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Hard Drive Reliability by Brand

N4g4rok

N4g4rok

Senior member
Built my rig back in April with a 2TB Hitachi Desktar. This is right around the time that some reviewers said their drives were giving out, so i'm looking to set up a drive for external backups.

I've had a lot of recommendations for Samsung's Spinpoint and WD's Caviar Blacks, the latter being pretty expensive at the moment.

Is there a specific brand of 5400 rpm drives that has had proven longevity, or is it still just a guessing game?
 
I would say, if the data is important, then have multiple backups, and even offsite if you want to be safer. If it isn't, then flip a coin as to the brand you pick.
 
Samsung's HDD business has been absorbed by Seagate. Seagate is not yet supporting the Samsung drives, though - I have 1 that I need to send in for warranty work, and Seagate support told me to wait until January.
 
For my Home server, I'm using Seagate Barracuda Green drives and they've been great:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148681

They were $59 and $69 when I bought them, though.

It's luck of the draw, but it may be best to avoid the WD Green line. Of the several WD Green drives I've purchased, I did have to RMA a 1.5 TB model (an external USB drive). The replacement has been working fine.
 
Besides OCZ ssd's and the old Deathstar I have had very few problems over the years. Almost all my drives have been Western Digital. They last until obsolete in my case. I'm pretty sure you'll be fine with any brand other than OCZ today though. Just backup your data. Get one with a Warranty that meets your needs.
 
Personally I stick with Western Digital mechanical drives, since I haven't had any problems with maybe a dozen drives over the past decade but I have had Seagates die on me.

That's just luck of the draw, though. What the previous poster said about backups is the best advice you could possibly get. If the data is important to you then you should never count on one drive. Local backup is fine for stuff like movies you don't feel like downloading again; if the data is important to you then you'll want offsite to protect your data against fire, theft, etc.
 
I have had very good luck with Western Digital drives. I returned a Caviar Blue once. That amongst dozens of others. I like the Caviar Black series.

But right now with the prices near double, I wouldn't buy a hard drive unless I were desperate. I do have a few new spares I was saving in case this happened.

John
 
Every WD drive I've ever owned has been rock solid. I had one go bad, that's all, and it wasn't anything to do with data, rather the sata connection's plastic broke off. And WDC still warrantied it.

Most of the Hitachi nee IBM drives I've had, while out of the box at the time were fantastic, were crap in the long run. Now that WD has picked up Hitachi's storage division, we'll see. The players are getting fewer on the mechanical side of things whole new companies are coming into the SSD market.

For large cap drives, I've been using Samsung as well. WDC have been traditionally performance based drives in lower capacitied in RAID 0 configurations (Raptors and the like).

I've also never been a fan of Seagate, which sucks as I don't know that I'll ever buy one so those nice large cap Spinpoints...oh well.
 
My two drives are a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2, and that 2TB Hitachi Deskstar. I do keep weekly backups, but i'm getting more and more paranoid as that one year mark approaches. Right around Christmas, i'm planning to put together a home server as my off site back up solution.

I'm assuming a solid set of 5400 RPM drives would be the most likely to last. I'd like to go with WD, but i don't think the budget will allow for it at the moment.
 
Western Digital Caviar Black is one of the best HDDs out there. Seagate drives can be a bit of hit-and-miss, and they are pretty loud in some cases (in comparison to WD).
 
Samsung was my preferred but they are now owned by Seagate, so that kind of sucks.

I've seen drives from every manufacturer die, so it's kind of a tossup anymore.

My list right now would probably be:

Samsung (until they disappear under Seagate)
WD Black (loud though, ugh)
.
.
Seagate (shitty batch of 1.5tb drives, not sure on their current Green drives)
.
.
Hitachi ("oh your drive died? is it a hitachi? thought so")
.
.
.
.
WD Green


If we were talking 2.5" laptop drives you could throw in Toshiba and Fujitsu which I've actually had good reliability results with over the years. (not very good performers usually though)

I will say though as far as warranty replacement goes both WD and Seagate are pretty easy to work with when doing RMA's.
 
You will find a lot of different personal experiences. I've had a couple bad WD drives and A bad Samsung drive that later resulted in 3 out of 4 80GB drives failing in my RAID5, but haven't had a bad Seagate drive.

Any one person's experience is too small a sample size. The only people who know real failure rates are people who work at major systems integrators like Dell and HP, and they get different stock than newegg and such get because of that.

Every brand has some level of issues. The bottom line is that regardless of brand you want at least two backups of anything to be at a comfortable level (one 'near' backup and one that gets locked in a fireproof safe or is off-site in the case of fire / flood type damage that will take out your 'near' backup.) IMO if I can't afford three identical drives for my information, then it isn't information that's important to me, and I fully expect to write it off in the event of a failure.
 
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Concillian said:
You will find a lot of different personal experiences. I've had a couple bad WD drives and A bad Samsung drive that later resulted in 3 out of 4 80GB drives failing in my RAID5, but haven't had a bad Seagate drive.

Any one person's experience is too small a sample size. The only people who know real failure rates are people who work at major systems integrators like Dell and HP, and they get different stock than newegg and such get because of that.

Every brand has some level of issues. The bottom line is that regardless of brand you want at least two backups of anything to be at a comfortable level (one 'near' backup and one that gets locked in a fireproof safe or is off-site in the case of fire / flood type damage that will take out your 'near' backup.) IMO if I can't afford three identical drives for my information, then it isn't information that's important to me, and I fully expect to write it off in the event of a failure.
Click to expand...

But its still good to ask or look around forums to see if one particular brand or model has problems. Would you say Maxtor's reliability was as good as other brands in its last years? Seagate 7200 rpm drives years back was problematic because of cooling issues. Some models pack so much data per platter, I'm suspicious whether they are skimping on ECC on some drives I was researching in the past.
 
Only thing I can add is that over my 15 years of computers, only two drives have ever died on me... One being a Maxtor (obv), and the other being a Seagate (Not dead just realllyyy loud).

Dozens of Western Digitals have lasted 5-15 years, so I have a preference towards them 🙂
 
My sense is that one cannot make such a judgment by brand. Each brand has bad lots and bad models over the years. It sort of fits this adage, . . . all generalizations are false, including this one.
 
While I now boot from an SSD, my data drives are both Samsungs. These are worked hard, and have offered not so much as a hiccup moving in on two years now, so I count them reliable. Not the fastest spinners, but workhorses. Too bad they sold that part of the company to Seagate; not a knock on Seagate (who has at least as much experience in rotational storage as anyone today), but I like Samsung products and wish they still supported my drives.
 
I have a pretty large collection of Seagates, WDs (Consumer and Enterprise), and Hitachis spread between work and home. With the exception of the WD Greens, I haven't had any recent failures. Out of 12 WD Greens, I may have had 2 or 3 failures.

At work, we have 40 2tb 7k2000 drives with no failures as of yet after 2.5 years.
 
kmmatney said:
For my Home server, I'm using Seagate Barracuda Green drives and they've been great:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148681

They were $59 and $69 when I bought them, though.

It's luck of the draw, but it may be best to avoid the WD Green line. Of the several WD Green drives I've purchased, I did have to RMA a 1.5 TB model (an external USB drive). The replacement has been working fine.
Click to expand...

I bought a wd20ears on BF 2010. It's been the primary (and now only) data drive in my main rig since then and performed flawlessly. I've also owned many other WD drives (36gb raptor and 2 x wd6400aaks are still in use) and they've been great for me. It's depressing that the price is now twice what it was on the exact same drive a year ago...curse you global climate change!! 😡
 
Well, there's a lot of luck involved, too.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Samsung is one of the most reliable brands, yet of the 6 Samsung drives that I bought over the past few years, 3 have been through RMA (though I think a couple of them may have been unfortunate victims of bad power from a faulty UPS). Of the 4 Seagates that I acquired during the same time period, all are still in good shape, even though anecdotal evidence is not in their favor. I know someone who ended up RMAing every single Seagate that he had gotten over the past few years.

Anyway, I like looking at the percentage of 1- and 2-egg reviews as an indicator of drive quality. People say, "But those online retailer reviews are not reliable!" Or, "People who have problems are more likely to vent in a review whereas happy customers usually don't bother to provide feedback." Etc. Which is why I never look at product reviews in isolation. 10% 1-egg reviews does not mean a 10% failure rate. But I think it is fair to assume that these systemic biases should affect all the brands more or less equally. So while Seagate's "review failure rate" is much greater than the actual failure rate due to selection bias, the same should also be true of Samsung's "review failure rate". And as a result, the relative "review failure rates" between the different brands is useful even if the absolute numbers are meaningless.
 
I've found that no valid conclusions regarding differences in quality can be made by brand, at least not for the quality of the hardware. On the other hand Samsung tech support has been consistently far worse than that of every other hard disk manufacturer.
 
bryanl said:
I've found that no valid conclusions regarding differences in quality can be made by brand, at least not for the quality of the hardware.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup: This is also what I believe. There have been occasional issues such as the Seagate firmware problems on early 7200.11 drives and Western Digital's recall many years ago, plus the dreaded IBM "Deathstar." However, for the most part any one brand is not inherently more or less reliable than another brand.
 
Zap said:
for the most part any one brand is not inherently more or less reliable than another brand.
Click to expand...

Taking that into consideration, i think, for a home server, the best i can do is a high platter-count 5400 RPM drive. Looking at a caviar green that seems reasonably priced at the moment.

I can see that consumer reviews of hard drives might not be the best source of failure rates, but it seems like Western digital drives have done really well for longevity. I just wish the price issue and most of Thailand can get back on their feet in the near future.
 
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