TR Forums

I have a 160GB WD Blue that started to show signs of failure( overheating) after like 7 years of everyday usage. It was used as an OS/Apps drive btw.
Got it for $89.99 at BestBuy, go figure.

Deanjo wrote:

Krogoth wrote:

IMO, I think the drop of reliability started with the jump to perpendicular recording.

I don't know about that, I seem to recall a lot more dead drives leading up to perpendicular recording (and I don't miss figuring out the ideal interleave, manually marking out bad sectors, carrying out real low-level formatting).

Well, I guess the introduction of perpendicular recording does roughly coincide with Seagate's run of dodgy drives, but that could be just a coincidence. Hitachi's and Western Digital's early perpendicular drives didn't appear to suffer from the same sort of reliability issues, and Seagate's later (7200.12) drives seem to be OK as well. I suppose it is possible that Seagate jumped the gun a bit on perpendicular recording (I believe they were the first to market with desktop drives using the tech).

Interleave, manual bad sector mapping, and low-level formatting went away long before perpendicular recording hit the scene.

ish718 wrote:

I have a 160GB WD Blue that started to show signs of failure( overheating) after like 7 years of everyday usage. It was used as an OS/Apps drive btw.
Got it for $89.99 at BestBuy, go figure.

My old file server had a pile of ancient PATA 80 GB Caviars in it. This was before fluid dynamic bearings, so these were all ball bearing drives. Over the years they got progressively louder, prompting me to run a network cable to the crawlspace and relocate the file server there. None of them ever failed, but damn... that file server sounded like a dental drill by the time I finally retired it!

No power filtering.. But if it can take out a drive you'd think it would drop a board, ram, CPU, north bridge etc..

Na I contend crap QA.. I still have pair of caviars that run on the firewall/nat without issue 10 years later...

Box is on an AVR UPS and has been on (about to 99.999%) since I built it in July 2007. Right now the disk cage has:

1 Samsung HD501LJ 500 GB (OS drive, oldest drive of the lot)
1 WD Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750 GB (random data drive)
1 WD Green WD10EACS 1.0 TB (music)
1 WD Green WD20EADS 2.0 TB (more music)

At least they're all SATA (probably 1.0).

The 2 external caddies both have WD 2.0 TB drives, probably Greens (non-spinning backup) on e-SATA.

Not all drives were mounted in 2007 and damned if I can tell you when I added them. Cable routing in the bottom of a P182 can be exasperating and it cost me a chassis fan to run all those cables.

Hmmm this could be a packing issue then, but considering all the negatives on Newegg you think they would've learned in like the first month, let alone the 3-4 years. Newegg has been selling OEM drives for more then a decade too... It's not like it's a new thing for them. As I said before though, all the Seagate OEMs I've bought come in Seashells, which are pretty darn sturdy. Great for absorbing shock on all edges and across the middle.

I've only ever bought bare drives from Newegg and have never had issue with the packing. Perhaps it's a per-warehouse issue?

just brew it! wrote:

Interleave, manual bad sector mapping, and low-level formatting went away long before perpendicular recording hit the scene.

I realize that, just giving an idea of how long I was thinking back to. If you remember however there have been bad lines of drives through out HD history. The Maxtor thin 20/30/40 Gig hard drives, the IBM Deathstars, every 3.5" fijitsu ide drive (they eventually would just send you a check to go but another brand of drive, that's how bad they were), Quantum Bigfoots, etc. There were plenty of drive series that were bad from the start well before perpendicular recording.

Deanjo wrote:

I realize that, just giving an idea of how long I was thinking back to.

True manly storage is a Winchester disk pack or 3M Black Watch reel-to-reel. It's amazing what late-'70s high school students will do for Dad's business when Dad is paying the gas bill for said student's car.

Captain Ned wrote:

I've only ever bought bare drives from Newegg and have never had issue with the packing. Perhaps it's a per-warehouse issue?

It could be, I haven't had issues with packing either, but I definitely have had drives fail on me.

Bensam123 wrote:

Captain Ned wrote:

I've only ever bought bare drives from Newegg and have never had issue with the packing. Perhaps it's a per-warehouse issue?

It could be, I haven't had issues with packing either, but I definitely have had drives fail on me.

My last failure was a DeathStar.

maxxcool wrote:

No power filtering.. But if it can take out a drive you'd think it would drop a board, ram, CPU, north bridge etc..

Yeah, you would think... but with hard drives being precision electro-mechanical devices, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. The failure modes will be completely different.

Captain Ned wrote:

My last failure was a DeathStar.

I'd say you've either been lucky, or were running a DeathStar until relatively recently.

(I'm assuming that by "DeathStar" you mean the infamous GXP series drives, not the newer DeskStars made since then. I was a little surprised that Hitachi kept the DeskStar branding, given its history.)

Bensam123 wrote:

Newegg reviews

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822236344
http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-D ... rds=wd+red
Same exact drive, different statistics

As for packaging - Amazon's current packaging is pretty decent:

Wow, interesting. I just had two Seagate 7200.11's die of read errors in our home-built SAN at work. A third drive was also giving read errors, but it was able to correct itself. It has been a long weekend of RAID array death watch. Thankfully the array survived the rebuild. I was able to rescue the two failed drives with Seatools, but not after replacing them with spares (also 7200.11's). The drives report 32500 power on hours. This particular SAN is used by our recording department, almost 100% use for those hours. The building has had several power outages in the last four months, and one rather unfunny restart because I put the SAN in a GPO that it shouldn't have been. Yes, I'm stupid, don't ask. Official report is 'cosmic rays'.

I don't think the power had anything to do with it. The RAID box is solid (Supermicro), the SmartUPS are solid, and the backup generator is also solid.

Anecdotal, uh, notes, I've had countless drives fail over the years. I'm sure it doesn't need to be said, but it's not if, it's when. Hey, I like typing. And of course, rarely when it's convenient. While having a competent IT director is a blessing, maintaining backups and a DR plan is annoying. But it does saves yo ass, mmhm.

The first 'click of death' drive I can recall was a Conner 1.7GB drive I bought at a flea market (it was in a shipping box with a bunch of clones), mid 2000-ish. It died within a week of buying it. Also, it was the first drive I took the lid off and powered it on. Before that I've had MFM, RLL, SCSI, IDE, and now SATA/SAS drives.

The IDE and SATA drives do appear to die more readily. I've also had a lot more experience with IDE and SATA drives in recent years because of work, so that doesn't really give any credo to my experience, just bigger numbers. I have heard that the density on the platters is just about at the maximum, the capacity is coming from better compression and error correction. The Deathstars were a real thing, though, lots of those died (what 10 maybe out of 25 drives purchased) before Hitachi bought the business. Western Digital seems to have a good track record, actually. I'm skeptical of the Reds, but I recently put five of the 2TB models in service for a DAW at another company. They had budgetary limits, otherwise I'd use RE4's. The array has zero use in reality (vacations, waiting on upgrades, etc.), so we shall see.

Sorry for the staccato English. I'm drunk and tired. Cheers.

Deanjo wrote:

Krogoth wrote:

IMO, I think the drop of reliability started with the jump to perpendicular recording.

I don't know about that, I seem to recall a lot more dead drives leading up to perpendicular recording (and I don't miss figuring out the ideal interleave, manually marking out bad sectors, carrying out real low-level formatting).

I didn't say that latitudinal recording was flawless and there weren't failures prior to perpendicular recording (Infamous Bigfoot and 75GXP "Deathstar" are the foremost examples). I just noticed a trend of reliability drop and HDD manufactuers starting to reduce warrant lengths on their product just happen to occur around the same time as they were pushing out perpendicular recording to the masses. Coincidence? I think not.

Mechanical drives are pretty unreliable these days, but I've had great experiences with WD Black drives. I've had about 15 of them and NEVER had one fail. They do have a price premium, but it's well worth saving yourself some headaches. It's probably cheaper in the long-run too, not having to replace drives all the time. I had one WD Black drive running 24/7 for 8 years, and eventually had to retire it simply because it was too small and slow. Most of the others lasted at least 6 years before I retired them for the same reason.

In that same time period I've had about a dozen non-Black drives (both WD Blue/Green, and some Seagate and Hitachi drives), and literally every single one failed. Anecdotal I know, but when I've had a 0% failure rate with WD Blacks, and a 100% failure rate with other drives, I think I'll just buy WD Black drives from now on I haven't tried any WD Red drives, but based on their warranty alone I wouldn't expect them to be as reliable as Black drives, plus they are slower.

just brew it! wrote:

(I'm assuming that by "DeathStar" you mean the infamous GXP series drives, not the newer DeskStars made since then. I was a little surprised that Hitachi kept the DeskStar branding, given its history.)

Yep, the 75GXP itself. It was many years ago.

I think that running the box 24/7 helps as power cycling (to me) puts more stress on a drive than just sitting there spinning away.

These days I usually stick with Hitachi or Toshiba. Anything but WD and Seagate, as I haven't been very happy with WD or Seagate for the past few years and I know they have factories in Thailand that were flooded. I also look at the origin of the drive and usually stick with China-made drives. At least I can be quite sure that those Chinese factories weren't flooded.

On another note, I bought a Hitachi 500GB drive for one of our office PCs the other day and was curious to see how the shiny plastic packaging is very similar to the plastic packaging(s?) that our current Hitachi drives came in. Not too long ago when Toshiba desktop drives started appearing I was also very curious as to why Toshiba would bother to re-enter the desktop hard drive industry, considering everyone is bailing or selling out. Now it looks like Toshiba had to swallow up Hitachi's desktop drive business to avoid anti-trust problems, as someone here has pointed out. Interesting how these hard drive factories and personnel get passed around for as long as I can remember.

just brew it! wrote:

I also had them arrive rattling around in a box with a far-too-small sheet of bubble wrap taped to the drive that didn't even go all the way around.

Oh yeah! I was actually going to mention that but it's been awhile and I was myself wondering if I'd made that up. Anyway, I'd agree that what you received seems reasonable. I guess I will put them back on the list for HDDs. (Which, at this point, I will probably buy 3-4 more of over the entire rest of my life. )

JohnC wrote:

As for packaging - Amazon's current packaging is pretty decent:
[pic of very well packed hard drive]

My previous (earlier this year) purchase from Newegg came packed that way.

drsauced wrote:

I have heard that the density on the platters is just about at the maximum, the capacity is coming from better compression and error correction.

I wouldn't exactly call it compression, but yeah we're right at the hairy edge of what magnetic heads can resolve, and yes there's a buttload of error correction layered on top to make it all work.

drsauced wrote:

The Deathstars were a real thing, though, lots of those died (what 10 maybe out of 25 drives purchased) before Hitachi bought the business.

Yup. And after they fixed the reliability problems, Hitachi drives were a bargain for several years as they were consistently undercutting their competitors on price. (Probably to regain market share they lost due to the DeathStar fiasco.)

drsauced wrote:

Western Digital seems to have a good track record, actually.

I don't know if I would say "good"... if you said "somewhat better than the competition" I might agree.

drsauced wrote:

Sorry for the staccato English. I'm drunk and tired. Cheers.

It was actually a very coherent post for PUI.

Well, got those two Toshibas I just received from Newegg powered up in a couple of eSATA drive docks. Gotta leave for work now, but I'll remote in on my lunch break and run some tests. Looks like they're Advanced Format drives; I got the following warning when I fired up the partitioning tool:

Linux fdisk tool wrote:

The device presents a logical sector size that is smaller than the physical sector size. Aligning to a physical sector (or optimal I/O) size boundary is recommended, or performance may be impacted.

Hmm... maybe I should look into how to disable emulation of 512 byte legacy sectors. That would be even better than making sure the partitions are aligned (though in practice I imagine the difference should be negligible).

just brew it! wrote:

Deanjo wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

(Heh, at this point I guess I should be leery of it because it may be getting close to dying of old age, not because it is a 7200.11!)

Bah... My Diamond Max 10's have been going 24/7 for close to 8 and half years and still going strong. (Although looking at the powered on hours in SMART makes me giggle).

Guess they got their act together on the DM 10s. That was during the period where I wouldn't buy Maxtor because of the train wreck that was the DiamondMax 9 (which I consider to be Maxtor's version of the 7200.11, more or less).

I still have a 120GB SATA DM9. Damned thing still works as a media storage drive in a PC I built for my mother.

All of my DM9s (something like 3 or 4 of them) died. Started developing bad sectors after 2-3 years of use, and there was no turning back. Don't think I ever bought Maxtor after that (at least not on purpose, I suppose some of the Seagates I've owned post-merger may have been Maxtor designs).

Truly hilarious, but the oldest drives activly in use in my house are 75GXP deathstar drives.

Also depending on the external drives, the drives inside still have warranties - i've even RMA'd a couple of Seagates from them, but all the warranties checkout on the companies' websites.

I've gotten boxes where every drive was perfect in it's own box. I've gotten others that are just OEM bubble-wrapped... except they didn't tape up the ends so they got tossed out of their wrapping. Sad.

I'm not sure about that Keltor, I think that depends a lot on which drives you get. A lot of people claim warranty-less drives inside enclosures. Manufacturers simply need to give them special SNs to match external enclosures.

I'm simply saying they don't ALL have no warranties.

keltor wrote:

I'm simply saying they don't ALL have no warranties.

Warranty. A somewhat delusional concept when it comes to a device whose function is to remember things and when it forgets them the warranty doesn't apply to the things. I don't really care about the $$ I lost on the drive, I want your warranty to get my damn data back without cost to me.

I know, I know, which explains the explosion of bare drives, static baggies, and e-SATA drive caddies at Casa Captain.

I consider the length of warranty to be (very) loosely correlated with how reliable the manufacturer expects the drive to be. All else being equal I'll take the drive with the longer warranty. But I'm not willing to pay much for more warranty.

just brew it! wrote:

I consider the length of warranty to be (very) loosely correlated with how reliable the manufacturer expects the drive to be. All else being equal I'll take the drive with the longer warranty. But I'm not willing to pay much for more warranty.

I'd pay much more attention if I was in the enterprise market compared to the home market. Maybe when I build that 4-slot NAS with 4TB drives.

In the actual Enterprise market, your drives come from your server/storage vendor and attached to the service contract/warranty you have from that. Purchasing single type setups is really rare except workstations. Some larger "tech" companies do do other things like the mass drive exchanges people like Google do.

Where I work we physically destroy all drives when they go bad or are decomissioned. Two people have to sign off on the physical destruction.