What's up with high hard drive failure rates?

[Ken90630]

Disk makers are having a hard time building reliable disks with the high data densites needed for these large-capacity disks. Seagate seemed to be having the worst time, but I'm not sure WD is doing any better.

If you had to put a number on that 'threshold' -- in other words, drives bigger than ___ GB, what would you guess it would be?

A primary reason for the new 4K sectors (called "Advanced Format" by Western Digital) is to allow additional error correction code, which is supposed to reduce the uncorrected error rate by a factor of 1/100.

Never heard of this before. What are 4K sectors?

 

[Ken90630]

A few months ago I had 3/8 WD Green's fail (within the first two weeks). The first one was in the advance RMA queue for 2 weeks because they had no inventory. One call and I managed to get new drives shipped not refurbs.

The OCZ Vertex I just got back I'm not 100% sure if it is a refurb. Came in full retail packaging (sealed, but then again I'm assuming OCZ could just make a refurb look new). Usually drive manufacturers will but something like "refurbished" on the drive labels to denote that. I'm assuming it is a refurb, but they were easy to deal with and I have great backup.

To ModelWork's point about moving a case while a drive is in operation, that is a really good reason I moved to SSD's on everything but storage servers. I think they are generally quite a bit more durable sans moving parts.

My guess is you got lucky with your new WD Green replacements 'cuz maybe they felt bad they were making you wait so long and just decided to do the right thing by you. Plus, you called rather than just doing the RMA via their Website form & shipping it back. It's harder to say "no" to someone on the phone. That said, I've asked reps from both WD and Seagate, on the phone, whether RMA'd drives get replaced by new or refurb'd units, and both said, without hesitation, "refurbished drives." I said I didn't think that was a good way to do business & treat their customers. Care to guess how much they cared?

Nevertheless, I'm happy for you. Way to go! 🙂

 

[RebateMonger]

Never heard of this before. What are 4K sectors?

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/WhitePapers/ENG/2579-771430.pdf

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691&cp=7

 

[Ken90630]

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/WhitePapers/ENG/2579-771430.pdf

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691&cp=7

Thanks. Looks like I've got some heavy reading to do. 😛

BTW, what's your take on perpendicular recording? Good, bad or indifferent?

 

[RebateMonger]

BTW, what's your take on perpendicular recording? Good, bad or indifferent?

I imagine everybody uses it now. It's another step to make higher data densities. I've had good luck with dozens of Seagate 320 GB 7200.10 disks, which were early PMR disks. Mine are mostly used for server backups and I advise my clients to toss them if they show a single sector error. So far, we've only had one disk develop a single (visible) bad sector.

 

[Ken90630]

I imagine everybody uses it now. It's another step to make higher data densities. I've had good luck with dozens of Seagate 320 GB 7200.10 disks, which were early PMR disks. Mine are mostly used for server backups and I advise my clients to toss them if they show a single sector error. So far, we've only had one disk develop a single (visible) bad sector.

Good to know. :thumbsup:

BTW, how do you tell when a disk develops a visible bad sector? Something other than CheckDisk?

 

[RebateMonger]

BTW, how do you tell when a disk develops a visible bad sector? Something other than CheckDisk?

Since my backup drives get almost their entire surface read and written each week, sector errors show up in the Windows System Event logs. I'll use Chkdsk /r on those to verify the error.

Again, these are disks used for backups. There are usually several full system backups on each disk and there are several backup disks used in rotation. I'll advise the client to remove that disk from the backup rotation and get a replacement disk.

 

[Like2angle]

Hi all,

In my mind it's manufacturers making the drives as cheaply as possible. Even to the point where it's cheaper to have a high failure rate then to make all good drives.

In my case I have purchased in the last 18 months over 25 drives both WD and seagate drives from Newegg and 9 failed in the first week of use. I would pay more for a better drive but I can't seem to find any with a lower failure rate.

 

[BFG10K]

Necro'd thread.

Super Moderator BFG10K.