OT - Which (non-SSD) Drives Are Most Reliable?

Soniclight wrote on 11/18/2014, 2:13 PM

I have been a fan of Seagate, but from experience now, I've been disappointed and it's not just me. Drives start clicking, heating up, become inaccessible then something happens, they show up again and with some surface tests and firmare updates, seem to work again (but for how long, that's the uncomfortable unknown). See this article -- an update of similar tests from a year prior (2013), with identical results. Looks like I'll be going back to formerly called Hitachi drives (now HDST, owned by WD) or WD drives...

Such a topic used to be very "to each his/her own", but the facts may seem to point to Seagate not being what it used to be. Curious as to what your experiences are and have been over the last few years with HD brands. For me, SSD are still way to expensive for the amount of storage they provide. For now.

"Who makes the most reliable hard drives?"

Comments

videoITguy wrote on 11/18/2014, 2:21 PM

same answer since 1998 -
see here:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=906668

Gary James wrote on 11/18/2014, 2:30 PM

I've had three hard drives go bad on me in the past 30 years. All of them were Seagates. I wouldn't own another Seagate drive if they PAID ME to use them. I've had exceptionally good results using Western Digital Black drives.

Christian de Godzinsky wrote on 11/18/2014, 2:31 PM

Just my PERSONAL experience:

Seagate - (various) drives: 5 of 6 drives have failed during the last 7 years.
Samsung - Spinpoint drives: 0 of 11 drives have failed during the last 7 years.

I'm a Samsung fan, bought a bunch (!) of 1TB drives before Seagate took over. Nil problems. Not the cheapest ones but this is the wrong place to save money. I believe Samsung is comparable or even better than (former) Hitachi. They run cool, silent and vibration free. Unfortunately Backblaze did not publish reliability data due to the relatively small number of drives they have. I hope they would have...

Just my two cents...

Christian

Chienworks wrote on 11/18/2014, 4:33 PM

Still on WD here. I've never had another brand be as reliable.

Right now i've got about 90 drives spinning in our data center, at the moment all WD. Over the 8 years i've been here we've replaced maybe 5 WD drives, while all the Seagates have died and been replaced repeatedly.

At home i've still got an 18 year old PC running a 10GB WD drive, and it's still perfectly functional.

TeetimeNC wrote on 11/18/2014, 4:49 PM

I just had a five year old Seagate system disk die. I replaced it with Western Digital Black.

/jerry

Julius_ wrote on 11/18/2014, 8:53 PM

Last year my 1st drive started clicking and I was getting messages that the drive is failing. The drive is about 6 years old and I own about 10 (not sure what make), but the drive that failed was a seagate. I never had a drive fail on me....I'm sticking to WD from now on.

Soniclight wrote on 11/19/2014, 12:42 AM

Thanks for all of your feedback. Confirms my suspicions and experience.

VideoFreq wrote on 11/22/2014, 11:23 PM

Gary, I have used both but really, if SonicLight had only three Seagate drives fail in 30 years I would KEEP BUYING Seagate. That is excellent, statistically, especially since they didn't make a 7200 RPM until 22 years ago, and just 12 years ago for the first SATA. They only released the first 1TB just 7 years ago. Statistically, I would keep buying Seagates. $59 for 1TB. Buy, slip into extra HDD slot, transfer data overnight, sleep like a baby. A least they click as a warning. Also, just asking, how do you know if a Western Digital will last as long as a Seagate since they will be obsolete before you can get reliable statistical data on them? The best drives are Enterprise quality. Western Digital's Black series is nice, BUT do you let your machine run 24/7? Mine will run three to four years before goings. I have lost two of 9 drives in last four years with Seagate. Expect failure. My WD drives are old 500 GB legacy SCSI PATA drives and they still work well, but my main drives are Seagate. I am converting ALL to Samsung 840 EVO SDD's.

Steve Mann wrote on 11/22/2014, 11:39 PM

It's practically impossible to answer this question from all of the anecdotal information. The design and component purchases for hard disk drives are constantly changing. The manufacturer will buy components for a million drives at a time and if their failure rate goes up, they change the design for the next million unit run.

DrLumen wrote on 11/23/2014, 10:06 AM

WB Black for me too.

I have had problems with Seagate over the years. Not that I haven't had some WD drives fail too but the Seagate drives seem to fail quicker.

Also, when WD drives start to fail, they slowly degrade over time and not just die overnight. The failure is usually slow enough that I can get another drive in and backup the data before it fails completely.

Regardless of the brand, I have found if you keep them cool they last much longer.

I post this as I currently have an old (~10 years) 160gb Maxtor that is starting to have problems. Of course, it is the OS drive. (sigh)