IDE hard drive reliability

[bwass24]

I know that everyone, included me, is very concerned with the performance of our disk drives, but over the long term they are the most failure prone devices in our systems. Putting aside issues of performance (ATA100 vs. ATA133, large buffers, etc.) I'm very interested to learn about the brand of disk drives that you've had failures with.

Let's see if we can put together a sufficient amount of data to make some judgements about which drives might be more likely to die an early death.


Sorry...I didn't realize that the polling software wouldn't allow multiple votes. Please just vote for your most recent drive failure, if you've had more than one.

 

[corkyg]

The poll mechanism does not work - it will only allow one vote for one selected system. In over 20 years, I have had three HDD failures:

1 Seagate
1 Western Digital
1 IBM

All I could vote for was western Digital. This poll mechnism doesn't allow mutliple selections.

 

[CTho9305]

12 gig maxtor, work machine. (which i voted for)
also a 30 gig samsung (home machine). samsung hard drives suck. maxtors are reliable - i've had lots of em with no problems.

 

[Woody419]

Every brand I have owned has failed at some time. None seem worse or better than any other. Hard drives fail so often that the manufacturers have streamlined and efficient RMA departments that can get you a replacement drive in 2 or 3 days, and I bet the RMA department isn't like the Maytag commercial with the guy sitting around waiting for a repair to come in either.

 

[kly1222]

I had a seagate die on me once...it was part of a raid 0 array. Thank god for norton ghost. That program has saved my butt so many times I've lost count.

 

[BFG10K]

The only HD I've ever seen die was a Maxtor.

 

[corkyg]

There are other related factors here that contribute to HDD mortality. One is voltage stability and smoothness. Ever since I installed a UPS, I have had no HDD failures. Voltage spikes and surges can do damage easily. Additionally, heat is also a factor, and computer location. A bump or shock during drive action can really do a good job on the platters.

And, this is subject to debate, but I believe that dividing a drive into logical partitions also saves wear and tear because the seeks which cause actuator stresses are greatly reduced in the area they have to cover, IOW, data is confined to a smaller piece of real estate, thus the head assemblies only have to cover a smaller chunk of the drive instead of the whole enchilada when collecting data stored by random access.

 

[Texun]

1 out of 6 Maxtors died within 30 months
3 out of 5 WD's died in 36 months
1 Segate was DOA in the box.

 

[Amused]

I've never had a HDD fail.

And I've owned four 75GXPs in one RAID-0 array and two more in another. I've also had two 60GXPs in another RAID-0 array. (All actively cooled)

The only HDD I've ever had a problem with was an old 1gb Seagate drive that came in a Packard Bell P150 computer. It developed one bad sector after two years. It still runs today and is being used by my neice with only one bad sector still.

 

[powerMarkymark]

No failures yet, keep my fingers crossed.

 

[bwass24]

AmusedOne...

I think that it might be time for you to go play Lotto. Your luck has been amazing, even with the active cooling.