Vent Inc.

Seriously what the f*** is with hard drives these days. In the last 2 years I've bought 6 hard drives (Seagate & WD) in various sizes (160Gb, 400Gb, 500Gb, 1TB) and 3 of them have failed. The first was the 160Gb, second was the 500Gb and now out of the 3 1TB drives I bought yesterday, one has failed.

Yet I still have 120Gb IDE drives from 5+ years ago going strong with no signs of failure.. is it an indication we are reaching the physical limitations of storing that much data on a disk? Cheaper components/manufacturing cycles? Or am I just unlucky :(

I should backup my porn

I can't even remember the last time one of my drives f***ed itself. Certainly nothing in the last 8 years I can think of.

Posts: 5085 Location: Melbourne, Victoria Vent Inc. Seriously what the f*** is with hard drives these days. In the last 2 years I've bought 6 hard drives (Seagate & WD) in various sizes (160Gb, 400Gb, 500Gb, 1TB) and 3 of them have failed. The first was the 160Gb, second was the 500Gb and now out of the 3 1TB drives I bought yesterday, one has failed. Yet I still have 120Gb IDE drives from 5+ years ago going strong with no signs of failure.. is it an indication we are reaching the physical limitations of storing that much data on a disk? Cheaper components/manufacturing cycles? Or am I just unlucky :(

Your unlucky man. Perhaps there is underlying cause to why your HD's are failing all the time. Something about your computer itself? Have these drives all failed in the one rig?

Otherwise its just bad luck. you should set yourself up a raid.

I noticed my hard drives live a lot longer since putting active cooling around them (a fan or two) and I've stopped moving my PC around all the time, taking to to LAN's etc. Vibration & heat would slaw a hard drives reliability.

It's about 3%.

Your unlucky man. Perhaps there is underlying cause to why your HD's are failing all the time. Something about your computer itself? Have these drives all failed in the one rig?

Different rigs.. top of the line (at the time) Antec case or a generic case, it doesn't matter. I should have clarified in the OP that 2 of those drives failed out of the box. Like the 1TB drive I bought yesterday (out of 3) started showing SMART errors in Linux within 12 hours and now the Seagate tools says that it's dead.

Otherwise its just bad luck. you should set yourself up a raid.

That's what I bought the 3 drives yesterday for :(

(Touch wood), I've run multiple PCs 24/7 and still haven't had a hard-drive death since the IBM Deathstar about 9 years ago. I seem to only throw out drives due to being outdated and slow.

These days I run a 4-disk RAID 0+1 just to rule out mechanical failure of up to 2 disks simultaneously - obviously won't help in terms of viruses/deletion/PSU-explode but may as well target one of the possible failure mechanisms.

Then again I heavily research the HDD models I buy and go for the ones that statistically have the lowest failure rates, the same approach I take for all of the other PC components.

What are the exact models of the drives that have died? Both Seagate and WD have certain drives you should stay away from.

The 3 drives I got are Seagate ST31000528AS. I think I'm just unlucky.. has to be one in to make the statistic failures come true :)

Which shop did you buy them from? So I can avoid it :p

MSY .. I think it's time to change to another shop.

well QLD MSY has seen me buy dozens of drives with 0 failures to date

also i don't believe the BS about different shops have differing qualities of stock.

hey parabol what website shows these statistics about HDD failure ?

The 3 drives I got are Seagate ST31000528AS

A quick look at newegg (link): 61% high satisfaction, 13% strong disapproval.

Compare it say the drives I got:

WD1001FALS: 77% high satisfaction, 7% strong disapproval.
WD5000AAKS: 71% high satisfaction, 7% strong disapproval.

Can't read too much into the numbers, since the sample sizes differ by an order of magnitude and there can be other factors involved (bad PC/power setup, people rating the seller instead of the product!) - but you can use it as a rough indicator to research the drive further if some patterns emerge.

Then again you could have just had a bad batch that those numbers can't address properly.

last edited by parabol at 13:10:34 20/Sep/09

Personally I think Seagate have gone down hill since buying Maxtor a few years ago.

always had WD hdd's.. never had 1 fail in over 10 years.

They are suiciding upon learning they are going into a network that one day will have Mac's attached to it :D

also i don't believe the BS about different shops have differing qualities of stock.

No but a particular store might buy its stock from a particular manufacturing plant where another store might get it from another plant and if one plant has a bad batch then one store might have a bad batch prone to failure while another store might not. While this is pure speculation if a particular store sells 5 drives of a particular brand and 3 of them fail while another store sells 5 drives of the same brand and none fail I think I know where I'd rather shop just out of paranoia.

p.s. I know 5 is a small sample size it was an example, replace it with any number you want, say 10 billion and 9 billion failures vs 0 failures.

p.s. ticman, I have one of those seagates that would apparently self brick, even that's still working just fine so I think you're just unlucky :)

Search online regarding seagate firmware bricking the hdd. It is exactly what happened to mine, i sent it into seagate in sydney and my data was restored.

It happened out of the blue when i tried to boot the computer and bios wouldn't detect the drive but it i could still hear it spin. After a search online i came across a page about the firmware bricking the hdd.

last edited by Resonate at 18:43:35 20/Sep/09

Ticman, I had recently had both my WD 160gigs die within 3 weeks of eachother, 1 started making a racket & the other one just stopped working, as in not registering as a drive in Windows. & yea my old drives are still working

They would have been round about 4 to 3 years old, sorry to hear about your 1TB dieing though :(

I understand your pain.

hmmm this concerns me as I am about to buy 6 x 1.5tb as a file server / backup server.

I better research drives before I just go out and buy some!

im with rev. cant think of any failing in the last 10years. so much, that ive got a stock pile of old 20, 40, 80gb drives.

hmmm this concerns me as I am about to buy 6 x 1.5tb as a file server / backup server.

I better research drives before I just go out and buy some!

there's not much you can do dude, just buy from somewhere that's easy to get warranty actioned and prepare for drives to fail once in a while. and put a ups on your server.

that's it

I have to say my WD green drives (I have about 10 or 12 all up at home) seem to be lasting.
I put it down to them being not quite as hot ?

They are suiciding upon learning they are going into a network that one day will have Mac's attached to it :D

haha

Why so much hate for my MacBook (that I didn't buy in time and now it's gone from the refurb store!@).

The firmware is fine for these drives, it is still recognised by the BIOS & OS and I can reformat around the bad sectors but with < 20hrs running on it, it's still a bit poxy for it to have errors. Here's hoping MSY replace it without too much farting around otherwise my poor RAID is running in a degraded state :(

i've only had 2 hdds fail evah. one was the infamous quantum deskstar not so long ago a wd 400gb died after i used it as a portable hdd in a caddy for about a year :P

For those on the edge of their seat waiting in anticipation for what happened ...... MSY just replaced the drive no questions asked.

md0 : active raid5 sda1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0]
1953519872 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]

Huzzah!

At the rate of hdd size increasing I usually cycle my hdd's every couple of years so I haven't had a hdd fail for years now. Have green drives in the media pc and they're going fine too.

All mine have failed eventually. Just depends how much abuse they've had, usually mine die after 3-4 years, lots of really poorly made PC cases without rubber grommits between the metal housings etc and lots of movement of the case to LAN etc.

These days i don't do that but i never really expect a HDD to last longer then about 2 years, which is also generally enough time to double my hdd capacity drive for drive.