So whose do you recommend then? I have always relied on WD. My old VM/DPR has lots of old Seagate Barracudas that have worked fine for years. I have used other various ones but usually went back to WD. When I build the new machine I will want to use some external units like this. So which ones? Really want to know. Thanks.

Gary

I've done well with Samsungs. I know a lot of people didn't seem to trust them as they were the new kids on the block but so far not lost one.

And thanks John for the heads up and I agree, especially the way these thing are marketed, as a book to put on the shelf, like the old family album!

Probably worth a mention that some manufacturers have "server/enterprise" grade versions of their disks. Don't know if that's just clever marketing but if for the few extra dollars you get a more reliable drive seems money well spent to me.

Probably John's the best guru though, I've only got around 20 HDDs and whatever drive it was that died last night is the first one in a decade, touch wood.
Bob.

I have maybe 90% Seagate drives and 10% Samsung drives. I also have a few older Hitachi/IBM drives. Haven't had any issues with any of them.

The only drives which I have ever had out-and-out fail have been Western Digital and Maxtor.

I'll add a 320GB WD to this list. Making unsettling sounds on start up, but once wound up works OK. Have only just isolated the source of the noise (thought I had a fan going bad). Time to unload and replace.

Farss, I have observed your booting issue a number of times with an external USB drive, especially if the drive has backup software on it. It appears to hang as the drive is searched for a licensed bootable OS during startup.

What are the odds of this? I spent a couple of hours at work trying to get a WD My Book 1394/USB drive to mount on a Mac Pro today. The internal WD that the DVD Studio Pro projects were on is causing a Finder hang if it is in the system at boot time, and the external back drive, the My Book, is doing the same. I had to boot from an OSX installation disc, connect the drive via USB instead of Firewire, and copy the project I need via command line to a different internal drive so I could get my work done. I will never buy a My Book for myself or for my business again.

Joe

Don't know if this would work under OSX but it does seem to work under Windoz. Pull the power plug out of the MyBook (Should we call it MyCookedBook?) while the OS boots. Once the OS is up and running then put the power plug back in.
What has me foxed is I made the system drive the SATA1 port as I believe that's the first drive the BIOS is supposed to look for a boot record. I'll try digging furher into the BIOS but I can find a zillion boot device options but nothing about which SATA port to boot from.

I did find a lot of info about these MyBook things on the web, not much of it overly complimentary.

Bob.

OK, my client came over with her MyBook. It was doing more than clicking. When it spun up, the drive itself was rattling internally AND the heads were seeking furiously, hence the clicking. I removed the drive from the enclosure and tried to get it to come up, still no luck. I then thought about it for a while and decided that the rattle could be a piece of something that came loose inside the drive. It was either from the head actuator or a small chunk of the platter broke off. I shook it to get the piece to fall into a corner of the drive opposite the head actuator. I stood the drive up on the corner where I though the piece was finally sitting and turned it on. There was no rattle, but lots of clicking. There was also some vibration, which indicates maybe it was a piece of the platter. It finally stopped clicking and the drive was recognized. I immediately started transferring the data off the drive. There are a lot of head retries and the transfer rate averages about 1 meg/sec, but I'm slowly getting data off the drive. It's going to take until sometime late tomorrow to finish, if it actually does finish.

The drive is only a few months old and has only been turned on for backups. She's never dropped it or abused it in any way. It's under warranty, but I can't imagine that she's going to use a new one for any reason, certainly not backups! Could probably make a stylish doorstop though...

Ironically enough, I have just returned two Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB drives as they would not work with my PC's eSATA port at all, and replaced them with a WD My Book Studio II (2x1TB disks)...

The drive works flawlessly - both via eSATA and FireWire. Yes, it does spin down when not accessed, but comes back to a fully operational state within 2-3secs. The transfers are also not bad for RAID1 (mirror) mode - between 90-100 MBps. The only suspicious thing are intermittent heads' knocking noises while idle, but the thing is covered with 5 years warranty.

FYI, the Seagates kept spinning up and down when hooked up via eSATA in 5 secs cycles - unusable, as they did it when accessed rather than when idle! I guess the eSATA standard is still not fully matured. But it beats me why you're having problems with FiWi or USB, as well...

PS. And yes - I am actually using my 1TB RAID1 WD Mybook for constant backup of the mission critical data :) But now am a bit scared!

It's not that useful to try to extrapolate manufacturing quality from friends' anecdotes about a handful of Seagate/WD/Samsung/Maxtor etc. drives that croaked in short order.

The only company that has truly meaningful data on drive reliability is Google, and they're not telling.

I'm currently avoiding Seagate after having been a long term fan, and I've switched to WD as my primary replacement, with 100% good results so far.

I particularly like WD's two-platter 640GB drive, and put one in my Mac Pro to replace the system drive, which boosted the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test from ~70 MB/s to ~103 MB/s (both Read and Write).

WD's 1TB Green Drive is also excellent when used properly, it was faster than I thought (about the same as a regular 7200 rpm 7200.10 Seagate drive).

Samsung has some good drives, and some to stay away from. Ditto for Seagate really.

Maxtor was always lower spec consumer drives, no pretentions there, and there has been no obvious increase in quality (fewer returns) since Seagate bought them.

Oddly, I cannot find any increased reliability in the pricey so called "Enterprise" drives. They seem to have some other optimizations, that are of value in a corporate environment, but no increased reliability.

And all these big box store mass market products like the WD MyBonk scare me.

So many people have had lots of trouble.

Just buy a professional enclosure with drive sleds and stop worrying.

I'm really happy with my FirmTek and IcyDock enclosures.

You'll pay a little bit more money (but not that much if you shop wisely), but you won't have the problems either.

"It's not that useful to try to extrapolate manufacturing quality from friends' anecdotes about a handful of Seagate/WD/Samsung/Maxtor etc. drives that croaked in short order."

Yeah, well, YOU try telling my client that it's safe to buy another MyBook, or my other friend who had three WD drives fail in less than a week.

The only drive manufacturer with which I have never had a failure is Seagate. I have at least of dozen of them that run 24/7 and have literally been on for years. They're not just idling, they get USED and used hard. They are also well cooled.

Just curious, why are you currently avoiding Seagate?

I'm kind of inclined to disagree with both of you. Google did say something some time back. They found no correlation between any of the factors and drive failure. Temperature or manufacturer made no difference and the plot followed the classic bathtub curve.

All said modern HDDs are pretty simple mechanically. The old DDC drives I used to work on were something else though. Encased in an enclosure pressurised with He, fixed heads, 4MB for $45K.

Bob.

I should have said that Google only released the vendor-independent portions of their immense hard drive statistics (I wrote about that here a year ago).

I've got a lot of Seagate drives, and it's been years since one of them failed.

My current concern is with simultaneous reports from several different professional IT sources over the last 12 months that Seagate had lost control over their Chinese manufacturer's Quality Assurance, with greatly increased failure rates as a result.

Frankly - during my over 20 years of computing - I have NEVER had any single disk failure (most of them being Mitsubishi, Maxtor ans Seagate - if I remember correctly). Currently, I'm using a Maxtor, a couple of Seagates in RAID 0, and another couple of Samsung Spinpoint F1's in another RAID 0.

The My Book Studio II 2TB external drive (plus the WD Passport Studio firewire I'm using with my laptop) are in fact my first WD drives ever. I certainly hope they will not share the fate of those mentioned in this thread. But something must be up with the MyBooks, because when I asked the WD support about those intermittent knocks, I was advised to RMA without further questions - I guess I'll wait and see; I'm using it in RAID1 mode after all so am not risking much (I hope).

Oh, and as to the knocks when idling: I still have a 6 year old Dell laptop, whose 30GB drive produced them since the very beginning - it's still working OK. On the other hand, the 2 HDD's inside my new Vaio laptop are dead silent - and so is the 2.5" WD Passport I'm using with the Vaio as the external backup for off-loading my EX1 cards. I don't even know the brands of my laptops' HDD's, but the overall picture arising here is that there is no single hard rule - noisy does not have to be unreliable, etc.

You're right, some drives are very noisy and it's normal. If you've ever watched one doing it's thing it's kind of remarkable how quiet they are. However when they start to make new noises, that's the time to panic.


Bob.

Just a question which crossed my mind: does it make any sense to use the disk scanning tests (for damaged sectors), when the drive is actually a RAID 1 array? I mean, if there is a bad block on one of its disks, will it be seen as bad by the host?

Bob,

This isn't good news. My son just recently gave me one for Father's Day to use as a backup with my EX1 and Laptop. It is the wdh1cs7500n 750 GB My Book Home version of the drive. Haven't tried it yet, but since the laptop does not have eSATA anyway, I was going to use firewire. Have you tried that interface? Or do you think I should just ask him to return it to Best Buy.

John

There are tens of thousands of people using MyBook drives without any issues. The failure rate for all hard drives is probably well under 1% (although I don't really know that for a fact.) In the absence of any hard data, I suppose it is useful to hear about issues which other people have had with a particular model or series of drives. However, people typically only post things on the Internet when there has been a problem and far, far fewer post when a product simply works as advertised. Of course, if there are millions of MyBook drives out there, statistically there will be a larger number of people with problems, even if the drive has a very low failure rate.

From what I've read, there could be a reason to at least be a little suspicious of MyBook drives. Based only on my personal experience with Western Digital drives over the last few years, I wouldn't own one nor suggest that any of my friends buy one.

Yes, I have been using the drive on firewire and only really started to have issues when I went to eSATA. I do agree with what John is saying, small smaples in large population can show all manner of wierd results and can be just anomolies.
What I don't like about the design of the MyBook is the 'power saving' feature. Come back to Vegas after you've left it rendering and hit Save and it'll take quite a while as the OS has to wait for the MyBook to spin up. As backup units they *might* be OK, possibly as we've seen with other such off the shelf drives in a box perhaps not built to take the thrashing that rendering video causes.
I could also mention that my new Gigabyte mobo has a very slick looking feature that throttles back the 12 phase CPU power supply to save energy. With that turned on Vegas does not seem at all happy.

Bob.

There is no way to know if an external drive has been dropped to the floor. I owned a hobby store for 14 years and I have heard one lie after the other. People who swear they didn't drop it in water only to have water poor out upon examination. Kids knock stuff over and put it back thinking no one will ever know. You just never know what has happened to a hard drive regardless of what you have been told. Trust only yourself!!