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>500Gb drives, are they reliable?

rogerdv

rogerdv

Member
Im planning to get a new hard drive to expand my current 250Gb storage capacity. One of my friends have told me several times that 500Gb or more hard drives tend to be unreliable. I consulted another friend and he says that everything should be fine as long as you keep the disk in a single partition. Thats a big problem for me, because I use Windows and Linux and I need several partitions. Can somebody give me an opinion about this?
 
I'm having great luck with my 2tb Samsung F4's and WD Green.

I'd have no worries grabbing a 1tb Samsung F3. here

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No hard drive should be considered reliable. The bigger the drive the more you stand to lose. Back up anything you can't live without.

That said, your friend is seriously ill-informed..

Any 500gb + drive from an established OEM should be considered as reliable as any smaller capacity drive..
 
my 2TB drives have been good the past year but it is a weekend only use computer

like already mentioned though drives are cheap and big enough that i have two matching drives and keep back ups.
 
I've been running 3 1.5TB Seagate LP's in RAID 5 for over a year and they are fine. I've also been using a WD 2TB green drive to back up the raid array on another machine and its also fine and i hammer it with 1.5TB of data a week for backups.

So i would say the big drives are fine, I actually just installed a Seagate 2TB LP drive 15 min ago and am hammering it with 1.5TB of data right now and its doing fine(so far)
 
My 1TB Western Digital Black has been rock solid for the year or so that I've had it. I just ordered a newer black in fact, to accompany the current one which is getting lonely.
 
Been running 2 WDC Black 500s and a Seagate External eSATA 500 for nearly 2 years now. No hint of a problem with any of them. Thinking back, I only recall two HDD failures in the past 25 years.
 
Those 500GB drives will often use the exact same components as the larger drives... just fewer heads/platters. The reliability of any hard drive is primarily based on 2 things: How the drive has been treated through it's life (temperature, electrical, physical shock) and random chance.

Oh yeah... and that partition thing is total nonsense.
 
Thanks for the answers! Im looking though newegg and tigerdirect something that fits my budget, probably a 320Gb drive, because 500 ones are a bit out of my reach.
 
alaricljs said:
The reliability of any hard drive is primarily based on 2 things: How the drive has been treated through it's life (temperature, electrical, physical shock) and random chance.
Click to expand...
And third: Number of motors/heads/platters since every mechanical part you've got in your HDD is a potential point of failure.
 
From my experience, drives will either fail pretty quickly or after a long while. I seem to have pretty bad luck when buying them. I would say a decent percentage of Seagates I've bought went bad after two weeks or so. You could tell from the clicking sounds that they are going to go. But the ones that have survived those first few weeks have lasted me years and are still in my computer. The one thing I did do proactively was buy a dedicated HDD fan for them. You really need to keep them cool.
 
Doggiedog said:
From my experience, drives will either fail pretty quickly or after a long while. I seem to have pretty bad luck when buying them. I would say a decent percentage of Seagates I've bought went bad after two weeks or so. You could tell from the clicking sounds that they are going to go. But the ones that have survived those first few weeks have lasted me years and are still in my computer. The one thing I did do proactively was buy a dedicated HDD fan for them. You really need to keep them cool.
Click to expand...
One thing you can do is stresstest your drive a bit before using it to find those drives that will afterwise go bad in a week or two (actually I only fill them with random bits twice or so which isn't really stresstesting but does the trick for me).


And the famous google study showed that drives have the fewest problems in middle temperature (something like 30-40° iirc) - cold isn't that great.
 
Considering that I still have several 1st gen Hitachi 1TBs (industry's first 1TB drive) that have been (and still are) running 24/7 for the past few years, I'd say they're fine 🙂
 
keeping the drives mounted in an isolated well cooled environment - not too many vibrations (subwoofer) and not getting kicked/shoved around- stable power - yeah pretty reliable. more parts = more parts to fail. so twice as many heads/platters twice as many parts that can go bad.

keep in mind 1 platter usually = 2 heads (each side) but a 250gb drive might use only 1/2 of the platter to meet a market segment. that may be more reliable than the same 1 platter drive with 2 heads.

I've found stability is key. changing weather is worse than being a little too cold. stopping drives = no-no. enterprise drives have absurdly low power off/on levels (1000-2000 for 5 years). isolating vibrations is a biggie. think about what happens when you create a standing wave or have varying drive rpm's in a chassis. you can create some weird vibrations that really have an effect long term.

Things were pretty good with 1TB but once 1.5TB,2TB - things went downhill - fast.

My freeagent i have going right now if i thump the desk or hit the desk with my fast lightly it will crash and lose a few sectors and stop working. (usually destroying the partition too). yah its that sensitive. i carry them in caselogic cases and tip-toe around.

they need to make a boob-like enclosure for drives. <werd>
 
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