How many of you have had serious problems with your conventional hard drive?

have you recently had issues with your hard drive?

  • yes

  • No


Results are only viewable after voting.

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
5,076
2,635
136
In the last 5 years, how many of you have had serious problems with a laptop or desktop hard drive ? Define serious as you wish but i generally accept requiring repair or replacement as a good definition. However again define serious as you wish.

This thread is to evaluate hard drive reliability vs ssd reliability which is also being polled in another thread at this time. I realize most ssds have been bought in the last five years and some hard drives have been in use longer than five years but honestly most people I know have drives that are 2-3 years old with both types. If your drive was older than 5 years before it developed an issue vote no automatically. Please think about all your drives. Feel free to state how long you had the drive before it developed a problem in your post.

Vote yes if you have experienced at least 1 problem. Vote no if you have been problem free.
 
Last edited:

Ben90

Platinum Member
Jun 14, 2009
2,866
3
0
My 8 Re2's in Raid 0 have been chugging along quite fine.
My 8 Re3's in Raid 0 have been chugging along quite fine.

*edit*
I have broken three SATA connectors since it is an EXTREMELY tight fit in my P182 and P183 cases, but nothing a little tape couldn't fix.
 

billyb0b

Golden Member
Nov 8, 2009
1,270
5
81
If I were to speculate, I have owned somewhere between 30-50 mechanical hard drives between 1994 and now. Some I've owned for several years, some just briefly and then sold them. I never had a problem with a one having issues. I guess I've just been lucky, I don't know.

I've always heard the stat that 1 in 10 HDs will fail. I cannot source it but it certainly has not been my experience. Though if you look at feedback on drives on newegg, drives with 1000+ reviews, there are groups of people in there who say their drives failed.
 

piasabird

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
17,168
60
91
I think it is confusing when you see all of the posts about bad hard drives or drives that arrived DOA. It is hard to tell if the customer mishandled the drives, they were damaged in shipping, or they were faulty to begin with. After seeing how some of the shipping handlers handled things like TV's and other packages on YouTube, I understand how maybe a lot of hard drives could be damaged during shipment. All you have to do is just move a box around and you could damage the hard drive. They kind of dont like being bounced down the road and being thrown around like a brick. I also noticed a lot of local potholes around where I live.

I am a one hard drive per machine guy. When I use a new hard drive for a computer and keep it for 3-7 years I tend to not have problems with the hard drives. One time I repurposed a hard drive from one build to the next and I had problems with it. One other time about 10-15 years ago I purchased an IBM Deskstar and it earned the name of Deathstar after it started clicking. I think some other company like Mitsubishi or some such company purchased IBM's hard drive company and they still use the brand name of Deskstar. I would not buy that hard drive if it was the last model or brand on the face of the earth.

My last hard drive is about 3-5 years old and it is still running fine. I think it was a Seagate. I dont overclock and I dont have a discreet video card that makes fan noise. It seems to run rather quietly. I have it next to my TV on a desk, and I stream Internet videos from it to the TV.
 
Last edited:

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
20,983
16,229
136
@ piasabird

Over ten years ago, a SCSI hard disk was delivered to a place that I worked - quite reasonable packaging (large cardboard box, plenty of sponge, anti-static bag), however we sent it straight back because a corner of the disk chassis had been broken off. To this day, regardless of whether it happened before or in said packaging, I still wonder what amount of force was involved to achieve that.

I had a DeathStar drive too once (year 2000 or thereabouts) :) I haven't had any failures since on my own computer. That occasion and a previous occasion involving some unexpected partition trashing taught me the value of data backups :)
 
Last edited:

God Mode

Platinum Member
Jul 2, 2005
2,903
0
71
Loud clicking and motor noise compared to duplicate identical drives. Intermittent mechanical noise bothers me a lot and the last 2 out of 4 hdd's (identical WD blacks)had these issues. I haven't experienced an outright failure but I didn't trust them longterm for important data.
 

MotF Bane

No Lifer
Dec 22, 2006
60,801
10
0
Two confirmed dead of 10 or 11, another with a bugged firmware, and a couple noisy and unreliable. Bad luck for me i guess.

.
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
5,076
2,635
136
In the last five years I have replaced a Seagate 1.5tb barracuda drive 3 times due to grinding and errors on Seagate testing utilities. I have replaced a laptop Samsung drive for failure to boot as confirmed by Asus techs. I have replaced my girlfriends 750gb storage drive after incessant grinding. And failure to boot. I later tested it with a 3.5 in enclosure an windows wasn't able to recognize or utilize the drive.

The oldest drive was the barracuda which was about 1.5 to 2 years in before its first replacement. All the others were roughly one to 1.5 years old.
 

Viper GTS

Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
38,107
433
136
I currently have close to 40 mechanical drives, though 24 of them are too new (~9 months) to be worth much data wise.

24x1 TB 7200 RPM - No failures yet. This is 16 Samsung 7200 RPM and 8 WD RE series 7200 RPM.

8x320 GB in an external chassis - Two developed bad motors or something that produced horrible squealing but no actual failure or data loss. Replaced under warranty. These drives ran 24/7 for 4 years - Not bad for $60 apiece in 2008.

One hard failure out of the remaining odds & ends, a 250 GB Western Digital MyBook. It just doesn't detect on anything. I even broke it out of the enclosure, no luck.

Viper GTS
 

Concillian

Diamond Member
May 26, 2004
3,751
8
81
I put no, since the drives I had issues with had been in continuous service for 6 years when they failed (2 out of 4 80 GB Samsung drives in a RAID-5 array.)

Those are the only issues I've had in the last 5 years, and I don't thin a hard drive failing after 6 years of 24 / 7 use is necessarily unexpected.

Outside of those Samsung's, all my drives in the last 5 years but one have been Seagate. I think 9 Seagates and 1 WD in the last 5 years.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,587
10,225
126
I had been running some WD 6400AAKS drives, with a build date of 2007 on them, with no issues.

I did have one Seagate 500GB start to throw bad sectors, but it had been bounced around on a cross-country road trip.
 

fffblackmage

Platinum Member
Dec 28, 2007
2,548
0
76
I have three WD20EARS in a raid array in a home server/NAS. After a year, one of them recently started to develop bad sectors and repeatedly dropped out of the array. I hate having to pay for shipping for any warranty issues (feels like winning the wrong kind of lottery), but at least I did get a replacement drive from WD pretty quickly and I didn't lose any data.

The only other drive that died was probably caused by an ESD from me. It was an external drive, and the stupid Aluminum case must not be properly grounded or something.
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
5,076
2,635
136
I put no, since the drives I had issues with had been in continuous service for 6 years when they failed (2 out of 4 80 GB Samsung drives in a RAID-5 array.)

Those are the only issues I've had in the last 5 years, and I don't thin a hard drive failing after 6 years of 24 / 7 use is necessarily unexpected.

Outside of those Samsung's, all my drives in the last 5 years but one have been Seagate. I think 9 Seagates and 1 WD in the last 5 years.
Yeah I agree. That's why I say if the drive was more than 5 years old before it failed, vote no as that's more or less what you should expect. Anything past 5 years is gravy IMO. However I have never been able to keep a drive in operation without repair for more than a couple of years or so.
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
5,076
2,635
136
I think its very interesting so far. Not a ton of votes, and not exactly the most scientific of endeavours, but it certainly does seem like hard drives are more problematic for people than SSDs. The SSD thread has a complaint ratio of like 6 complaints to 54 no issues.
 

Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
1
71
interesting - 7200.11 500gb drives, two in raid-1 , 10 in raid-5 - 30% of the drives had 500+ remaps (fail), 30% had 0-50 remaps, 40% had < 10 remaps. Subsystem was used for 3.5 years for D2D backup - raid 5 causes far more writes even with 512meg BBWC @ 50/50 read/write and drive write cache enabled.

The raid-5 amplifies writes far more as any change to any 1 block writes to 10 drives. The raid-1 drives had ZERO remaps.

Basically tore those 10 500gb up - junk. I use raid-10 for everything else sata and have had no problems. RE4 2TB and Hitachi 2TB (ultrastar).

All sas drives are in tip top shape though (about 70 15K SAS drives). Raid-10 (1+0 hp smartarray) - never a problem really.

This has changed my mind to use raid-1/10 on all future storage and to break up the raid groups to reduce the thrashing. I'm going to build 6 raid-1 with esxi 5 and present the storage in smaller chunks (since the drives are 4x larger).

i've had three intel X25-M fail hardcore (catastrophic, no SMART until after the death). the x25-v's are solid. the sandforce drives we have in raid-0 are solid. No server activity on consumer ssd's as i know better than that.

External drives? the 7200.11's i use for offsite D2D2D are solid once broken in. A few went back off the bat - failed a 48 hour burn in. One person put down a heavy wrench next to a drive during use and nuked it. (dropped it on the desk - didn't have time to catch it). otherwise the WD elements 3tb usb 3.0 and seagate 2tb 7200.11 external freeagent's are rocking out strong. surprisingly since i carry them home and back. Teracopy with crc-testing always.

I'm not much of a believer in incrementals so i do full bare metal backups of all desktops 60+ and vm's (30+) every night. Disk space is cheap eh?

I had not thought about write amplification with raid-5/6 until ssd's came along. I do think about it now. It doesn't make sense to write to all disks in a raid volume unless there is a good reason.
 

philipma1957

Golden Member
Jan 8, 2012
1,714
0
76
Since 2006 I have used over 100 hdds. the only terrible hdd with a 8 of 14 failure rate was seagates 500 gb 2.5 inch 7200 rpm hdd a momentus

what ever. To be fair this was the worlds first 2.5 inch 500gb hdd at 7200 rpm. came out in the summer of 2008 and from 2008 until aug 2009 it was a bad bet if you purchased one. No other company released a 2.5 inch500gb hdd with 7200 rpm until hitachi did in sept 2009. The seagate and the hitachi both have worked well since that date. In fact I got a hold of a 20 count case of seagate 500gb hybrid ssd/hdd drives and all of them are working after 3 to 5 months of use.


The wd 3tb hdd i owned and sold 32 of and today 30 still work. they were purchased from nov 2010 until april 2011.

I built a lot of 4tb raid0 boxes for audio people in a few places in ca.
I used sans digital ts2ct with wdre4 2tb hdds all are flawless.

The only really bad drive was the seagate 2.5 inch but the thread was 5000 plus on seagates forum and they closed it due to the endless cursing and bad behavior by unhappy buyers. so in general hdds have been pretty good to me. better then sdds well maybe. not sure.
 

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
20,983
16,229
136
I think its very interesting so far. Not a ton of votes, and not exactly the most scientific of endeavours, but it certainly does seem like hard drives are more problematic for people than SSDs. The SSD thread has a complaint ratio of like 6 complaints to 54 no issues.

The SSD poll also has double the number of people voting than on this thread. There's almost no question that everyone in this forum owns a HDD, so what we have so far are only people that felt like voting, for one reason or another.

I'm not saying the SSD poll has all the SSD users either, but at least it's not inaccurate to the point that less than ten percent of users voted, IMO.

If the HDD poll was a fair representation of HDD reliability generally, that means that nearly 40% of people on this forum have had a HDD pretty much fail in the last two years. What's the figure for worldwide hard disk production? 40% of that? WD and Seagate would be bankrupt by now. Businesses would probably be printing everything out.
 
Last edited:

palladium

Senior member
Dec 24, 2007
539
2
81
my Seagate "died" twice in 3 years - both times it had bad sectors in it (my PC keeps crashing). On the other hand, I have a 12 year old WD 40GB IDE drive that is still running strong.
 

Charlie98

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2011
6,298
64
91
My old Dell desktop and it's WD 80GB are still going strong after 6 years... (WD800JD.) It's been down on the floor sucking in dust and dirt all those years (until I got brave enough to actually pull the cover off and look inside... nothing has been the same since.) I've had it crammed full (800MB space available) and have reformatted it twice... it just eases along. Not very quantitative given some of the others with mucho drives, but it is what it is.

If we are talking laptops...

My original business laptop (2005 Dell,) with a pathetically small 40GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2, bounced around in the cab of a recovery truck for over a year, never had a problem with it, either (the computer or the drive.) I just recently replace it with a more suitable 160GB WD.

HDD's are pretty idiot-proof and are so common and plentiful, that's why I think they will be around for a long while still, even with the SSD star on the rise. The $/GB pre flood probably had a lot to do with it, but if there really was an inherent problem with HHD's, you would have seen a cry for something better long before the SSD hit the market.
 

Rvenger

Elite Member <br> Super Moderator <br> Video Cards
Apr 6, 2004
6,283
5
81
I have a WD800JD as well. Still a good drive to this day.


I have a WD Blue 320gb WD3200AAKS getting ready to kick the bucket as we speak. I just don't want to buy an overpriced HDD right now.
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
5,076
2,635
136
The SSD poll also has double the number of people voting than on this thread. There's almost no question that everyone in this forum owns a HDD, so what we have so far are only people that felt like voting, for one reason or another.

I'm not saying the SSD poll has all the SSD users either, but at least it's not inaccurate to the point that less than ten percent of users voted, IMO.

If the HDD poll was a fair representation of HDD reliability generally, that means that nearly 40% of people on this forum have had a HDD pretty much fail in the last two years. What's the figure for worldwide hard disk production? 40% of that? WD and Seagate would be bankrupt by now. Businesses would probably be printing everything out.

I realize this is not scientific at all. There are much more HDDs in use than SSDs in use and the voting on both sides isn't equal. All sorts of selection biases may be in play here. Nonetheless though, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if 40% of people who use computers as "vigorously" as anandtech forum browsers use computers, have a hdd fail once every 2 to 3 years. Like I said, myself I have had at leat 5 failures in 3 years across multiple isolated systems. I'm not sayiing that 40 percent of all drives will fail, some drives are built to be much more sturdy and reliable for enterprise uses and etc. However, I wouldn't be surprised if 1/10 of all consumer level drives will fail in the time its warranty is still active. Which is really what this is a poll of when you think about it.
 

goobernoodles

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2005
1,820
2
81
I've never personally had a drive fail on me during use. With that said, I've seen many drives fail at my various jobs - many times with the user losing a lot of data.
 

zCypher

Diamond Member
Aug 18, 2002
6,115
171
116
I still have an 8.4GB Quantum Fireball that works fine. Along side it, a 80GB Seagate drive. In my current rig, both a 64MB and 32MB cache versions of 1TB WD Black. The Blacks aren't that old obviously, but the other drives are. Never any issues with any of them, the last drive I had issues with was a 2GB Seagate way back in the day.

I'm not all too surprised considering how many years hard drive tech has had to mature. Good lord most of these drives are god awful slow though.