Are there hard drives which fail less?

[slicksilver]

From the last 6 years, I've never owned a hard disk which hasn't eventually died and am getting sick of replacing, reinstalling and making backups all the time. I've used them all ...Maxtor, Quantum, Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung and IBM Deathstar. All of them have failed on me atleast once. Is there any newer techonology as such where drive failure rate is minimal? I actually do not mind taking a performance hit too.

Thanks in advance for your opinion folks

 

[SuperNaruto]

nope.. anything mechanical and generates heat is bound to fail... scsi fails less.. but still fails.. SCSI just uses better parts.. I would get the Seagate ES or WD RE2 series.. above avg than regular SATA/PATA drives but still, like th test seagate did, 20% more prone to failure.. raid up if data is valuable and backup often.

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5


The difference in reliability between typical SATA and real enterprise disks has been proven in a recent test by Seagate. Seagate exposed three groups of 300 desktop drives to high-duty-cycle sequential and random workloads. Enterprise disks list a slightly higher or similar failure rate than desktop drives, but that does not mean they are the same. Enterprise disks are tested for heavy duty highly random workloads and desktop drives are tested with desktop workloads. Seagate's tests revealed that desktop drives failed twice as often in the sequential server tests than with normal desktop use. When running random server or transactional workloads, SATA drives failed four times as often![²] In other words, it is not wise to use SATA drives for transactional database environments; you need real SCSI/SAS enterprise disks which are made to be used for the demanding server loads.

Even the so called "Nearline" (Seagate) or "Raid Edition" (RE, Western Digital) SATA drives which are made to operate in enterprise storage racks, and which are more reliable than desktop disks, are not made for the mission critical, random transactional applications. Their MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is still at least 20% lower than typical enterprise disks, and they will show the similar failure rates when used with highly random server workloads as desktop drives.

 

[Blain]

Keep them cool, Keep quality power flowing to them, Keep away from Maxtor. 😉

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: Blain
Keep them cool, Keep quality power flowing to them, Keep away from Maxtor. 😉

Good advice from Blain. I have been using HDDs since about 1985, and have only had one failure in that time. You might want to review your care and maintenance practices as well. Could be that you are just really unlucky. 🙂

BTW - in that 20+ years of experience, I can add that my nominal use of any given HDD is about 4 years max, and mostly 2-3 years. Ugrades and product improvements are constant.

 

[T9D]

raptors seems to be better quality than most. with longer longevity, and thats reflected in the 5 year warranty too. You pay more though. But at least you are getting faster drives also.

 

[lobbyone]

No HD will last forever anyway

 

[BurnItDwn]

as others have said ...
buy NEW drives not used drives if you plan to use them for a long time

Expect a useful service life of about 3-5 years for most drives ... anything beyond that for most drive, and the failure rates start to climb. Expect a useful service life of about 5-7 years or so for most SCSI drives.

This is true for ALL drives, as well as a lot of the other crap inside your PC, If they get too hot due to inadequate cooling or air flow, they will probably fail sooner.


As far as new technology that will fail a lot less ...
Solid state drives are much less prone to fail, however, the cost per GB is very high, and the capacity is very limited.

 

[ShawnD1]

Not sure how the cause and effect works for hard drive failure, but it sure seems like they fail more for people who don't use them much. Every computer I've ever had has been left to run all day and night, 24/7, and I've never had a hard drive failure. The only failures I've heard about (in real life) were drives owned by people who didn't use computers all that often; people who turn the computer on and off several times per day.

It's a lot like a car. You can drive a car for 20 years with no problems, but a car left in a field for 20 years probably doesn't work anymore.

 

[IGBT]

..I've had good luck with them. 2 failures in 5 years and still have 2 old (4years old WD's) still working. I adjust power mgmnt.to spool the drives down after 3 min of inactivity. I think that may explain my good luck.

 

[SparkyJJO]

I've had drives fail on me before, every one of them was a WD :frown: I guess they don't like me.

So far no samsung, seagate, or even maxtor has died on me. Never had an IBM drive but my brother did and it failed. He's got all maxtor drives now (about 4 of them) and all have been running for a couple years. The primary OS drive did act up once so he got it RMA'ed but that is the only time he's had issues with any of them. My parents' PC has a 3 or 4 year old 40GB maxtor drive in it (one of the slim ones) and it still works fine as well.

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
It's a lot like a car. You can drive a car for 20 years with no problems, but a car left in a field for 20 years probably doesn't work anymore.

Not really. Hard drives don't rust or have liquids flowing through them.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
It's a lot like a car. You can drive a car for 20 years with no problems, but a car left in a field for 20 years probably doesn't work anymore.

Not really. Hard drives don't rust or have liquids flowing through them.

But they do have bearings and motors 😉

Gentle continuous spinning is probably good for it. Constant read and write demand is probably bad for it.

 

[Jiggz]

Heat, heat and heat is the most common cause of hdd, followed by unstable power and then age. So start looking for fixes in the same order. As for age, usually at the 2-3 year mark, you should start looking on upgrading but make sure you have a secured back up starting at the 2nd year. My RAID 0 is on its 3rd year. Secure back up in place and replacement hdd in place. When one of these hdd's fail both will hit the trash can at the same time.