New harddisk ?

[Sandsound]

Hi all

I just lost one of my hd's :cry: and this time I want something more reliable, but it's a jungle out there...

I'm thinking about buying this one : WD RE3 WD5002ABYS 500 GB (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=489) =P~
It's quite a bit more expensive than the Blue edition, but it has a 1.2 million hours MTBF.

I have bad experiences with Seagate, Hitachi and Maxtor, and all thou I make backups regularly, I have lost many hours of work to bad disks from those companies.

Do you have any experience ? and which drives are the most reliable ?

[Странник]

From my experience Western Digital is probably the best choice ;)

[Whiffle]

These days western digital seems to be on top. But on the otherhand, my desktop has a seagate, my laptop is a few eyars old with a seagate, my server has a couple of maxtors... no crashes so far. So yeah, get the WD :-P

[Странник]

Older series of seagate were good, but the newest are not so good.
My cousin bought a seagate hdd for his home computer 8 years ago and it still works without a problem.I cannot say the same for their newer series

[Exodist]

Hi all

I just lost one of my hd's :cry: and this time I want something more reliable, but it's a jungle out there...

I'm thinking about buying this one : WD RE3 WD5002ABYS 500 GB (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=489) =P~
It's quite a bit more expensive than the Blue edition, but it has a 1.2 million hours MTBF.

I have bad experiences with Seagate, Hitachi and Maxtor, and all thou I make backups regularly, I have lost many hours of work to bad disks from those companies.

Do you have any experience ? and which drives are the most reliable ?

Western Digital from around the beginning of time :-) to about 1994-95 was top drive and most reliable.
Maxtors And Seagate around 1995 to 2003 where the top drives while WD at the time was less then top quality. Think they was focusing on quanity then quality.
But around 2004 to present they have thankfully pulled out of that hole and now the absolute best drives out there.

I have two of the original Raptor 74GB SATA 1 dirves and although very salty they freaking rock. It makes me sad tho I need more drive space :(

[gordintoronto]

Hi all

I just lost one of my hd's :cry: and this time I want something more reliable, but it's a jungle out there...

I'm thinking about buying this one : WD RE3 WD5002ABYS 500 GB (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=489) =P~
It's quite a bit more expensive than the Blue edition, but it has a 1.2 million hours MTBF.


My preference is the WD6401AALS. On Newegg, 10% of reviewers gave it a rating of 1, 2 or 3 (bad to poor), versus 20% for the RE3.

If you have problems with hard drives, you should figure out how to get some air flowing across the drives. My computer has a fan at the front blowing air right across the drive, and a fan at the back blowing out, and my WD6401AALS runs at 31 to 34 C.

[Paqman]

The only drives i've found to be really bad were Maxtors, I had a couple die within a fairly short timespan. I've been using Seagate Barracudas for the last few years without any failures at all.

[Sidewinder1]

+1 WD
I have 4 Cavalry (WD inside) external (sounds like you're lookin' at internal), and they are rock solid.

[Sergeant Streetwise]

Samsung ftw :D

WD very good

[Sandsound]

I have two of the original Raptor 74GB SATA 1 dirves and although very salty they freaking rock. It makes me sad tho I need more drive space :(

I have replaced my broken Seagate with a WD Raptor 74GB (the most stable disk I have ever had), but with my primary use of the pc as a home-studio, 74GB is just about 4 songs :-)

[BuffaloX]

My preference is the WD6401AALS. On Newegg, 10% of reviewers gave it a rating of 1, 2 or 3 (bad to poor), versus 20% for the RE3.

If you have problems with hard drives, you should figure out how to get some air flowing across the drives. My computer has a fan at the front blowing air right across the drive, and a fan at the back blowing out, and my WD6401AALS runs at 31 to 34 C.

Black series are 1<10^14 error rate
Blue and RE3 are 1<10^15 error rate

RE3 is meant for servers, how can it have poorer rating on Newegg?

My guess is people like the higher performance of the black series, but in this case we are looking 100% for reliability.

Good advice about air flow (low temp). :D

[Sandsound]

If you have problems with hard drives, you should figure out how to get some air flowing across the drives.

A good point about the air flow, but... I have a Cooler-Master Cosmos case and if I add more fans, I'm afraid that it might take of :-)

[sideaway]

They all use similar manufacturing processes. All the firmware is similar, notice how seatools is cross-manufacturer compatible? Similar materials.
TBH, you're experience with HDD reliability is drive operation temperature, the abuse it's taken and finally (and mostly), luck.

Pick what drive suits your needs (speed/storage/warranty) and buy it. Most differences are just human perception playing up.

Every now and again each company ships a drive with buggy firmware or a manufacturing fault, but what company in any market hasn't? These are few and far between. BTW I own 1 Toshiba, 1 Western Digital, 3 seagates and 3 samsung. I've had trouble with one samsung. Should I now proclaim to the world how crap Samsung are? My sample size is much too small. And so is everyone elses.

[The Real Dave]

Hi all

I just lost one of my hd's :cry: and this time I want something more reliable, but it's a jungle out there...

I'm thinking about buying this one : WD RE3 WD5002ABYS 500 GB (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=489) =P~
It's quite a bit more expensive than the Blue edition, but it has a 1.2 million hours MTBF.

I have bad experiences with Seagate, Hitachi and Maxtor, and all thou I make backups regularly, I have lost many hours of work to bad disks from those companies.

Do you have any experience ? and which drives are the most reliable ?

I gotta recommend the Samsung Spinpoint F1, an absoluletly great drive, fast quiet and cool :D Mine never goes above 23C, where as my Hitachi Deskstar is at 30C.

I have a total of 6 of these drives, all 320Gb models. I use one in my main PC, 2 in my main server (RAID0) and 3 in my backups server (RAID5). Both my servers run 24/7, in my hallway, not far from the bedrooms, and need to be quiet. With these drives, the temp stays nice and low, meaning I need less fans, and the drives themselves are very quiet. A great HDD IMO

[Sandsound]

I've had trouble with one samsung. Should I now proclaim to the world how crap Samsung are? My sample size is much too small. And so is everyone elses.

I have lost four Seagate and quite a few Maxtor drives in only four years.
I admit that I run them pretty hard at times, but my old faith-full WD-Raptor have never given me any problems, so that is what I base my experience on.

btw... A warranty doesn't do you much good when you lose a precious recording, after all, the warranty is on the hardware, not the data (afaik).
A high warranty COULD be a mark of quality, but in the end it doesn't matter if you lose your data.

[Sandsound]

I gotta recommend the Samsung Spinpoint F1...

How long have you been running these disks ? sounds like a nice alternative.

[BuffaloX]

They all use similar manufacturing processes. All the firmware is similar, notice how seatools is cross-manufacturer compatible? Similar materials.
TBH, you're experience with HDD reliability is drive operation temperature, the abuse it's taken and finally (and mostly), luck.

Pick what drive suits your needs (speed/storage/warranty) and buy it. Most differences are just human perception playing up.

Every now and again each company ships a drive with buggy firmware or a manufacturing fault, but what company in any market hasn't? These are few and far between. BTW I own 1 Toshiba, 1 Western Digital, 3 seagates and 3 samsung. I've had trouble with one samsung. Should I now proclaim to the world how crap Samsung are? My sample size is much too small. And so is everyone elses.

Sorry I think you are wrong, I ran a hardware sales business in the 90s, and I had plenty data to reliably measure differences in reliability for different makes of drives.
Maxtor were really great drives back then, much better than both Seagate and Quantum, unfortunately Maxtors quality plummeted after they bought Quantum.
Seagate had been of lower than average quality for more than a decade, but became better in the very late 90s.
If you sell just a few hundred drives each month, the difference is very obvious over time.

The question here seems to be, do you really get better reliability from the Western Digital Enterprise series than you get from the desktop blue series.

[The Real Dave]

How long have you been running these disks ? sounds like a nice alternative.

About 6 months now? Their run pretty hard, but I've had no problems with them. My cases don't have a whole load of ventilation around the drives, which is why my main PC's one is around 23-25C. The server is a bit more airy, and stays at 20 under heavy usage. In the morning after a night of doing nothing (the servers drives all spin down when not in use) the temp is around 16C.

And it helps that compared to some other drives, their not hugely expensive.

EDIT: Here (http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2008/12/09/samsung-spinpoint-f1-1tb/1)'s an interesting review by bit-tech where a Spinpoint F1 went up against a raptor and won :

Another quite good review (http://techreport.com/articles.x/14200/15)

[mamamia88]

how about solid state? probably much more reliable

[Stan_1936]

^^^You have to be willing to pamper the hard drive very often.....

[Sidewinder1]

^^^^ Pamper? ^^^^

[The Real Dave]

^^^^ Pamper? ^^^^

Every Harddrive loves the feeling of soft cool air blowing across it ;) :lolflag:

[Sidewinder1]

Gotcha...

[Sandsound]

Every Harddrive loves the feeling of soft cool air blowing across it ;) :lolflag:

Yes that would seam to be the logical conclusion, but I found this interesting article : http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience/

It's based on analyzing 100.000 drives, and according to their findings, one of the worst thing you can do for your drive is to keep it TO cold, actually it seams that a temperature of about 37-45 degrees Celsius is the optimal operating temperature if you wish to prolong the disk lifetime.

Another interesting point they make, is that to little work, is almost as bad as to much work, and that "low utilization drives having slightly higher failure rates than high utilization ones".

I can understand why they won't release their brand of choice (the commercial value and so on), but I would sure like to know what a giant consumer like Google uses :-)

[Sandsound]

how about solid state? probably much more reliable

Unfortunately both price and size is a problem with SSD.
The largest disk I could find was a 250GB with a 600$ price-tag :shock:

[The Real Dave]

Interesting find that, seeing as Google would have massive experience with drives. That bit about drive temp is a bit un-nerving though, my dries don't go near those temps. My 3 year old Deskstar goes up to 36C, averaging 33, whereas my F1 is around 23-25. They don't really have alot of air around them though, there's no fans near them. They get some air from the 120mm fan in the side, but not much.

The servers F1s though rarely stray above 20C. I wonder, is this lowering their lifespan? According to them, cold drives don't last as long. Mine seem to be right in the danger zone...

[BuffaloX]

My preference is the WD6401AALS. On Newegg, 10% of reviewers gave it a rating of 1, 2 or 3 (bad to poor), versus 20% for the RE3.


I found this review quite interesting, it seems RE3 and Black editions are identical drives, except for some firmware differences which seem to be mostly irrelevant unless your case is vibrating heavily or you are using some special RAID controllers.

Another interesting fact from the review, is that Black edition is constantly in the top half of all tested drives, where other drives tend to do well in some tests and poorly in other.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15588

[gordintoronto]

The servers F1s though rarely stray above 20C. I wonder, is this lowering their lifespan? According to them, cold drives don't last as long. Mine seem to be right in the danger zone...

I'm suspicious of the readings you are getting. Room temperature is 22 C, so if a drive is 20 C, then it is in a refrigerator. Or perhaps your server is in a cool basement?