.
SSDs can be backed up too, exactly like mechanical drives. Mechanical drives can lose everything too.
SSDs run much cooler, so everything in the computer case can run cooler, and much faster to boot, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Backups are what save the day, not reliability. Have a perfect drive and system and let it roast in a house fire and see what happens. My clones are kept in the safe which is water and fire resistant long enough for them all to survive. The only drives out and exposed are the image and storage drives in their docks, and the ones inside each computer. The USB thumbdrives are in my pocket and my wife’s purse. If it/they is/are destroyed then I/we will likely be dead and will not care at all.

It isn’t that hard or expensive. Have one computer? A drive dock and two extra drives are all you need for a bulletproof system. A drive dock is 30 bucks. A spare drive may already be laying around for the 500GB – 1TB image and storage drive kept in the dock most of the time when not using another for weekly/as needed use, and one for a clone drive which must be the same size or larger than the one in the computer to restore images later if need be is all you need.

Getting sticker shock with today’s hard drive prices since the flood? I already had all my drives and just bought two used ones for my old and new Laptops a good Seagate 500GB 2.5 and a WD Black caviar 620GB for 20 bucks each both like new and perfect. I kept my old laptop drive and put in the used drive that was wiped and factory restored from the disks I always make and keep until time to sell, but has none of my data to be forensically recovered in it, and kept my old drive for a clone or main.

See once you have your drives and clones no price fluctuations or availability of compatible hardware issues can come up. You are done!

Reply | Quote

Yes, an SSD is the way to go as a primary operating system boot drive. Nothing beats the speed increase you can get from it.
Even a Windows XP based computer will see real gains in speed, if it’s installed and run properly.

The only problem with an SSD is that it is still too expensive to purchase 4 or 6 TB to use as storage. Regular high capacity mechanical drives, in this instance, will do just fine. The lifespans of many “high quality” SSD’s have come to match that of their mechanical counterparts.
I did say “high quality”, not cheap low quality SSD drives.

So yes, solid state drives used as primary operating system bootable drives are more than ready for prime time.

Remember, your operating system is a means to an end, not the end in itself. If you want to preserve the data you generate
and the programs you install, you must be the one to back them up. Not Microsoft, not the hardware manufacturer, YOU the user.

Reply | Quote

@ CliNT;
You said, “high quality”, not cheap low quality SSD drives.

What brands do you recommend, would Crucial m4 be high quality??

Reply | Quote

I’ve been reading the performance tests, reviews and monthly ratings on Tom’s Hardware for the best SSD’s for the money rated every month. The current generation of Sand Force SSD’s offer the best performance and except for manufacturer badging are nearly identical. I’ve been using the Corsair Force 3 and Force GT’s with great success. Mushkin and Adata are also consistently at the top of the charts. Intel drives currently have about half the performance of the latest Sand Force-based drives but still cost more. I’ve been avoiding OCZ products after a few dismal experiences with their now-defunct RAM and reading the user reviews on Newegg. Nobody should have to do firmware upgrades to get a “new” product to function properly (or at all).
Crucial drives are competitive in the SSD market (and they actually manufacture the internal memory chips themselves as part of Micron) and I’ve read reviews of them getting near the Sand Force performance mark. Two Corsair 120GB Force GT’s in RAID 0 will saturate the SATA 3.0 6GPS pipeline in benchmarking for speed. You can also use indexing and compression with no noticable hit in performance in Windows 7 Ultimate/Pro 64-bit. Tom’s had a very good article on that as well.

Reply | Quote

Thx bobbybluz;
Use to buy Mushkin mem yrs ago — good for oc’ing but been a crucial customer for yrs now.

I guess quality is reading reviews.

Reply | Quote

I’ve used a few Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR120GB-DX SSD’s in customer builds and they may be the best SSD for the $$$ at the moment. Newegg has had them on Shell Shocker deals a few times for $119 and at that price can’t be beat. When I do my own next build that’s most likely going to be the system drive. I always read customers reviews to get an idea of potential problems with anything. If n00bs don’t have issues with a product experienced users won’t either.

Reply | Quote

Many brands of SSD use “Sandforce” controller software, and there were some nasty bugs in early versions of Sandforce 1200-series controllers used in SATA II drives. After a few days/weeks users would wake their computers from Sleep mode and a few seconds later would get a Blue Screen of Death. Upon rebooting, the computer no longer recognised the SSD drive at all – everything was gone !! Eventually, Sandforce worked out the bugs (even the early firmware updates didn’t fix the problems!). This seriously damaged some brands’ reputation, OCZ being a case in point.

Intel and Kingston, among others, didn’t use Sandforce controllers so, while their performance wasn’t as fast, they performed reliably with very few problems. Using Kingston V+100 96GB models in our two Windows 7 desktops, they go from the “Starting Windows” logo to ready-to-use desktop in about 30 seconds. Both PCs have a bunch of programs loading at Startup with 77 or so “processes” running. Sandisk, always a good name in flash memory, waited until the Sandforce controllers were totally reliable and then released a great SATA II SSD called the Sandisk Ultra with real top-shelf performance and reliability. It boots and loads programs and games a few seconds faster than the Kingston, with even better performance on small files or Excel work, plus it’s really fast loading and saving large image files for editing.

However, the newer, faster SATA III drives are now predominant for top performance, but only if you have SATA III on your computer !
If not, you’ll still get top SATA II level performance from these newer SSDs and they’ll go way faster when you connect them to SATA III ports. Based on experience, I recommend the latest Sandisk Extreme model (just check out those positive reviews at newegg.com and everywhere else). You can get a PCI-e plug-in SATA adapter card that gives you a couple of SATA III ports on it for around $20 – $30 if you need that SATA III blinding speed.

Don’t forget a couple of important things before installing Windows on your SSD. Go into the computer’s BIOS setup screen and change the SATA operating mode to AHCI. On some BIOS the setting may just be “Enhanced”. Install Windows plus video/graphics drivers, then run Windows Experience Index (WEI). Windows will recognize that it’s an SSD and will turn off Scheduled Defragmentation, Indexing, and maybe Superfetch (I can’t remember for sure). These tweaks help ensure long term performance and reliability for the SSD.

Reply | Quote

Leaving Indexing and Superfetch alone with a SSD. You can enable AHCI on an existing Win 7 installation by doing this registry mod: Here is how to set AHCI up without doing a reinstall

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesMsahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesIastorV
In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

Install the AHCI drivers, reboot into BIOS and set the drive/storage controller to AHCI. Reboot and you should be good to go.

As far as Sandisk goes their products are abysmally slow compared to those from Adata. I do a lot of A/V editing and use large USB 3.0 flash drives to transfer data between machines. The Adata’s over over 4 times as fast as the Sandisk’s. They also have much better construction (aluminum vs plastic). I haven’t used an Adata SSD yet but their benchmarking score are very impressive.

Reply | Quote

When using AHCI for fresh Win 7 install you may have to start setup in IDE mode, install the chipset’s AHCI drivers and when they system reboots during setup go into BIOS and change to AHCI. You can also enable AHCI in an existing Windows installation with this registry mod: Here is how to set AHCI up with out doing a reinstall:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesMsahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesIastorV
In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

Install the AHCI drivers, reboot into BIOS and enable AHCI, reboot into Windows.

Reply | Quote

In the past 5 days I have had two Seagate Barracuda SATA hard disks fail. That makes my tally now four in the last two years. And I’m just a mostly home user. All four were covered by warranty and so replacements were offered. But of the the two replacements I received previously (both refurbished) one has failed again!

I won’t be returning the latest two for replacements. The data they contain is inaccessible (actuator failure I believe rather than just bad disk sectors) but is private information that I do not want to share with anyone in the possible, but unlikely, event that the disks are repaired.

So where does that leave me? SSD is out of the question for me – they are not ready for the big time in my opinion, especially when it comes to reliability. The only other option I have considered is purchasing high reliability enterprise server disks (e.g Seagate ES series or WD RE4). They cost significantly more but haven been bitten four times now I am totally unconcerned about the extra cost when my data is at risk.

The other question that might be apparent that I will answer here is did I lose data? Yes, I did which has taught me that I can never have too many backups. :mellow:

Reply | Quote

If you had been using a backup (internal or external) using RAID 1 with two drives in redundant data storage you’d still have your data. I’ve never seen both drives in a RAID array fail at the same time. For critical storage I use a WD external drive running two 2TB drives in RAID 1 along with a seperate WD 2TB drive in a docking station.
SSD’s are more than ready for prime-time. With the Sand Force based drives now going into the 4th generation and competitors also having solved the reliability issues of the first drives using a SSD for the main system drive is a no-brainer. I’m seeing Newegg selling QUALITY SSD’s for less than $1 per GB at least once a week. Considering that the older mechanical hard drives were significantly more expensive as recently as 8 years ago ($135 for an 80GB WD Caviar) while offering only a fraction of the performance and having moving parts inside (no moving parts is always a good thing) the times have definately changed. After using a top-end SSD along with a 4-6-8 core CPU and 64-bit operating system all mechanical hard drives are downright slow (Two WD VelociRaptor SATA 3.0’s in RAID 0 are about 33% as fast as a Corsair Force GT SSD in benchmarking).
Prior to the flooding in Thailand driving up mechanical drive prices the Samsung F3 HD103SJ 1TB drives were going for as little as $49 including free shipping. Two of those in RAID 1 gave a great backup for under $100. Prices are coming back down now but since Seagate now owns the Samsung hard drive name I doubt if the prices will be as low again or the quality as high. The WD Caviar Black Edition drives offer the same two-head design as their RE4’s at a much lower price. Two of those in RAID 1 are the way to go for backups at the moment.

Reply | Quote

Agree with SSDs, only type of drive that has not failed on me…yet. Seagate has been the least reliable over the past two years and are the Samsungs the ones with the Deskstar (formerly “Deathstar”) brand now? Deskstars have been the most reliable mech drives for me, but like I said, 7 or 8 SSDs and no failures.

Disagree on the RAID 1, it only protects in case of hardware failure in one device, any non-hardware read/write corruption, or deletions or the like, instantly affects both drives, and does nothing to insure accident befalling both drives simultaneously. Its better than having just one drive but that’s all, better. Best is separate, backup to the backup miles away, if my home should burn or be damaged in some way affecting the drives; got it covered. I do it for free too by the way, just the cost of the drive and a friends good will; using GBridge to backup over the Internet to my own drive. Beats Carbonite and others of that ilk like a dirty rug but its a bit geeky; free to back up externals, network drives, you name it, no restrictions.

Reply | Quote

Hitachi took over IBM’s hard drive division after the infamous “Deathstar” debacle. I was building gaming machines back when the 75GXP drives were failing with regularity and had been using those drives. I was getting them directly from IBM in bulk and they got quite ugly about the warranty issues with the failed drives. I had about 20 of them I wanted to return and not only did they refuse to accept them they actually denied I had bought the drives from them even though I had invoices and billing statements. I even had my IBM customer service rep on the phone in a conference call with an IBM executive being asked if he actually was an IBM employee. After filing a lawsuit against IBM they sent a private courier to pick up the drives. IBM then sent me a series of small checks over several months as reimbursement for the “replacement value only” and I lost several hundred dollars in the long run. I’ll never buy anything with IBM on it again.
Samsung did a great job on the Spinpoint series of hard drives. I used them for a few years in my own and customers builds without a single failure to date. They recently sold their hard drive line to Seagate and after many bad experiences with Seagate quality have fears the same issues with affect the Samsung series as well. After Seagate merged with Maxtor the quality plummeted.
For A/V editing and file transfer I do redundant backups while I’m doing the actual production work. Depending upon how critical the data is I’ve used my ADATA 32GB USB 3.0 flash drives, DVD+RW’s, RAID 1 external hard drives and a 2TB WD Caviar Black Edition in a USB 3.0 docking station all at the same time. The odds of all of those failing at the same time is next to zero. I also use 6 different production computers and keep the same data on at least 3 of them at the same time. Over the years I’ve learned to be neurotic.

Reply | Quote

At his induction speech into the NFL Hall of Fame Mr. Jerry Rice said that fear of failure is what drove him to succeed. Maybe hard drives need to be programmed with a “FoF” feature? :o:

Reply | Quote