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Topic: Harddisk Death Survey (Read 9176 times) previous topic - next topic
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Harddisk Death Survey

Large, cheap and reliable harddisks are important to all of us. Sadly, it appears that newer large IDE disks breaks very frequently. As I am about to purchase several new disks, I would like to choose the most reliable brand.

Please post your results below and I will compile a list when there're enough results:

RULES:

- IDE disks only
- Min 60 Gb
- Max 18 months old
- Working disks - min 3 months old
- Broken disks <3 months OK
- When including results from friends include ALL their disks that follow the rules above - not just the broken ones


My own results:

IBM 120GXP - 120 Gb - 5 out of 5 disks OK
IBM 60GXP - 60 Gb - 2 out of 6 disk OK - 4 died!
Seagate Barracuda 80 Gb - 2 out of 2 disks OK
Maxtor 80 Gb - 1 out of 1 disk OK
Maxtor 60 Gb - 1 out of 1 disk OK
Western Digital 180 Gb - 1 out of 1 disk OK

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #1 –
IIRC, there's already some sort of database or survery or something like this at storagereview.  I'm sure you'd get much more useful data from there then from here, if for no other reason then they'd have significantly more submissions.

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #2 –
Excellent. No need to do this survey.

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #3 –
Just to mention...

I have a 40GB Maxtor 34098H4 which has been working fine for the last 15 months or so.

oh well, something else to worry about....

mutter...mumble...

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #4 –
Just to put my 2 cents in..... Western Digital. 60 gigs and about 2 years old now.

                                                              -Darin

:alien:


p.s. Are you that hot(avatar pic) in real life?
Cowon Iaudio X5 30 gig. It rocks!

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #5 –
Strange this thread would come up today.  I have a Seagate Barracuda ATA IV (60 GB) that I bought when the drive first came out, and that's been good until today.

This morning started showing a few weird pauses and making sounds that are not good at all.  After powering down completely (including wall power) for a few minutes things have been fine since then, but needless to say I made a complete system backup, and am watching things carefully. 

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #6 –
I just wore-down two 80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV's, the first one took about 6 months (before I noticed it at least), the second one more like 6 weeks). Otherwise I can't say my experience with hard disks has been bad (not a single bad drive before that, except for a notebook hard disk, but that doesn't really count since that computer was so messed I would have been surprised if the hard disk had survived).
To check wether your Seagate drive is bad, download Seatools from Seagate and check your drive with it, it gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect (although it isn't very specific, in my case it just said something like: "This drive is bad, you should replace it with a new one", but it also gives an error code which can probably be found somewhere).

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #7 –
Damn, I recently bought one of the aforementioned 80Gig Drives... Is it a case of they are all crap?  Had it for 3 months now, and has been working 100%

btw, I've never had a hard drive die on me.  Got a 4 year old somethingorother in my PC at the mo, and 3 SCSI ones that must be about 10 years old by now hooked up to my Amiga.  All work fine

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #8 –
My advice - go with Western Digital. I have 5 drives from them - a 1gb 5400rpm, a 5.4gb 5400rpm, a 10gb 5400rpm, a 40gb 7200rpm and a 160gb 7200rpm drive. The drives are in order from old to new (pretty obvious  ) with the oldest one being over 6 or 7 years old, and the newest one being about 3 months old. I haven't had any problems with any of them (knock on wood  ), and they are used almost constantly (+6 hours a day at least) I think that's a pretty good track record  B) .

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #9 –
Quote
Damn, I recently bought one of the aforementioned 80Gig Drives... Is it a case of they are all crap?  Had it for 3 months now, and has been working 100%

btw, I've never had a hard drive die on me.   Got a 4 year old somethingorother in my PC at the mo, and 3 SCSI ones that must be about 10 years old by now hooked up to my Amiga.  All work fine

No worries... Jasper was just very unlucky.

When evaluated in greater numbers, it turns out that Seagate's Barracuda IV is the most reliable line of 7200rpm, 40G/platter disks out there.

If you like French, here's a short article: http://www.hardware.fr/news/lire/22-05-2002/#4844 [edit](the percentages are rma percentages from a large french webshop)[/edit]

nonetheless, stupid me got myself a Maxtor because it's faster. Never notice it is fast, but I notice it is noisy every day    I bought a 'cuda for my sister's pc, and I almost kept it myself when I (not) heard it...
I'm going to get a 'cuda IV as my next drive. Or maybe a 'cuda V; I haven't decided if I'll go with tested-and-tried (IV) or improved-upon-a-winner (V).

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #10 –
Just wanna add my experiences thus far :

The Devil of HDD's IMO:
  IBM 60GXP - 60 Gb - 3 of 3            DEAD (died within 3 months)

All My Other Childern - Fine :
  Seagate Barracuda 60 Gb              OK (over a year old)
  Quantum 60 Gb  -  2 of 2                OK (over a year old)
  Quantum 30 Gb  -  1                        OK (over 2 years old)
  Maxtor 60 Gb  -  1 of 2                    OK (1 dead)
  Western Digital 120 Gb - 2 of 2      OK (< 3 months old)
  Western Digital 60 Gb - 4 of 4        OK (ranging from 1 to 2 years old)

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #11 –
My father had a 45G IBM DTLA ... (cannot remember the exact number) harddrive which died after two years.

My Quantum Fireball 17G 5.400 has been working fine since three years and I've got a newer Seagate 80G 5.400 that is also working fine and silent.

The loss of a harddisk is hard to support (for me), because I do not make backups every day.

Are there any possiblities to recognize wether a harddisk is reaching his end?

fragtal
I love the moderators.

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #12 –
4x IBM 60GXP, almost a year old, all still alive.

--edit: Thanks to supercooling though. Each disk has fans mounted.

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #13 –
my experience:

maxtor  2 x 40gig - 1 died after 1 year
maxtor  2 x 80gig - 1 died after 1 1/2 years

ibm      75gig - died after about 1 year
ibm      3 x 45gig -  1 developed fatal errors & couldn't be recovered

western digital      5 x 120gig (bb) - all running fine for 7-8+ months
western digital      3 x 120gig (jb) - 1 died after 5 months


i was very impressed with western digital's customer service on the 1 drive that did fail. lightning fast & no questions asked.
not so impressed with maxtor's service.

i don't know if maxtor & ibm drives still have issues, but there is no question my western digitals have been rock solid & most of them run in server computers.

-jazz

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #14 –
Quote
Are there any possiblities to recognize wether a harddisk is reaching his end?

Yes. You need to have SMART feature (Self-Monitoring And Reporting Technology) turned on in the BIOS. All newer hard disk support this. When it's about to die and SMART detects something irregular (access times slower than normal etc.), it will warn you during boot-up.

I have such a hard disk that's about to die; an old 4 GB IBM. When i put it in and boot, i get a warning like "Back up your data and replace the drive immediately. A failure may be imminent." Of course, i don't use it anymore, i just have a lot of old hardware lying around...

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #15 –
I had a WD 45GB drive which failed after one year... I RMA'ed it and the replacement failed after three months. Again RMA'ed it and sold the new drive...
The two drives which failed didn't indicate that through SMART (it's turned on and they supported it). But there where very strange and quite loud sounds - I managed to backup everything and hours later they died completely.

Regards, fileman.

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #16 –
Get a good IDE RAID card and at least mirror the drives. Took a serious drive failure for me to finally break down and do that.
flac > schiit modi > schiit magni > hd650

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #17 –
Is it just incredibly unlucky people posting on here or am I and my circle of friends dead lucky?

Theres about 6 of us that I can think of with drives at least 4 years old and no failures, no noise, no nothing.  Ive never known anyones harddrive in the office here to die either, and these things are now 5 years old...

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #18 –
Why not get 2 harddrives, a raid controller card, and set it to level1.  This way the contents of your first harddrive will be mirrored onto the second harddrive, and if the first harddrive crashes, your data will be perfectly safe on the second harddrive!!!

120Gb Harddrive = £100
120Gb Harddrive = £100
Raid Controller    = £  15

Total = £215

User = totally satisfied

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #19 –
finally got around to rma'ing my wd 120gb (jb).  it didn't actually die, but became alot louder, and developed a few bad sectors on the boot partition.  Thats enough for me to rma it before it costs me 120 gb of data.  wd was great about the rma; did it online with advance rma and got the advance drive in a few days, with a months time to send back the defective drive.

Also one consideration for those of you buying new drives: apparently the 8mb cache wd drives carry a 3 year warranty as opposed to the seemingly-industry-standard 1 year!  That makes the $30-50 extra spent on the 8mb cache doubly worth the price to me.

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #20 –
Quote
Quote
Are there any possiblities to recognize wether a harddisk is reaching his end?

Yes. You need to have SMART feature (Self-Monitoring And Reporting Technology) turned on in the BIOS. All newer hard disk support this. When it's about to die and SMART detects something irregular (access times slower than normal etc.), it will warn you during boot-up.

I have such a hard disk that's about to die; an old 4 GB IBM. When i put it in and boot, i get a warning like "Back up your data and replace the drive immediately. A failure may be imminent." Of course, i don't use it anymore, i just have a lot of old hardware lying around...

thanks, that's cool!

I already had this feature activated but never knew what it meant.

btw. Is it reliable?

fragtal
I love the moderators.

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #21 –
Quote
btw. Is it reliable?

Yes, although there are some errors that can't be foreseen by whatever monitoring.
Parameters analyzed by SMART are listed here (or in german).

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #22 –
Quote
My advice - go with Western Digital. I have 5 drives from them - a 1gb 5400rpm, a 5.4gb 5400rpm, a 10gb 5400rpm, a 40gb 7200rpm and a 160gb 7200rpm drive. The drives are in order from old to new (pretty obvious   ) with the oldest one being over 6 or 7 years old, and the newest one being about 3 months old. I haven't had any problems with any of them (knock on wood  ), and they are used almost constantly (+6 hours a day at least) I think that's a pretty good track record  B) .

i had a wd 1.6gb that died on me, made a horrible grating noise.  i took it apart later and found that part of the head mechanism had actually broken off!!

i've still got a seagate st157a (40Mb job, full-height) that is still live and kicking!
Dan

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #23 –
Quote
thanks, that's cool!

I already had this feature activated but never knew what it meant.

btw. Is it reliable?

fragtal


I had a Western Digital that went out on me, but before it went out on me the SMART system let me know a month in advance there was something wrong! Really cool.

I have a Promise Ultra 100 T2 card now and it doesn't give any info on the SMART system dureing boot up. Does anyone know if it is disabled through the controller card?

                                                            -Darin

:alien:
Cowon Iaudio X5 30 gig. It rocks!

Harddisk Death Survey

Reply #24 –
Quote
IIRC, there's already some sort of database or survery or something like this at storagereview.  I'm sure you'd get much more useful data from there then from here, if for no other reason then they'd have significantly more submissions.

I signed up for this site, but I'm not sure how I can get information about a specific disc. I'm curious about the IBM 120GXP with 40GB.
--alt-presets are there for a reason! These other switches DO NOT work better than it, trust me on this.
LAME + Joint Stereo doesn't destroy 'Stereo'