Do 2 and 3 TB HDDs have any reliability issues?

[cmdrdredd]

I remember a while back reading about some reliability issues and a buddy of mine wants a large storage drive for videos and pictures. He asked me which one to buy, but I honestly haven't an answer. Seagate, Western Digital etc all make them. Is there one that has known reliability issues? I remember personally going through three 1TB Seagate drives that all died, but that was years back.

 

[rchunter]

I think wd and seagate nas drives are good. I've got 15 4tb wd reds in use right now. No problems with any. No doa, no errors, clean smart data.

 

[Acidicheartburn]

This is in no way fact, but I've seen some people agree that higher capacity HDDs may be more likely to go bad than smaller capacity HDDs. The idea of it sorta makes sense. More platters mean more complexity and thus more things that could go bad. With that being said, I've yet to see any real proof.

Personally, I feel less comfortable about having that many eggs in one basket, so to speak. 2 TB of data on a single drive means if it goes you lose 2 TB of data (excluding backups). But if you spread that out across two 1 TB drives you're a lot less likely to lose everything in one go.

~Acid

 

[Elixer]

Unfortunately, there is no known way to know when ANY HD will fail.
So, the ONLY answer is, do backups.
Yeah, I know it sucks, but the alternative sucks more when you lose terabytes of data, and end up paying thousands to try to get your data back once the drive has failed.

That said, I would use HGST then WD blacks, then Toshiba, then seagate in that order.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Guys I think you missed the question. There have been in the past particular models of HDD that were known for reliability issues. I am asking if that is the case with any of them now in higher capacities. Telling me you need backups etc avoids the question entirely.

 

[Acidicheartburn]

The problem is that there isn't very much data out there on HDD reliability. Your best bet is to look at the reviews of individual drives on Newegg, Amazon, and other places and see what percentage of the reviews for each drive are strongly negative (1 and 2 stars). If you find that 3 TB drives have 10% more 1 and 2 star reviews than the 1 TB models then there's your answer. It's by no means an accurate assessment of reliability but its pretty much the best you can do.

~Acid

 

[cmdrdredd]

Fair enough

 

[AlienTech]

Reviews are wrong. I have rarely seen reviews of "A" drive.. It is always "a" review of a drive. Which means one of those drives work or wont work. Unless you have detailed specifics, it would be like doing a review of Toyota. Buying a toyota is usually safe... Except if you bought the one where the accelerator pedal gets stuck ones..

I been fooled many times so I do extensive research now. Even then I have found it very hard to figure out the fact and fiction. Paid pumpers will attack you for saying something negative or even asking particular questions. It took over an year to find out some real info on both 2TB and 3TB drives, which in the end I found out had like over 3 different kinds each and that is after whittling it down from ALL the 2TB and 3TB drives of which there are a dozen different ones. I have a 6GB seagate drive I bought in 1998 and it works great.. No errors and no problems.. Does not actually say much of anything about what to buy right now.. Maybe I will buy seagate because of my experience from almost 2 decades ago and I can see it works great.. But the drives I bought in the last 5 years are just junk.. They are still usable.. It is only that compared to the old drive which I bought at the time, I was anxious already knowing other peoples experiences of their drives at the time. But mine ended up different and even a 160GB SATA 1 drive I bought in 2005 still works great, So until I really started buying their drives again in quantity again I had a good experience. I did not do enough research.. ie extensive research taking months.. I was lazy and I pay for it. I just "ASSumed" I would have the same experience as the notes others left on those drives. I ordered those drives but ended up getting some other drives. Thats the problem with ordering a BMW... Without knowing the full specs.. I thought I was getting a 650CSI 12 cylinder 500 HP with air and abs and stuff and ended up with a bmw 320 with no spare tire, no sun roof and no abs.

You never had the salesman show you the top of the line fully loaded model and then in the office you sign up for the lemon in the bunch?

You might get lucky.. I would say select a particular model then do a lot of research on that particular model. Find every detail you can. others cant help you because if some of the answers here are any indication, it says nothing about ANY drive you are going to buy unless you get mroe info on those particular drives and order the very same one and hope you GET that very same particular drive as well. My own experience, off the 8 drives I ordered even with all the asking and prodding, I only got 2 drives that I really wanted. The other 6 were bait and swap. My own fault..

 

[bononos]

I remember a while back reading about some reliability issues and a buddy of mine wants a large storage drive for videos and pictures. He asked me which one to buy, but I honestly haven't an answer. Seagate, Western Digital etc all make them. Is there one that has known reliability issues? I remember personally going through three 1TB Seagate drives that all died, but that was years back.

Large nowadays means 4-8Tb for harddrives, 2-3Tb is mainstream.
The news that is making rounds lately since last year is Backblaze's reliability stats which points at some defect in the Seagate 3Tb model because of the high failure rate.

 

[Charlie98]

The news that is making rounds lately since last year is Backblaze's reliability stats which points at some defect in the Seagate 3Tb model because of the high failure rate.

I think that's the answer the OP is looking for. Having said that, I have one of those evil Seagate 3TB drives, and it's been fine so far; that is not to say it won't fail the next time I power up the HTPC... just like any other HDD or SSD I have in my systems.

OP, large storage drives are great, but as Elixir and Acidic allude to... yes, you need to back up that data if it is at all valuable. If you (or whoever) need a 3TB HDD, for example, buy two and duplicate your data across them. In my business machine I have the OS drive backed up across 4 different drives... because I have lost the OS drive. In my HTPC, if my storage drive takes a dump... whoop de do, I have all the DVDs upstairs and can rerip them. BUT. All those video files represent a few hundred hours of ripping and configuration... which I'm not really anxious to do; so I have a single 5TB drive, backed up across 2 3TB HDDs.

As far as which HDD I pick? What's on sale?

 

[cmdrdredd]

I am fine with my storage. I have a 4TB NAS at home in a RAID 1 configuration. I haven't kept current with drives lately and I didn't want to recommend a model that was known to be problematic. Remember the IBM desk star issues and the issues with a specific model of seagate 1TB drive I had. I will hesitate to recommend the seagate 3TB drive mentioned above though.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Reviews are wrong. I have rarely seen reviews of "A" drive.. It is always "a" review of a drive. Which means one of those drives work or wont work. Unless you have detailed specifics, it would be like doing a review of Toyota. Buying a toyota is usually safe... Except if you bought the one where the accelerator pedal gets stuck ones..

I been fooled many times so I do extensive research now. Even then I have found it very hard to figure out the fact and fiction. Paid pumpers will attack you for saying something negative or even asking particular questions. It took over an year to find out some real info on both 2TB and 3TB drives, which in the end I found out had like over 3 different kinds each and that is after whittling it down from ALL the 2TB and 3TB drives of which there are a dozen different ones. I have a 6GB seagate drive I bought in 1998 and it works great.. No errors and no problems.. Does not actually say much of anything about what to buy right now.. Maybe I will buy seagate because of my experience from almost 2 decades ago and I can see it works great.. But the drives I bought in the last 5 years are just junk.. They are still usable.. It is only that compared to the old drive which I bought at the time, I was anxious already knowing other peoples experiences of their drives at the time. But mine ended up different and even a 160GB SATA 1 drive I bought in 2005 still works great, So until I really started buying their drives again in quantity again I had a good experience. I did not do enough research.. ie extensive research taking months.. I was lazy and I pay for it. I just "ASSumed" I would have the same experience as the notes others left on those drives. I ordered those drives but ended up getting some other drives. Thats the problem with ordering a BMW... Without knowing the full specs.. I thought I was getting a 650CSI 12 cylinder 500 HP with air and abs and stuff and ended up with a bmw 320 with no spare tire, no sun roof and no abs.

You never had the salesman show you the top of the line fully loaded model and then in the office you sign up for the lemon in the bunch?

You might get lucky.. I would say select a particular model then do a lot of research on that particular model. Find every detail you can. others cant help you because if some of the answers here are any indication, it says nothing about ANY drive you are going to buy unless you get mroe info on those particular drives and order the very same one and hope you GET that very same particular drive as well. My own experience, off the 8 drives I ordered even with all the asking and prodding, I only got 2 drives that I really wanted. The other 6 were bait and swap. My own fault..

You might wanna run for politics since you are so incredibly good at talking so much yet saying absolutely nothing of value.

 

[AlienTech]

You might wanna run for politics since you are so incredibly good at talking so much yet saying absolutely nothing of value.

Maybe I will, that way I could come onto your tv talk show and we can talk about the weather.

 

[h9826790]

For your info. I am now using a 4T WD Red with another 6T WD Red. The 4T was there for more than 1.5yr, and the 6T only few months old. No problem so far.

 

[Charlie98]

For your info. I am now using a 4T WD Red with another 6T WD Red. The 4T was there for more than 1.5yr, and the 6T only few months old. No problem so far.

In contrast... I had a 2TB Red with bad sectors right out of the box, WD replaced it with a refurb 3TB Red, which has been 100% :\

 

[thxdd]

Check out Backblaze's real world results with anywhere from tens to thousands of various drive types used in their data centers:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

 

[XavierMace]

My 12 Seagate 2TB's are still running strong.

 

[MongGrel]

You might wanna run for politics since you are so incredibly good at talking so much yet saying absolutely nothing of value.

Maybe I will, that way I could come onto your tv talk show and we can talk about the weather.

I'd say StrangerGuy has a pretty good point, but won't start a fight in here.

:thumbsup:

I still haven't bought anything over a 1TB myself I guess, but I bought 4 X WD 1 TB RE3's when they first came out and put them on an Areca hardware card, that cost a bit at the time. and they still work fine.

I guess I've never used a Blue or a Red, had always avoided them, but just for regular storage I stick to WD Blacks, most of the computers I use or build has one in it other than the main.