Harddrive reliability

[Bloodwych]

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.

[Harrison]

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?

[Bloodwych]

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.

[Harrison]

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.