Question New Report: Seagate and *SHUDDER* Hitachi seem to be the worst HDDs to buy

[igor_kavinski]

Drive Study Shows Most Failures Occur in Under Three Years

If you have a potentially bad hard drive, failure is most likely to occur early on.

www.tomshardware.com

From the Blocks and Files site:

Toshiba drives, in his sample, are the longest-lived, working for 34,799 hours before failing, with Hitachi’s the worst, at 18,632 hours. The Hitachi drives also have the highest pending (bad) sector count.

Burlee says the Secure Data Recovery engineers looked mote closely at the two most popular manufacturers; Western Digital and Seagate. He says: “We found that the five most durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made before 2015. On the other hand, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made after 2015.”

He notes: “in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives,” and “disks with CMR (conventional magnetic recording) appear more durable and resilient than those with SMR.”

Wow. So it's better to avoid newer drives from Seagate and Hitachi. Hitachi! I thought their data center Helium drives were not bad. Wonder what happened?

 

[fzabkar]

There is nothing inferior about these AV drives. They have the same robust ECC as desktop drives. In addition to the standard read/write sector commands, they support an additional "streaming" command set. This allows them to drop frames if error recovery is taking too long.

If you think about it, the drive must not drop any sectors when it is updating the file system's metadata (these are critical), but it is permitted to drop sectors containing AV data. When an AV drive is used in a desktop application, the OS never invokes the streaming command set.