Harddrive reliability

Looking at larger HDD options, I noticed a lot of reports of growing reliability issues in both Seagate and Samsung drives. These have been my 2 favourite makes recently so it was a bit of a surprise.

Has anyone here had a drive failure with either of these makes?

Seagate

I'm running some of the older 7200.10 500GB SATAII drives and have had no problems. They are fast, quiet and just get on with it. On looking around they don't seem to have any problems.

However the newer 7200.11 models seem to have a firmware bug that makes disks inaccessible at power on. Disks affected by this are not detected by the BIOS after a reboot. Sometimes a power down will make them appear again, but a lot of the time the firmware just bricks the drives and only an RMA under warranty is an option, so all data will be lost.

Some more info here.

Seagate have released firmware updates to fix this problem, so if you are running any 7200.11 drives I recommend you update the firmware ASAP.

There is also now the newer 7200.12 drives. Some people report reliability issues, but on the whole not much compared to the .11 drives.

Samsung

I've been using some 1TB Spinpoint F1's for some time now and have been really happy with them.Now the Samsung range has expanded to both Spinpoint and EcoGreen drives. The latter more for data storage than software or OS loading as they spin at a slower RPM and use less power. Both ranges also come in 4 variations from F1 to F4.

There have been reports of their reliability going down recently, but equally loads of people saying how happy they are with them. It could just be the usual failure rates and people getting annoyed as is always the case. I've not found anything specific about a cause of failures though.

Western Digital

WD is one of the oldest makers, but for a long time a lot of people have been avoiding them for being noisy and having reliability issues.

That is unless you wanted the fastest performance, whereby the WD Raptor 10KRPM drives have been a firm favourite of gamers. And more recently the SATA version, called the VelociRaptor.

However, for their current range of drives I couldn't see any evidence of this. Seagate drives are meant to be faster and a bit quieter, but most people are saying WD drives are currently more reliable.

I do like their recent drive naming, splitting their caviar range into the three Blue, Green and Black ranges.

Anyone had any issues with WD drives?

Hitachi

We all know the horror stories of Deskstar drives from the past. The click of death and the nickname Deathstar they gained.

I've still got 2 IBM Deskstar drives (60GB and 120GB IDE) and they are both still working fine. So maybe these drives did have a higher than normal failure rate, or people just jumped on the band wagon and attacked the make. Who knows.

Not sure of the reliability of their current range of drives. The prices seem very good for the drive capacities, sometime lower than any other make. And they often seem to release larger capacity drives before any other maker.

However, I probably wouldn't buy one from them just because of their long running reputation. In the IT industry issues stick and it can put people off a brand for life.

Other makes?

Any other makes of drive anyone here uses and would recommend?

I've had Maxtors fail on me in the past, but since I always held backups, there never was any data loss or frustration. On top of that, the drives that failed had always been used and abused, so overall, my experience with Maxtors has been good.

Western Digital makes decent drives, but I've had some noisy ones (seek noise, case vibration) in the past. Their recent drives have gotten very good reviews, particularly the Green drives which are supposedly very silent and energy-efficient - albeit at the cost of performance. I haven't had one fail on me (yet).

At the workfloor, I've worked with Hitachi, IBM, Samsung, Western Digital and Seagate drives. I'm not particularly crazy about Seagate performance, especially the 7200.10 and older series. Haven't had many fail on me though. The Hitachi drives I've seen and benchmarked have all been very fast, but rather noisy (mostly from case vibration). If you can dampen them enough with rubber washers or even a suspension system, they make good performers. Haven't witnessed any failures here either. The IBMs have seen some cases of premature deaths, but they were all older Deathstars. As for the Western Digitals, the workfloor models all have middling performance, but they're generally quite reliable (have had a couple of fails, but with so many in use, that's to be expected).

I had some Maxtor and WD disks dying, but they were all external drives, that's why nowadays I don't trust external disks that much anymore.

One IBM Deskstar also died, internal one, and had the so famous clicking sound.

Since some years I'm using only Samsung drives, which seem so far to be very reliable. At the moment I use 5 2TB Spinpoint EcoGreen F3 drives.

I only read good things also about the Seagate Momentus XT disks.

Regarding external drives, I had a problem with an external 500GB Lacie drive. It started having trouble initialising on startup. You could hear it spin up, but then it sounded like it was having trouble reading and kept trying for ages until eventually it succeeded and then appear to the system. Sometimes this could take 10 minutes. I did some searching and found some other people having this issue, and it turned out to be the enclosure's PSU and not the drive itself. I removed the drive from the case, which turned out to be an SATA Seagate 7200.10 and identical model to my other internal ones, installed it inside my main PC, and it has worked perfectly ever since.

I was trying to think about internal drives I've owned that have failed and can't think of much. The only complete failure was a very old 1.2GB drive in my A1200 many years ago. Forget the make, but it might have been Conner.

I've had a few laptop HDDs fail on family or friends laptops, but that is to be expected I suppose. At least newer 2.5" drives are now seeing better shock detection systems to prevent this.

The only other one I can think if was an IDE 160GB Maxtor drive being used as an XP boot drive, which started to generate bad sector errors during booting. I swapped it over for a larger SATA drive and used Maxtor/Seagate tools on it and managed to fix it. I think it just had a couple of bad sectors that the software designated off limits after a full scan, and a partition and format later the drive was working perfectly again. In fact it is still working in my download PC.

Not had any hard drive failures, but I have never run a PC 24/7 like a server.

I do have a couple of 500GB single platter 7200.12's that I'm keeping an eye on. As mentioned above, the 7200.11 had a firmware issue and the 7200.12 with the 500GB platters seem to have relocated sector counts rising in some cases - probably due to the new 500GB aerial density introduced last year not being refined yet.

My 7200.12's were among the first batch released CC34 firmware I think, with 130MB/s outer speed and 15.2ms access times. Mine both have relocated sectors, but I'm not sure if they came from the factory like that. Keeping an eye on SMART to see if they start to get worse. They are meant to be identical, but one has slightly more sectors that the other (about 2MB's worth). The latest drives have CC44 firmware and 20ms access times I've read - they slowed them down for some reason.

Seagate will replace any drive within its 5 year warranty which is good. I've got some 7200.9 ST3160812A, 160GB single platter, and they are indestructible. Battered them in my main rig and they still never relocated a sector. Now they are in my X-Box's! Use them in my two SFF retro machines too. Nice reliable drives.

Bought some Samsung and a 640GB WD black since the 7200.12's seem a little dodgy - they've all been fine too.

I also have some older 7200.9 and 7200.8 drives and they are all still going strong. In fact all of my larger IDE drives are now located in my main test/download server. I've moved my newer systems over to just SATA. So great getting rid of those horrible ribbon cables! The server has 6 IDE drives with a mix of 200 and 160 GB drives. Some are Seagate and others are Maxtor. And that system is running 24/7 constantly downloading and seeding, plus used for test dev work for web design.

I wonder how many of the current SATA drives will still be going as strong after so many years?

And as mentioned before, I also still have ny 2 old IBM Deskstar drives. A 60GB and a 120GB drive. The 60GB drive is really old now. Must be around 2000 I think. I remember when i originally bought it my current P2 400 PC only had a slow ATA33 IDE interface, and couldn't address drives larger than 32GB. I had to install a patch from IBM which fixed this and made the system see the whole disk. Although saying that, even in Windows 2000 you had to patch the system or install SP2 to use large HDDs over 133GB. I remember that when I installed a 200GB drive and wondered why it would only let me partition 133GB of it. Back to the IBMs. I also remember with the 60GB one having to flash its firmware more than once over the years to make it work correctly. When i first got it I had to to update the firmware to work with the patched Mobo/OS, and later when I moved the drive into a newer system it wasn't being recognised and had to be flashed again to make it show and work with the motherboard. I don't think I had any similar issues with the newer 120GB drive. That one was from 2002 when i built the next PC to replace the P2 400 one. And both drives still going strong, although neither is in the server, they are instead in another older PC used for Linux testing and DOS games.

I have just remembered a strange situation I had with a HDD a while back. At the time my main system was running an Athlon 64 Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, which had 8 SATA ports. I installed a 300GB SATA Maxtor drive as the boot drive and began installing XP onto it. However every time it went to do the first reboot to then continue the install the system would completely lose the HDD on the reboot. It didn't show at post or in the bios. Very strange. After some searching I found that this motherboard had a conflict with Maxtor SATA drives. I've never encountered anything like that before. I replaced it with a 500GB Seagate SATA drive and that worked perfectly. The strange thing is, I then added the Maxtor 300GB drive to the system as a second drive and it worked fine like that. It just didn't like being the boot drive. Anyone else encountered similar?

Regarding SATA, yes the cables are nice and thin, but man I would like to hit the guy who designed the SATA socket. It is so flimsy and feeble - plus if you bend SATA cables 90 degrees, you risk data loss! They also suffer from interference more. The locking mechanism isn't part of the spec, but thankfully some manufacturers add them now as they have a habit of falling out with the slightest knock otherwise. Even with the lock, they move around in the socket and wear down the contacts.

In the past, we've had great sockets like ethernet. Nice and solid click and sturdy. Yet even today, daft socket and cable designs popup.

To answer your question, yes I've had issues with SATA drives that I never had with IDE. Not a bios issue though. I have 8 ports on my motherboard, and they can be flaky. I run them in AHCI, and drives kept getting dropped and disappearing from windows or boot. First it was my SATA DVDRW that did it in IDE mode, then my boot drive, then one of my DATA drives. Played around with the SATA cables and ports and they came back. Not sure if it's a bad cable or port, or the fact the cables used to run right next to a fan motor and above one of the hard drives. I think I found a nice stable configuration now, months without issues, but I'd love a more robust connection and cable for drives.

SATA cables without the locking clips are very annoying. As you say, they can just fall out of the ports. ASRock motherboards are often bundled with them, which I suppose is because they are cheaper and it keeps the price down for budget buyers. Luckily all of the Asus motherboards I've bought in recent years have come with a load of good quality SATA cables that seem to plug in very securely and work well. I'm always impressed by how much Asus normally bundled with their higher end boards.