WD hard drives...not what they used to be? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: ampdoctor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 09:00:22 am
content: Historically I've always had ZERO issues with western digital hard drives over a dozen years and as many drives. Typically when I see bum reviews on an otherwise solid product I tend to write them off as written by morons that are probably screwing something up. However, in the past few weeks I've had 2 DOA drives and another that's failed in less than a day. Now I'm starting to wonder if anybody here is having issues with WD products as well, and/or are they having some serious QC issues at the factory. I'm about ready to write this company off as having gone completely in the crapper and start using Seagate again.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 09:13:29 am
content: i had a WD 300GB die a few months back. It was like 5 years old though, so not exactly worst case.In total i think ive owned maybe 10 WD drives going back 12 years.2 totally died with no warning (1 in warranty, 1 not)1 has an issue where the reallocated sector count will increase by one every so often during heavy usage. (I started using it to store non-important backups, so it doesn't get used much and its been fine for years with no more reallocations)Compare that to 8years ago when i owned some seagates.I had 2 out of 5 drives die within 2 years.

author: Balaur
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 09:18:49 am
content: WD is OK-ish in my books. But since I had more troubles with other makers, I tend to stay with WD since some of their products (black drives for notebooks and red drives for NAS) offer everything I need (at least on paper).On a collection size of ~20 WD drives, I had:2 black notebook drives that started developing bad sectors at an uncontrollable rate (although I have to add that one of the was in a notebook that had a ~10 cm fall)another one that suddenly shown a few bad sectors (reallocated at the next write). This one is still in use in very minor rolea desktop drive that developed many bad sectors and was RMA'd (good experience with their support, btw)I personally had disk drives that failed from all manufacturers (well maybe not Quantum), and overall, I'm happy with WD.It goes without saying that redundancy and backup are your friends. I'm not trusting any form of storage. I consider that RAID5 is a must, even (especially?) on home stuff. I'm also using rsnapshot + on-site and off-site backup (yes even for home). Maybe I'm a bit excessive though.Best regards,Dan

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 09:35:48 am
content: Quote from: Balaur on May 30, 2014, 09:18:49 amYou must never have owned a Quantum Fireball or Quantum Bigfoot drive.

author: ampdoctor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 09:41:39 am
content: Quote from: Psi on May 30, 2014, 09:13:29 amwhich is why I switched to WD and they were always rock solid.I'll give you that once in a while you'll get one that goes tits up, but this is ridiculous! Makes you wonder if the mfg's just don't give a damn about mechanical drives anymore, just slap them together and price them as consumables while focusing on SSD system drives and using the cloud for mass storage.I've always raided my work computers but just ran with system drive and storage drive for my personal home computer. Maybe it's time to start rethinking this strategy.

author: IanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 09:53:02 am
content: I had trouble recently with a WD black drive. The installation guide didn't make clear the drive needs a strong source of external cooling, and so my drive kept overheating and shutting down. I needed to switch to a WD green drive which runs much cooler and can operate with limited environmental cooling. After that experience I started paying close attention to the drive operating temperature.

author: dfmischler
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 09:59:54 am
content: Thank goodness they're not what they used to be: small and slowAll of the hard drive manufacturers have released lemons from time to time. I have no idea how you could find out in any individual case whether the problem is design, manufacturing, QC, transport, etc. Or even a bad end-user installation due to power problems, vibration, temperature, etc.From time to time end-user reports on hard drive reliability by manufacturer or model appear, but the reports are usually released too late to assist in model selection for new purchases.

author: dannyf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 10:30:28 am
content: I had quite a few WD failures a few years ago (5 - 10 years) and I stop'd using them. Have been happy with Seagate since. Before that I used IBM / Hitachi.

author: flolic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 10:34:59 am
content: Only HDD that ever failed in one of my computers was 1.6GB WD Caviar drive some 16 or 17 years ago.That was the last WD drive that I bought.I had drives from almost all major manufacturers (Seagate, Samsung, Maxtor, IBM...) work in my PCs for years without any problem. Right now in my main PC I have 8 HDDs and 1 SSD, some of those hard drives are almost 10 years old...And yes, I have one WD Green drive (1TB) that I received as a gift, now working for ~3 years without any problem.

author: cyr
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 10:57:01 am
content: I've only used WD and Samsung drives in recent history (5+ years). I've had at least a dozen of each, and one failure each. The WD drive that failed was the one and only "enterprise" drive I've ever bought funnily enough.It was almost two years since I last bought any mechanical storage though, so the quality may have gone down the crapper. Too bad if that's the case, I will need to replace on of the RAID volumes in my NAS soon and I was looking at getting some WD Reds.Here is some data from a much larger sample size BTW:http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

author: TMM
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 10:59:50 am
content: Yes WD and Seagate are absolute garbage compared to what they were. Out of about a dozen Seagate and WD drives 2-5 years old i have about a 60-70% failure rate of both brands. The low power variants ('GreenPower', 'Barracuda LP') are particularly unreliable. 7200rpm drives have done a little better. Samsung seem reliable (i have 0 failures), but i don't really have a large enough sample size to comment.It is worth commenting that all the drives i have owned have been on the 'bleeding edge' of what was available at the time. Thus they are all 3 or 4 platter drives with a lot to go wrong. If you go and buy the smallest capacity drive available it will be a single platter and logic would tell you that it is a lot less likely to have a head failure because there are significantly less heads to fail. Ditto with most other failure modes.Similar to the BackBlaze article above, almost every refurbished drive i have recieved back from Seagate as part of an RMA failed in a very short amount of time. I have a feeling that a lot of people (like me) send drives in for warranty when the SMART data starts to look particularly sad, then Seagate simply reset the SMART data and send it back to a customer as "refurbished" where it promptly fails in a short period of time. I don't bother returning drives for warranty anymore. Maybe it might be worth it if it is a new drive, but if it's 5 years old you are wasting $20 postage to get another drive that is probably just as worse for wear.HGST/Hitachi is where it's at

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 11:20:59 am
content: I have over 50 WD green drives stacked up and never one failure till this date. Knocks on wood.Samsung had a whole bunch of drives that had poor reputation (some chip failed after a year). Never used them.Friend of mine had half year ago failure after failure with a WD drives till he asked his money back and ordered the same drive from another dealer. No problem since.Our best guess was that this particular delivery to that dealer that box of drives might be handled poorly probably thrown and dropped from a distance.My money is and will be for standard HDD's always on WD.

author: ciccio
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 12:16:53 pm
content: During the years I've assembled about 120 PCs for me and friends, and I've used drives from about all manufacturers, but I think almost 60 to 70 percent of them were WD.If I look at the pile of broken dives I keep in my basement (never had the time to clean or destroy them to erase data) I see that almost all brands are there, except Hitachi and IBM.Recently I've got a couple of 5 years old WD fail, and the failure, without any prior sign, was dramatic (BIOS showed an unknown drive of zero capacity: the main chip in the dive's PCB had failed, and even a PCB swap could not help). Recovery was out of my capacity, and this prompted me to switch to Toshiba or Hitachi (even if they are more expensive) for new PC and repair, because I never had any Toshiba or Hitachi drive fail... My usual suppliers do not stock Hitachi drives.I've found this linkhttp://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/where thy show that Hitachi is the more reliable, followed by WD and that the less reliable is Seagate.Now hard drives are so cheap that I keep the habit of replacing them every 4-5 years.Best regards

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 12:26:07 pm
content: @ciccio note that backblaze uses the hard drives in a particular way, in a custom case where lots of drives are very close to each other and there's lots more vibration and heat, compared to regular setups. Still, it's an interesting blog post with good info.For years I've had no problems with hard drives, and I've had over 5 of them, now I'm down to 3 in the case.The first hdd that had problems was the one in the first pc I ever own. The hdd was a Maxtor 3.2 GB one.I only buy Seagate and Western Digital... I didn't trust Samsung that much but I'm biased, I had optical drives from Samsung and they had a reputation of failing. Their hard drives were probably good, now they're bought by Seagate if I remember correctly, Samsung only does SSD now.Nowadays I probably would buy Hitachi or Toshiba (even though they're the children of the old IBM "deathstar" hard drives) but there's really no incentive to buy those instead of wd or seagate. Between WD and Seagate, I'm leaning towards WD.Just a few months ago, a 2 TB WD drive (green) I had started to develop bad sectors. It had a little bit more than one month until the 2 year warranty was done, so I formatted it and delivered it to the store I bought it from and a week later they gave me a brand new 2 TB drive (still WD). It works fine.Now, another 2 TB drive started to get bad sectors, this time Seagate ST2000DL.. I don't hit the computer (people often hit computers or desk with their fists when gaming, those vibrations can affect hard drives), it's 24/7 on, it's cooled well, no clue why it started... there's probably 170 KB of bad sectors on one partition, the other's totally fine. This one had 3 year warranty and it expired a couple of months ago, so no luck with this one. So I'll have to buy another and use this 2tb drive just to store movies and music I don't care about if I lose it.It's interesting though, the SMART says no bad sectors, but it does have a lot of hardware errors recovered by ecc and huge seek error and read error rates (both show up as ok in smart though, not warnings)The oldest drive that still works fine is a 1TB WD Black .. 31231 hours of runtime ( ~ 1300 days, 3.5 years) and works like new.. I gave a 400 GB WD blue to my sister and a 250 GB Seagate to my brother, those are still fine as well. (The Seagate drive that's "failing" has 27719 hours of runtime , or around 1150 days... like i said, i keep my pc running 24/7, only turning it off for windows updates or when power fails.So it's 1:1 in the WD : Seagate battle here.Re temperature... Google's famous hard drive study shows too cold is bad, just as too hot is also bad... see page 5 and 6:http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdfBasically, it's best to keep drives between 30-40c, there's a huge spike in failures after 3 years if the drive is often hotter than 40c, and at low temperatures (15-30c) a lot of drives fail in the first 3 months .. but then again, there's a lot of failures in the first 3 months if the drive is heavily used (see graph on page 5)Last, there's a thread on linustechtips with some information from a large french seller of it parts and they gave the percentages of failures for various brands and productshttp://linustechtips.com/main/topic/108284-huge-list-of-failure-rates-on-pc-components-french-but-i-translated-nearly-everything/Quoting from that page:From an article posted on May 10th 2013 (so numbers are from before may 10 2013, maybe may 2012- may 2013 (?)Average Failure rates:- Toshiba 1,15%- Seagate 1,44% (vs 1,65%)- Western 1,55% (vs 1,44%)- Samsung 2,24% (vs 1,30%)- Hitachi 2,40% (vs 3,45%)(my note: i don't know what the vs percentage means, probably percentages for a year before this one year or 6 month period)We mixed all formats of hard drives, which means that we were able to add Toshiba to the list despite a rather small amount of 3.5" drives they sold. This Former arrives in 1st position. Of note is the high failure rate jump for Samsung, compared to the lowering in failure for Hitachi.Here are the 5 discs with the highest failure rates(my note: as of may 10 2013, below is data for october 2013):- 5,04% WD Caviar Black 1,5 TB (WD1502FAEX)- 4,94% Hitachi 7K1000.C 1 TB (HDS721010CLA332)- 4,87% Hitachi 7K3000 2 ToB(HDS723020BLA642)- 3,57% Seagate Barracuda 320 GB (ST320DM001)- 3,51% WD Caviar Red 2 TB (WD20EFRX)If we look specifically at 2 TB drives here are the obtained numbers :- 4,87% Hitachi 7K3000 (HDS723020BLA642)- 3,51% WD Caviar Red (WD20EFRX)- 3,01% Samsung SpinPoint F4 (HD201UI)- 2,12% WD Caviar RE4 (WD2003FYYS)- 1,97% WD Caviar Black (WD2002FAEX)- 1,95% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST2000DM001)- 1,30% WD Caviar Green (WD20EARX)- 1,01% WD AV-GP (WD20EURS)And the 3 TB drives :- 2,85% WD Caviar Green (WD30EZRX)- 2,71% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST3000DM001)- 1,89% WD Caviar Red (WD30EFRX)Article posted on October 30th, 2013:Average Failure rates:- Seagate 0,95% (vs 1,44% year before)- Hitachi 1,16% (vs 2,40% year before)- Western 1,19% (vs 1,55% year before)- Toshiba 1,54% (vs 1,15% year before)Hitachi HGST which was for a long time the definite last place, continues to improves its failure rate ever since it's buyout by Western Digital, but that's in large part due to the the sales of its high capacity hard drives which significantly lowered (>2TB hard drives). Toshiba sees it's rate decrease, while Seagate improves it's rate which allows it first place.Warning:Unlike others, Toshiba doesn't allow a direct return to the manufacturers (so it's failure rate might actually be considerably lower if it were to allow them)Only one disk obtains a failure rate higher than 4% during this time period, it's the Seagate constellation ES 2 with a rate of 9.64%. The failure rate is high, however the sample relatively small.Here are the rates for 2TB hard drives:- 9,64% Seagate Constellation ES ST2000NM0011- 3,38% Western Digital Caviar RE4 WD2003FYYS- 2,36% Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003- 1,45% Western Digital Caviar Black 2 WD2002FAEX- 1,45% Western Digital Red WD20EFRX- 1,38% Seagate SV35 ST2000VX000- 1,35% Western Digital Green WD20EZRX- 1,12% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST2000DM001- 1,09% Western Digital AV-GP WD20EURS- 0,96% Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARX- 0,83% Western Digital RE WD2000FYYZAnd for 3TB hard drives:- 1,99% Western Digital Red WD30EFRX- 1,48% Western Digital Green WD30EZRX- 1,29% Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001(I have no idea why the 1TB hard drive statistics were not in the article)

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 12:48:24 pm
content: HDs like most items are not built like they once were. But then gain look at the price drop, as they have become a commodity item over the years. I remember spending £360 STG on a 120MB Connor drive and it was cheapest large drive I could find. A year or two later a little less for a 540MB drive. etc.All my current drives are WD and I have had a large external 'WD Green' drive fail after the children knocked it off the top of a midi tower. The PC I am on now has two mirrored WD Black drives on the go for about 9+ hours a day for almost 5 years. They are still going strong, but then again the only reason I have two mirrored drives is because I no longer trust current HD quality and the WD Blacks were the best quality I could buy.BTW, I think Vincent works on the design of HD controller chips. I would like to hear his input in the current state of HD technology and price vs reliably.

author: dannyf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 12:48:30 pm
content: QuoteStill working strong.QuoteI am staring that a Caviar Blue - motor wouldn't run.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 12:50:43 pm
content: I think environment plays a big role in drive lifespan, in particular vibrations. I remember a friend's story about a customer whose PC's drives were developing bad sectors and failing within months; the cause was a badly designed drive mounting that was thin enough and just the right dimensions to cause resonance. It was fixed by, strangely enough, mounting the old dead drive in the case too, to act as a damper on the mounting bracket.Hard drives are extremely sensitive - there's a video on the Internet where someoneshoutingat some drives was enough to cause read retries. I've had to copy data to/from a bare unmounted drive just sitting on a table before, and in that case even gently nudging it slightly in one direction causes a noticeable drop in transfer rate. Not surprising, given that the tracks are <100nm wide on the highest density ones today.I know there's someone here who works on HDDs, care to give some input?

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 01:07:48 pm
content: Basically just Seagate and WD are left. All manufactures had some bad series or batches in the past and will have in the future too, I'm sure. Select the drive family based on the operation environment! Use desktop disks for desktop PCs and server disks for servers. Keep disks cool (<40 °C)! Don't wait until a desktop disk fails (unless you do backups regularly) and replace it after about 3-4 years (desktop disks are cheap). From my experience I'd stay away from really cheap Seagate desktop drives.

author: retrolefty
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 01:16:07 pm
content: QuoteDoes anyone really work on HDDs other then remove and replace?

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 01:41:36 pm
content: Quote from: retrolefty on May 30, 2014, 01:16:07 pmThe are are still humans required to designed them.A good question is are there still companies who can recover data from a failed drive?Apart from trying 'disk recovery tools' and swapping the PCB etc with one from of the same make, model, firmware etc. NSA not includedIn other words are there still companies who have clean rooms and the equipment to take just the platters from a modern drive and read/reconstruct the data from them?

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 02:01:51 pm
content: State,ents like 'they don't make drives like they used to are pure blabla.Drives today are better constructed than ever. Machined to a higher precision, better materials, less vinration, less friction.It's not all rosy though : At the same time the miniaturisarion does make heads more sensitive to damage. Mechanically and electrostatically.It is very hard to make comparative quality reports as the end user has no clue what model of drive he really has..

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 02:20:44 pm
content: Quote from: madires on May 30, 2014, 01:07:48 pmToshiba too, but it's getting a little anemic ... only a few years ago we had Samsung too.

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 03:06:25 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 30, 2014, 02:01:51 pmIn other words they are not a reliable as they once were.Certainly in my mind the first generation of 1TB+ drives had a higher failure rate than previous cutting edge drives.Joe Punter is not concerned about how small the heads are, they want in no particular order reliability, speed and size. In the past they took it for granted they would get decent reliability no matter the model. Now we are given a choice of models from each manufacture and WD don't publish the MTBF (for what its worth) for desktop drives, but do give different warranty period on models. Is this just Marketing tricking us out of more money, shelling out extra for a Black 5 Year vs a Blue 2 Year Warranty? Or are the Black drives better built than the Blues? This is leaving aside the speed/energy and the Red's etc which I believe are Blacks with different firmware. If you look at WD's 'Datacentre' drives they do publish the MTBF. So I can get a WD Ex with a MTBF of 2.0M Hours or on the bottom end a WD Se with 0.8 to 1.0M Hours.

author: Forced Perfect
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 03:11:34 pm
content: I personally have a lot of WD hard drives at home (well over a dozen, over 32 TB). I also buy a lot of oddball networking equipment on eBay (for poorly shot YouTube tear downs) which often have WD hard drives in them.I've had quite a few WD hard drives fail. Mostly early 1.5-2 TB Greens. Even a brand new 4 TB Black started glitching out with less than 20 hours use. That being said, I've never actually lost data on a WD drive and that's what really sets them apart from Seagate for me. I have had multiple "major" failures of Seagate drives which were unrecoverable (yay for backups, but that isn't the point).~90% of the failures I have had with WD drives are the "click of death while idle" type. Where the drive is accessing nothing, forever, when idle. The drives still work though and operate normally - but will fail sooner rather than later. The other ~10% have been bad blocks which were relocated without data loss. Each time I was able to copy 100% of the data off and return the drive under warranty.I'm not saying WD dries don't catastrophically fail. I'm just saying in my personal experience with quite a few drives (for a home user), I haven't really had much to any data loss with WD.Plus WD has amazing customer service. They really try to make sure you get something fixed for your needs specifically. For example, I had an early Green drive in my NAS which was known to be incompatible (slow reads/writes), I asked them about a firmware update if possible and instead they swapped it with a larger, Black series drive for free.Even just last week I had an old 500 GB Black give me clicks, so I sent it in and by mistake they sent me a Blue series drive back. I asked about it and they gave me a 750 GB Black replacement with free shipping and admitted their mistake.In the end though, ALL hard drives are like electrolytic caps. It isn't a question of "will this one die", it's a matter of when and how much warning will you get. Always backup important data. ALWAYS!P.S. Mirrored RAID isn't backing up!

author: saturation
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 04:24:02 pm
content: There is a recent survey by cloud drive vendor backblaze of their drive fleet.http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/However, what I find consistent in drive longevity is uptime and excessive heat. Second is how its mounted, a drive subject to shock and vibration while active is more likely to fail [such as a laptop]. I have 12 TB of drives and have not had a failure in 15+ years. In google and backblaze study drives are up 24/7 while my data drives are asleep until data is needed. Even my main PC drives are asleep in 15min. Given wear and tear with spin up and down as the downside over constant motion, a sweet spot in the time depends on how you use your PC and how much RAM it has [ more the better to prevent disk swapping.]

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 04:27:24 pm
content: i was interrupted when writing the earlier post.there is much more to this than the layman knows. you may buy 2 identical model drives from the same manufacturer. and yet they are totally different.The first thing you need to know is that hard disks are designed as a platform.we pick a head technology , encoding technology, and areal density. based on this a drive platform is fleshed out that will be in production for multiple years with different storage sizes. storage size is made by installing more or less platters.it take 2 years to design a new platform and a single platform is typically in production for 4 to 5 years. multiple platforms are in production at any given point in time. when one platform has gone through a refresh the next one is cycled. platforms are staggered in time. they overlap.What i am saying now is -generic speaking- not tied to one manufacturer :Now, if you order a model xyz123 1 Tb drive you do NOT know what you have in hand. That model number is simply an indicator how the manufacturer classifies the target audience. you need to look at the drive ID code.it is perfectly possible that one XYZ123 comes from a plant in thailand while an identically labeled XYZ123 comes from a plant in malaysia. the first one uses a denki motor while the second one has a tdk motor. the first one is a 3 platter drive the second one a 2 platter drive ... yes, the can be that different !The first one could actually be a 2 TB with one platter disabled due to a head short at production. There is nothing wrong with that drive. They just did not succeed at blowing the head short fuse during production. (during manufacturing the 4 terminals of the head are shorted by a fuse to protect it from static electricity damage. At first powerup a special sequence is sent to the head preamp that attempts to blow these fuses. sometimes this fails. the head is then inoperable so the platter is disabled. It wad determined that reworking was not economical so it gets sold as a smaller size. Some drives with problems during construction are reworked. a bad platter can be swapped. A bad headstack on a 2 platter drive gets swapped as this halves drive capacity . A single bad head out of 8 (4 platters) becomes a scaled down size as the risk of damaging something else during rework is too great the 4TB becomes a 3TB.The only way to know EXACTLY what you have is by decoding the manufacturers ID code. unfortunately that code key is secret.so comparing apples to apples is very difficult if all you have is a few drives bought from different sources. you can only do this kind of excercise if you are a company like google that has massive datacentres and orders drives by the container. those are tracked and guaranteed to be identical as they come from the same plant. typically one platform is run at the same plant. they do not split platforms across multiple plants as that is a logistics nightmare.Then there is the reporting of malfunctions by the 'users'. unless these failures happened in drives sitting in climatized rooms in servers bolted into properly suspended 19 inch racks : DO NOT BELIEVE A SINGLE WORD about what happened. Users are big fat liars.My drive failed. i swear all of a sudden. Sure. in reality the cat was chasing the dog who tipped over the computer, that sat on the windows sil , fell to the ground. the kid, who was alone at home put the computer back, not wanting to be blamed for breaking the computer ( it was the dog's that broke it) or, for not watching the dog and letting him into the house in the first place.Then there is the abuse form the do-it-yourself crew. Drives that inproparly mounted, improparly cooled (sure those see through chassis with all the cutouts look great at gaming parties. but the airflow over the drive is crap ! a properly designed computer chassis has an air intake and an exhaust. cool air goes over the drives first, then over the cpu and out through the power supply. drives should be properly spaced, suspended and fed fresh air.oh, and if you are a smoker .. that crap gets EVERYWHERE. even the filters in the drive breathing hole can't stop that. same goes for cat wee or mouse wee. anything volatile enough that can be smelled but not 'seen' (you don't see a cloud of cat wee, but you can smell it) can go through the breather. some of that stuff is corrosive.In short : you can only pull meaningfull failure rate information from broken drive if you look at the same drives. manufacturers can do that. huge datacenters can do that (but the have gag-orders). what pc-world or the lone user in the street reports ? nonsense.if you want a good drive : go to newegg look for a drive with the capacity you want and then buy the one that comes with 5 year warranty. That is the one the manufacturer has designed for that lifespan.og, one more thing : if you have a desktop machine: turn off all that fancy crap like drive spindown after x minutes. Drives wear out harder if they go through reptitive spinup spindown cycles. the airbearings only work at speed. during spinup the motor is subject to wear ( during spinup the motor gets 3 to 4 ampere , once at speed it runs at half an ampere... get the idea ? ) Also the thermal cycling is bad for the drive.The fact of the matter is : a drive is made to run at 40 degree C case temperature , be spun up once in its lifetime and powered down at the end of its life.in all my life if have had only 1 drive fail: an IBM deathstar with the famous click of death. IBM admitted this was a manufacturing defect and actually recalled those drives. I probably have gone through hundreds of drives in my life. i got about 30 or 40 right now at home in active use. various brands and models. No problemo. but they all sit in a tray having their own fan keeping em cool and happy. they all are powered by a proper power supply (antec or delta) and not a woing-plooing-tchjong where the voltage swings wildly between 11 and 13 ...And my data is stored , quadruplicated , once across drives , once across devices.I use LG NAS boxes. Each NAS has two drives. THere is always two NAS boxes replicating each other.a drive failure is not a problem, a NAS failure is not a problem.and then i have an off-site storage as well. a third nas replicates the primaries and i rotate those drives once every few months. those go in a carrying box and get stored at a location away from my house. if the house burns down. i got my data. twice.having a backup is not enough. you need a backup of the backup. drives are cheap. and the critical stuff you produce isn't that big. family photo's , documents, tax filings , stuff like that.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 04:58:19 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 30, 2014, 04:27:24 pmOnly if the deals were sweet enough, so sometimes something slips through the cracks.

author: Lightages
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 05:30:22 pm
content: I must agree with free-electron. Hard drive reliability is not worse than it was before. I have had very few hard drives fail and because I keep them running almost all the time and mount them properly and with proper airflow in my cases.Now that I am on solar power only I have given up desktop computers and only run notebooks. I have had the most hard drive failures in 2 years than I have had in my whole previous computer life. This is not because I am using notebooks. It is because of the altitude where I am living. I live at 2500 meters/8000 feet. The flying heads and other air management considerations are way out of spec. Most drives are rated only to 2000 meters. I have found that in this case my best bet is to use drives in a vertical orientation, or even better just use solid state drives.Here is a picture of a piece of equipment I designed, assembled, programmed and commissioned in the early 90s for a very well known business machine company that was used to investigate materials for hard drive head technology. The main goal was to look at giant magneto-resistive materials and high temperature superconducting materials.It used DC and RF sputtering, co-laser ablation of up to 6 targets with different ratios while co-sputtering, 8 different gases while controlling pressure over a range of 1x10-2 torr down to 1x10-8 torr. The substrate being coated could be heated and cooled through a range of -50 to +900C while rotating at up to 30RPM or indexed to 6 different substrate positions for smaller sample. It use a 850mJ Eximer laser for the ablation and also had chlorine, oxygen, and other nasty gases for the process. This is where the start of the really small hard drives started and became possible. The process and control program (which I also wrote) allowed 50 steps and 40 different variables during each step. These were logged and automatically stored according to the batch for data correlation during testing and prototyping of the drive read heads which were made from the new materials.The system was a mix of TTL, RS232, RS422, RS485, GPIB, analog I/O, and other mixed voltage digital I/O to all the instruments and system control from the computer. The computer was state of the art for its day, a 486DX33 with 8 meg ram and a 240meg HD. The whole system took 1 year of development plus my 800 hours overtime developing and troubleshooting the program and control system for the whole thing.This is just a small, very small, example of what goes into making a hard drive. This was only for the materials selected for the read head!

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 05:45:30 pm
content: In my experience it all comes down to airflow to keep the drives cool. In most PC cases the drives are in a location where the airflow is minimal. In those circumstances you'll see a lot of drives fail within 2 years. In my systems I have air vents where the drives are mounted so they have airflow to keep them cool. I never had a drive fail from any brand (not even the Quantum Bigfoots). The only problems I've had are bad bearing from running >10 years 24/7.

author: Forced Perfect
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 05:51:17 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on May 30, 2014, 05:45:30 pmI agree. I've recently switched to a Fractal Design Define R4 case for my Hackintosh, and I have noticed my dual 4 TB drives (WD Se + WD Black) are pretty warm (43C at worst). I realized they're in the upper slots and not directly in line with the fans. I'll have to put my SSD and other cooler drives in those bays and move 'em down to the cooler bays.The R4 has a nice cooling system for drives - dual 120mm fans right at them, but the 8 3.5" bays are just too much to have a fan directly on each of them.

author: M. András
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 08:11:21 pm
content: WDC WD5000AAKS-65YGA0 (WD-WCAS83327655) this one run to this day 989 daysWDC WD6400AACS-00G8B1 (WD-WCAUF2746950) this one run to this day 720daysboth of the drives still have zero reallocated sectors and silent as it was new. i have a big chieftec high tower case BA-01 for hose who is intrested it has 8 hdd slots 3 fans at the end of the drive bay and from the side the main air intake of the case atleast 300m3 of air mooving around the drives each hour but its still not enough to cool them below 38degrees in summer. i have no aircon in the room yet.the first WD drive i bought from my own money 12 years ago was a 250GB one still works today in the collegues computer but god knows how long.edit:in my family we had more then 20 wd drives over the years most of them was passed over as 1 config got old and we upgraded it and sold to someone else. i think only 1 died after a power supply death along with everything connected to that powersupply.had 2 samsumgs die within 2 weeks first 1 got replaced with hundreds of bad sector within that period, the second one get the same problems that one landed on hard granite floor tiles first time ive seen a driveshaft bent in a drive, i have 2 seagate momentus drives in my laptop which for my surprise their upgrade tool did not recognize, both drive have a pretty big numbers of raw read errors while my wd drives has zero or its not reported by the smart or the wd drives has no ecc as both are pretty old

author: IanJ
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 30, 2014, 08:39:54 pm
content: Hi all,Since working with industrial PC's, home PC's & hard drives since the 80's i've only ever had one catastrophic failure of a drive........about 6 months ago which was a 1TB drive in one of my QNAP NAS's.Western Digital RE4.Hurrah for RAID is all I can say!Ian.

author: marshallh
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 02:59:29 am
content: Never had a failure since the days of the Quantam fireballs... Those dropped like flies!WD, Seagate, Hitach, all worked well for me

author: fluxcapacitor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 03:43:58 am
content: Three things in life are certain. Death,taxes and hard drive failure

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 04:27:38 am
content: Ho-hum. Over the years we have seen exactly this discussion with each of the other major hard drive brands. Apparently this is WD season.....

author: TVman
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 04:28:31 am
content: Just get a solid state Hard drive.

author: M. András
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 09:32:08 am
content: Quote from: TVman on May 31, 2014, 04:28:31 amyou can be sure that wont use the same drive for 12 years

author: jeremy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 10:08:26 am
content: Quote from: Lightages on May 30, 2014, 05:30:22 pmThis is amazing. But you left the name of the "big company" in the file name of the image

author: ampdoctor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 12:23:03 pm
content: I can fully agree that overall the quality of drives is much higher than it used to be, at least on the mechanical side of things. I suspect though that the problems come in on the side of the firmware, and this is a bit of a double edged sword. While it allows for increases in read and write rates, storage density, improvements in preventing data corruption etc, if some code is buggy or doesn't want to play nice with other chipsets I would think that it can really stuff up the pipes.In my particular case, there were no mechanical failures that I'm aware of. Each one was SMART related. Both first and second drive upon installation reported SMART capable and status BAD on first boot. At which point it wouldn't even recognize the presence of the drive. Third drive recognized it and after formatting the drive on reboot it reported the same error...Smart capable and status BAD. As sanity checks I tried them on other machines with the same result.Here's the 64k dollar question. Is there something going on with either my mobo or power supply that could be interfering with the proper operation of the drive or causing the failures? IDK. All my boards are Asus with updated bios and Antec power supplies. Getting 3 out of 3 bad drives makes me suspicious, but I don't have any issues with the existing drives so I'm pretty much at a loss for answers at this point other than the drives are sketchy from the mfg.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 01:56:26 pm
content: Quote from: ampdoctor on May 31, 2014, 12:23:03 pm#1 issue is the SATA cable. Use only cables with retention clips. If you got any strange problem try another cable first. A less common (and known) problem is the drive cache size. Older chipsets (= older SATA version) support only SATA disks with a maximum cache size of 32kB. A disk with 64kB cache might cause weird behaviour or won't be detected at all.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 02:26:19 pm
content: Quote from: TVman on May 31, 2014, 04:28:31 amPermit me this : Bwahahahaaaaaaahahaha. Rofl -snort-If it's solid state it ain't a 'drive'. A drive has motors...As for data retention.. Good luck.I work in the storage business. I won't touch those things with a long stick , unless it are SLC drives.Intel or sandisk made.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 02:35:06 pm
content: Just looked at my drive, ST3500418AS, and it has grown 8 reallocated sectors since the last scan test at 27394 hours. 29999 hours powered, and 150 stop start cycles. Temperature 33C, so it is doing well so far. I think the 8 sectors are from power cycling as the UPS shuts down in power failure.Busy making another backup, and will make a clone of it later onto a new drive.

author: Tinkerer
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 03:52:28 pm
content: I have personally had one external hard drive failure so far. Thing always did seem to run kinda hot so I figure must have been alot of wear on the motor, possible the platter drifted out of alignment. Plus that thing ended up liking to click. Replacement runs alot cooler.Solid state drives, great if you want speed, bad if you want long term storage. I have one in my computer for the OS to use etc. I put most of my stuff on the regular secondary hard drive though and have much(or at least what I could) of the active reading/writing temp files using the secondary regular drive as well. Should help my SSD last the time I need it to. Next time, think I will just go with an SSD boot drive.Will be nice to see if any future storage tech can bring us something that will reliably last 50+ years; although, not sure what you would need to store for 50 years, except maybe if you wanna keep your "life story" or something.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 05:42:30 pm
content: Yes, there's nothing wrong with solid state drives for speed. Put your operating system and programs which normally take a long time to start on the SSD and keep the mechanical drive for data storage.I don't think I could go back to using a mechanical drive for installing the OS and programs on - they're far too slow.

author: Marco
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 05:45:23 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 31, 2014, 02:26:19 pmHow does MTBF for two decent brand MLC in RAID1 compare to a single SLC?

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 05:53:38 pm
content: Quote from: marshallh on May 31, 2014, 02:59:29 amI hated Fireballs and worse Bigfoots.

author: GreyWoolfe
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 05:53:57 pm
content: Quote from: Psi on May 30, 2014, 09:35:48 amI remember the Quantum Bigfoot drives in old Compaq computers(1999-2004) almost big enough to use as a boogie board. Not much good for anything elseOF course, when they failed and Compaq sent a standard size HD with out an adapter kit, that was also fun

author: Forced Perfect
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 06:09:13 pm
content: Quote from: Hero999 on May 31, 2014, 05:42:30 pmI completely agree. In all my years of computer use, no single upgrade makes as much a difference in user experience than switching to an SSD in my opinion.I wouldn't say I trust them less than hard drives. I know they will wear out, but so will motors/actuators/barrings, but there have been a lot of firmware issues with them. Blue screens on Windows, etc. I haven't had any of those issues so I can't speak from personal experience.The thing I do know from experience is a SSD is way more likely to DIE, I mean really die. Like, totally disappears from the BIOS and isn't detected, dead. Hard drives -usually- show up well enough to at least attempt some recovery (not always of course).

author: dannyf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 06:25:28 pm
content: QuoteHow about those 5" mfm drives in the XT? 10MB/20MB was considered "huge" then.The ones in AT were pretty noisy but much faster. The bigger drives then sounded like machine guns.

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 07:19:58 pm
content: Full height 5.25" SCSI drives, now they were loud.I have a 10MB drive in an IBM PC, still worked last time I tried it. The bearings screech as it starts up, uses what looks like a NEMA 17 stepper motor to drive the heads. I think the drive is from NEC. Those were the days, you had to run debug to access the controller cards BIOS.

author: Lightages
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 07:25:17 pm
content: Quote from: jeremy on May 31, 2014, 10:08:26 amDOH!Oh well it really doesn't matter that much.Any NDA I had expired a long time ago.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 07:32:19 pm
content: Quote from: Towger on May 31, 2014, 07:19:58 pmI still have one, SCSI. Still started up last time I tried it, and still had whatever server data was on it. A whole gigabyte of drive................

author: justanothercanuck
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 08:06:36 pm
content: My experience with hard drives, like most electronics is that they will either fail in the first week, or go years before failing.I've been using a Fujitsu MPE3064AT (6.4gb) in my router for years, and only recently has it started throwing DMA and sector errors. I'm replacing the whole machine in a few days, so no sweat off my back.Quote88205 / 24 / 365 = 10 years of useThat said, I've had all kinds of hard drives over the past 15-20 years, and they all seem to be pretty equal in failure rates.

author: Tinkerer
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 08:27:24 pm
content: Quote from: Forced Perfect on May 31, 2014, 06:09:13 pmYea, usually when an SSD fails, it has failed for good and is completely not recoverable.

author: echen1024
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 08:28:48 pm
content: Quote from: Lightages on May 31, 2014, 07:25:17 pmPlus you said they made "business machines." Not hard to guess.

author: Forced Perfect
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 08:33:53 pm
content: Quote from: Tinkerer on May 31, 2014, 08:27:24 pmEven data recovery companies have a hard time with SSDs as far as I know. Due to the complex wear leveling employed to spread data across all the available flash cells, it can be next to impossible to stick back together if the index is damaged/lost. It's like having an intentionally fragmented hard drive.

author: hammy
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 10:23:00 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on May 30, 2014, 04:27:24 pmThese bloddy users! Better not sell drives to them! They don't live in a controlled enviroment where the influences are reduced to a minimum. How can they dare to buy drives and use them in such a enviroment called "real world"? Somethimes the also carry drives around, in things called "laptops". Or they live in a rural area with animals!Or, now comes the best: They don't care! Really! They don't care! They just want to buy something with a resonable livespan because they payed their hard earned money for it.And then the drive failes - used in this unperfect enviroment - and when they complain the are called liars.At the same time we discuss here how to build reliable ciruits in a proper way. But with these drives we have to stay back: Shut your mouth, put it in the bin, tell everybody how great this drive was and buy a new one (or better two)! The economic cycle is more important!Sorry, I know, it's an unperfect world, and this was stubborn sarcasm.Please don't take it personal, free_electron. I just don't share this world outlook. You have thousands of "good reasons" why it is the way it is. But I don't want to change my live to provide my drives the best enviromet they can have. They have to fullfill their function in my thing called "real world".Cheershammy

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2014, 10:54:31 pm
content: Quote from: Forced Perfect on May 31, 2014, 08:33:53 pmI suppose it makes sense a SSD will fail completely, rather than degrade slowly like a mechanical hard drive, more of a reason why to just use it for the operating system an programs which can all be easily reinstalled.I'd be interested to see if an SSD is more reliable than a mechanical drive in a laptop as it isn't so susceptible to vibration. Still the problem is in a laptop, there's normally only enough room for one hard drive so going SSD would be a bit of a risk, if you use said machine to store important data.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 05:36:02 am
content: QuoteRight. So you want to make an analogy.... Here is one :Go buy a brand new car like a volkswagen passat , drive it for a year, every day through the woods, brushes, puddles, rockbeds. Stick the dog in to sleep in the carevery night (throw in a few chickens too), use it to demolish the neighbourse fence, the disused shed in the back and for target practice with your shotgun. Drive it 'dukes of hazzard' style and land it in the backyard pond, drag it out with a backhoe.After one year take it back to the card dealer stating it is a bad car because the paint is 'chipped', the seats smell like wet dog, the suspension is shot and the engine has frogs and waterlilies in its cylinder heads...And somehow this is a bad car ?Ehhhhh..Have you actually read the users manual of a harddisk ?If you stick to the rules there it will work perfectly fine for a very long time ,barring any early deaths which are unavoidable.My drives all sit in normal, unmodified, computer cases, directly behind the front panel nicely in the air stream. In case there is more than one drive mounted closely together i stick a fan in front of em.Computers are on the floor or desk so they can't tip over or fall off. Running in normal ambient temperature of 20 degree c to 28 degree c.That is really all that is required. The computer cases are closed so no rodents nest in em and the cat can't wee on the machine guts.These things are considered 'office equipment'. Unless your office consists of a worn out tire suspended from a baobab tree and a flock of goats... You get the feeling right ?

author: TMM
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 07:04:48 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on May 30, 2014, 05:45:30 pmI remember seeing an article that Google produced regarding the lifespan of all their drives and lifespan was not linear with temperature. If i remember correctly there was a sweet spot around 40*C and above and below this lifespan degraded.Quote from: TVman on May 31, 2014, 04:28:31 amSSDs are not 100% reliable either. Some brands/models are probably just as bad as mechanical drives. They are getting better though.

author: hammy
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 12:17:47 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 01, 2014, 05:36:02 amI haven't bought a "naked" harddrive in the last five years. Only some WD USB 1.5TB drives. They had a small flyer in the box which told me to use them in a "dry and clean environment with some temperature between <somevalue> and <somevalue>".These disks, called "WD Elements", are in a case with only some small vent holes in the bottom side. I stacked them, so the lower ones heat up the disk above ...If I read your previous post I'm not allowed to do this, right?Ok, I got it. But I live in a rural area with animals and agricultural dust. My desk is covered with fine dust after a week and thats the way it is in our "real world" here.If the industry only can build faster and larger disks when they push the limits, and these limits degrade the usability in the real world, they just have to stop. Or they build two separate lines of disks: "rural edition" and "datacenter edition".Of course you don't buy a Passat when you need a Jeep. But this example overstretch what I mean: I go to the car dealer and say I live in a rural area and I need a car for this environment. And he sells me a SUV and not a proper off-road vehicle. Because of the missing self-locking differential and the missing reduction the SUV is wear out after a year. I got warranty, but then when I want the repair they tell me I lost the warranty because I'm using the car in the "wrong environment" and this is not covered.At the day I bought the car it was not clear to see for me this car is not adequate, because it looks like a robust car and the dealer sold it to me.And this is the same for the disks. They are sold to me only based on my statement about the size ("I want 1TB or more") and they asked me about my USB connector and operating system.Cheershammy

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 02:55:55 pm
content: There are no harddisks for 'rural' environments...Think about living in a world where there are no SUV's.Sorry.nobody makes those.Drives are specced for an office environment.

author: dannyf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 03:09:45 pm
content: QuoteYou want others to think for you and be responsible for your decision.At some point, you have to realize that the only person who cares the most about you is you.

author: Hypernova
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 03:37:36 pm
content: There's another issue with SSD's that I don't see mentioned in the thread: data retention. Being composed of floating gates the charges leak out over time. Last I heard the higher density MLC types due to the ever shrinking process size have a retention time in the <3000 hour range. Which means if you try to back up data to a MLC SSD and forget it in a drawer for a year, you may find it blank the next time you power it up. This is in stark contrast to MCU's that have their flash retention measured by the decades.

author: saturation
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 03:56:05 pm
content: ... yes and HD data retention can be very long.http://lockss.org/locksswiki/files/ISandT2008.pdfExperimentally to 30 years ....In field test to 40 years ....http://www.tnmoc.org/news/current-projects/icl-system-25-restoration-during-2012However, as expected many drives c1990s and before are prone to mechanical problems although the platter data is intact. Then there is the issue of the data protocol in the drive firmware becoming obsolete. With c2000+ up drives likely less an issue however given problems simply migrating the data to the newer drive overcome physical storage space concerns of big old drives, and preventing firmware or hardware failure of electronics.

author: Rigby
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 04:06:41 pm
content: Quote from: Hypernova on June 01, 2014, 03:37:36 pmI hadn't heard that, and I can't fathom why this would actually be an issue given that magnetic disk is still so inexpensive and readily available, but I can tell you that after a lot of initial trepidation about SSDs, upgrading to them was the single most significant performance improvement I've ever experienced on any computer I've ever upgraded. Five year old laptops feel much, much newer when they have SSDs in them, and new PCs feel obscenely fast when upgraded to SSD drive.Whenever SSD discussions come about, the weird limitations are always thrown around in what sounds like an "OMG SSDS ARE BAD, U GUYZ" gesture. I don't get that. Except in rare edge cases, hey don't fail after a year (not talking about the post I quoted, but a year of constant use), they don't wear out within the lifetime of a normal spinning drive, they don't significantly degrade in performance anymore, and they don't suck. SSDs are the opposite of suck.

author: Hypernova
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 04:17:55 pm
content: Quote from: Rigby on June 01, 2014, 04:06:41 pmI too use an SSD for my system drive, but you need to consider that as they get cheaper and bigger there will be a time when people start using them as backups (starting with retired SSD from upgrades). If you keep them powered so the controller can perform needed maintenance they will most likely out last HDDs by a very wide margin.

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 04:25:10 pm
content: There are all sorts of tricks going on inside SSDs (and HDDs for that matter). Data compression to boost the rated speed and capacity.I have two broadcast-quality high-definition video recorders (AJA KiPro and BlackmagicDesign HyperDeck Studio) and both of them (and all HD video recorders, for that matter) can use only certain brands and models (and even firmware versions) to handle the data rate and capacity.Remember that the data is stored as a charge across an extraordinarily tiny capacitor and is subject to many environmental factors, not the least of which are cosmic rays, etc. I DO NOT trust SSDs or "flash" or NV-RAM for long-term archival storage. It is fine for transient storage (as for the system/boot/cache drive in a computer, etc.)

author: hammy
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 06:58:24 pm
content: Quote from: dannyf on June 01, 2014, 03:09:45 pmThat is not the point I want to show. What I want to say is: I cannot be an expert in every field of knowledge. Nobody can make the decisions for me, so I need all necessary information to build my decision.Sometime I get the stuff ( like the "WD Elements" sold in an USB case from WD) in a case that has not enough ventilation holes. Reducing the lifespan of the drive, I suppose based on the posts of free_electron. And now I made the bad decision?And "office enviroment" (and the mentioned other points: good ventilation, clean air, no animals, running 24x7) is not the place the majority of Joe Average is using his drives. But the technology limits in these drives need this more and more. My old drives, SCSI and IDE, are still running fine. The drives between 5 and 10 years old are mostly not running any more. For sure they are a masterpiece of advanced technology. Disposable.Ok, I stressed it enough. I stop.Cheershammy

author: dannyf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 07:44:14 pm
content: QuoteSure. We all do.But that burden should be on you - you should seek information you need to make that decision.From the society's point of view: we have all different degrees of information needs. The right amount of information to you may may be too much for me, or too little for the next person. The more efficient allocation of responsibilities should be for each of us to find it out.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 01, 2014, 10:45:41 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 01, 2014, 02:55:55 pmNot quite right. Hard drives for notebooks are built to be thrown around. They can take a lot of G forces and some even have systems which park the heads if the drive detects it's about to receive a big hit.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 04:39:41 am
content: I'm talking nonremovable tesktop drives.Drives sold in usb enclosures are a different matter. Same for laptop drives.Another hint : never-ever build your own drive in a usb box unless you know for certain the drive you will install has shock and rotational sensors !Laptop drives do. Desktop drive generally don't unless they are built for nas applications !Drives designed for usage as removable storage have three sensors on the pcb. These look like surface mounted crystals. They sot in 3 corners of the board. The diagonally opposite ones are the rotational sensors. The third one is the knock sensor.Laptop drives can have a g sensor as well. I am not aware of any desktop drives having g sensors.The g sensors signals the drive : you are accelerating vertically toward, most likely earth, : retract and lock heads in the garage.The knock sensor detects an impact vertically on the drive. It signals the writer to cut off immediately.If the drive was writing data the write amplifier is disabled by a hardware block. Software will then later attempt to recover and retry the corrupt sector.The rotational position sensors do the same but for the horizontal plane knoacks (vertical would be tapping on the top or bottom: The two largest sides ( a drive has 6 sides. Two short narrow ones, two long narrow ones and two big reachtangilar ones.))A force sideways may cause the headstack to move ! A force vertically causes a head strike. No problem. A modern drive has a headstrike every few seconds.A moving headstack is a disaster, especially when writing ! Data ends up in adjacent tracks and could corrupt the servo information.The voicecoil motor is not really 'held' in position. It is not a strong mechanical positioning. Sure the system will compensate for small shifts, but it can only detect that at the end of the sector write when it sees a decreased servo signal amplitude or a wrong sector block identifier. At that point it would be too late.The rotational sensors immediately terminate any write operation. Drive frimware will then retry.Comtrary to what most people believe, or know : writing is 'blind'The head is in read mode and the servo systems first look for max signal amplitude. That means good positioning on the track itself. Then the sector wedge flies by. This is a chunk of data, encoded and written during manufacturing that does two things : it contains a pilot. Like a sinewave. This is compared by a pll to adjust drive speed. Then follows a datablock telling us what track, sector we are on, and how long the sector is. Then the preamp switches from reading to writing and pumps data for the correct amount of time. At the end of the data there is a gap and then follows the next servo block. We never write these servo block, only in the gaps inbetween. The drive times it right not to write too long. Write too long ans you corrupt the servo block. Bad sector ... Move sideways, off track and you corrupt adjacent data and servo wedges.. More bad blocks.Errors in servo wedges are irrecoverable. So laterally thumping the drive during a write may knock the head off track with catastrophical results. That is why we have these sensors. They are placed at diagonally opposite corners so we have good sensitivty to detect such movement.

author: HighVoltage
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 06:27:04 am
content: I learned the hard way over the years:There are two type of hard drives: Those that fail and those that eventually fail.Although, I must say, all my WD drives have been lasting very very long.

author: dannyf
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 10:25:17 am
content: QuoteWow, tomorrow's technology today.

author: ciccio
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 10:46:05 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 02, 2014, 04:39:41 amThis confuses me a lot:I opened many failed external USB boxes, from Samsung, WD, LaCie, Seagate and others, all with 3.5 inches drives, and almost every time they were standard desktop drives.The failed units with 2.5 inches drives (from WD) were special units with the USB interface built on the drive's PCB. This made very difficult to try a data recovery.I prefer to build my own units, because I've discovered that about half of the failures were in the USB interface or in the power supply, and using standard units will ease the repair.During the last 3 years I supplied my cousin, who is a professional marriage photographer, with about 46 pieces of 2TB or 3TB external drives (lots of storage, but they keep 2 copies of everything, in different locations, they shoot almost 1000 images per marriage in RAW format, and by contract they must keep the original files for two full years).Never had a problem..They were built with standard desktop drives and commercial USB 3 boxesWhat you write about using dedicate or special drives make me doubt...What drives should I buy? WD RED series is easily available. Are they suitable?Best regards

author: rollatorwieltje
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 11:46:54 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on June 01, 2014, 10:45:41 pmI have yet to find one that will last more than 2 years. Although I've never lost any data, not a single harddrive in any of my laptops or portable harddrives lasted for more than 2 years. They just start to fail by becoming insanely slow or freezing the machine randomly, start making nasty clicking noises etc. Doesn't matter what brand, I've probably had them all.I don't abuse my laptops at all, I still use my 10 year old Dell D8600 every day (it was a bit of a pain to find a new harddisk for that, it has a PATA drive). For my newer 2011 MBP I just ordered a new harddisk as the current one is starting to fail by making nasty clicking noises.I don't really mind it, drives are cheap and every new drive was noticeably faster and bigger than the one it replaced.So far the only drives that have lasted a long time are WD RE3 500GB drives in my desktop (in raid 0), I think those were bought in 2009. They probably don't really have that much operating hours on them though.

author: justanothercanuck
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 12:25:20 pm
content: Quote from: ciccio on June 02, 2014, 10:46:05 amWD red are best suited for RAID applications.The old scheme was blue = desktop, green = low power, black = performance/raid... They changed that a year or two ago and split up the old black into what it is now.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 12:41:00 pm
content: Quote from: rollatorwieltje on June 02, 2014, 11:46:54 amI have a feeling you're doing something veryverywrong if all your drives die so soon; probably subjecting them to excessive vibration. Check the SMART info, it's not helpful in all cases but in this one the problem is likely to show up there. For a laptop, using an SSD really makes sense since they are shock-resistant. All the other parts of a laptop are nowhere near as sensitive to shock as the hard drive.

author: Fsck
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 12:43:21 pm
content: personally, my longest running live drive is just short of 34000 hours.if I dig out some older drives to check their smart data, I'd probably get some with longer run times.WD Red is their "NAS solution". probably a move to save from the WD Green TLER debacle.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 03:18:57 pm
content: Quote from: dannyf on June 02, 2014, 10:25:17 amThat is what the g sensor detects. It detects the drive is falling , so in the impending near future a big hit is to be expected.

author: Forced Perfect
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 03:19:42 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on June 01, 2014, 10:45:41 pmWestern Digital still makes new PATA drives.You can grab Blue series PATA drives.

author: Fsck
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 04:05:23 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 02, 2014, 03:18:57 pmproblem is, HD manufacturers have restricted vibe sensors to their business/enterprise/expensive drives. it's a pretty huge cost difference.currently, just short of double for a 4TB drive. 300$ vs 160$, or thereabout.

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 06:25:06 pm
content: From memory, the original WD Reds were the same as blacks with different firmware. The difference is the number of times/length of time they will retry reading a bad sector before returning 'General Failure Reading Drive x' is far shorter than a standard drive.The idea is that on a server with RAID5+ drives, system uptime is more important than being able to read data from a dieing disk. What happens with a RAID5 of standard disks is the system 'hangs' while a drive retries, until it eventually fails and the controller drops the drive from the array. The Red drives will 'fail' much faster, allowing the RAID controller to drop the drive and the server to continue running without interruption.

author: Forced Perfect
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2014, 06:30:39 pm
content: Quote from: Towger on June 02, 2014, 06:25:06 pmReds are closer to Greens, than Blacks, I believe. They are both low power (5400-ish RPM), low noise. The difference between a Red and a Green is the firmware and some mechanical stuff*. The firmware on the Red is tested for RAIDs and they "approve you using it", meaning they won't tell you to screw off if you call in a warranty claim for using the drive in RAID-5. They have a larger MTBF and won't die when run 24/7 (they don't warranty the Greens for constant use - how messed up is that?)*The Red series drives' spindle is mounted at both the top and the bottom like an enterprise drive (and like much older drives all had). Making it more stable and reliable. I suspect this is the main reason they have the higher MTBF.