crazijoe

A very interesting article in ZDNEt.

Just remember that the this is opinionated and does not reflect the recommendation of the TSF staff. Each staff member has their own opinions and favorites.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=159&tag=nl.e040

However I am quite intrigued where Hitachi stands on this list.

TheMatt

Nice. I'd like to see a laptop 2.5" drive version of this list.

linderman

Thanks for sharing C-Joe


great find! I have to agree with you, its time to start "looking" to buy some Hitachi drives


I have had great luck with the fujitisu drives in the last year also >>>> not a clunker yet

Kalim

Kalim wanted me to post this (Italy time) yesterday but I became busier than expected: Hard drive failure?
I don't expect him to be posting online anymore as far as I was told, depending on if he gets back.

Regards
Celina, a work colleague.

crazijoe

I am always supporting seagate because of it's warranty. Seagate carries a 5 year warranty where as last I heard WD only gives you a year warranty with the option to purchase an extended warranty via their website.

I know that warranty doesn't really mean crap. You can by a set of Sears Craftsman tools with an unconditional lifetime warranty or you can by some cheap "Ho-Chi-Mon" tools from Harbor Frieght with the same warranty. I guarranty that you will be visiting Harbor Frieght alot more often. So warranty basically don't mean ****. (I actually use SnapOn, MAC, and Matco tools in my garage and use Craftsman and my cheap junkyard tools. Unlike some people, I do see the quality in professional tools and when you do as much as I do, Craftsman doesn't cut it.)

I usually base my opinions with experience. I have had a lot of luck with the Seagate drives and had nil with Maxtor. With WD, I sacrificed quality for the performance.

linderman

Thanks Kalim & Celina for sharing your time >>>>>

betyouaint

Until recently I had almost exclusively used Maxtor drives and in the last 15 years I've only had one failure. The failure occured around 3-4 years ago and the drive that failed seemed to have a common fault judging by the ratings on the retailer website. The drive was less than 6 months old and out of paranoia I sold the warranty replacement on ebay and purchased a Seagate drive instead.

The first drive I ever had fail on me was a WD Caviar and I've never bought another since. Since my Maxtor failure I have never bought from them again either. The Fujitsu drive in my new laptop lasted around 3 months. Seagate are yet to let me down but no doubt when they do I will either accept that all hard drives are destined to fail or seek out another manufacturer.

Another thing to consider is that failure after 5 years of heavy use is in some way more acceptable than failure within 12 months despite the fact that it may be just a devastating to you and your PC. Does this make us less likely to slag off a vendor..?

linderman

before Maxtor got bought by seagate they were horrible drives, the failure rate was very high, they dominated the trouble in the hard drive sections without equal.


WD are decent drives, although I have had bad WD drives that were replaced by another flopper !! that ticks me off

WD's new warranty policy bugs me >>>> why should I "pay" for more than one year warranty when seagate gives you 5 years without extra cost ??

I think right now, all drives are about the same


but you have to remember, drives now days are VERY big and cheap >>>> have we all forgot the days when a 750 mb drive was $200.00 !

you can combat drive failure rate by using multiple drives and cloning or imaging software >>>>> when I have an OS drive act up or crash, I could care less >>>>> boot to one of three clones and right back in business

pull the bad drive out and plop in another $75.00 or less hard drive !

kodi

That can't be done with Vista as far as I know, I have tried and could not get it to work

linderman

Kodi >>>>> Bigfella posted he had no trouble cloing vista and getting a re- activation key from MS ?????

ebackhus

I use WD exclusively after going through a massive Seagate and Maxtor failure streak. I've lost just ONE Western Digital drive and that was because it was older than sin (well, it was a 10GB so maybe not older than sin, but close).

TheMatt

I have a 10 GB Seagate drive in a P2 I have in the Basement (Win 98/Debian, probably going to be Red Hat soon) that is still kicking after 10 years.

crazijoe

I am a firm believer in RAID 5.
Also Virtual Server is your friend.

Zazula

I've been disappointed by Maxtors, and I now have plenty of WDs and Seagates. The warranties are three (for the bulk WDs - not one as mentioned) and five years respectively. I buy more Seagates lately, because they seem slightly more robust and I want to enjoy the extra two years of warranty for virtually the same price. But no big complains for either of them. In dual-HDD builds I install one drive from either manufacturer.

Now, on the 2.5" front: As you probably know, I'm an avid Fujitsu-Siemens laptop user. Their consumer line uses (funnily enough) Toshiba drives and not Fujitsu ones (well, at least the ones I have). My 2.5" HDDs probably represent the longest running test approach (while on the contrary my desktop HDDs sustain the most intense ones), because when their host laptop gets binned, they get placed in an external case and continue being used.

Results? A nine-year old 30GB Toshiba 2.5" drive still kicks like hell. My only failure so far was a six-year old 60GB Toshiba 2.5" drive, which died pathetically two days ago. It hadn't been used intensively at all. I got it replaced by a WD 2.5" 120GB, and I noticed that, contrary to common practice for 2.5" drives, WD gave me a three-year warranty, à la desktop.

crazijoe

For bulk drives yes. However any Joe that would walk into their local Best buy and buy a retail packaged Drive will only get a 1 year warranty. They probably never know this and not even think about the optional extended warranty plan.

As per WD website.
http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp
http://websupport.wdc.com/store/extw...ex.asp?lang=en

Granted you folks in Europe will get a 2 yr warranty on retail drives with the option to purchase another year warranty, however this seems more like a scam to squeeze more money out of their already inflated retail price.

Zazula

I fully agree with you, crazijoe; that WD's warranty absurdity is a form of scam. I talked bulk because you asked for the staffers' opinion, and we're mostly builders (or buyers of bulk) ourselves. Moreover, at least in Greece, e-shops list far more HDDs in bulk form rather than retail.

WD4000YR 400GB SATA RAID : 5-yr warranty
WD4000YS 400GB SATA2 : 5-yr warranty
WD3200SB 320GB ATA RAID : 5-yr warranty
WD4000KD 400GB SATA 16MB : 3-yr warranty

Kalim

Since I'm back now and did have an opinion when I first read it on the 16th, I might as well state bits.

My own personal experience and those of trustworthy colleagues is as follows:

No drive failure indicator, standardized, means squat to us daily users, not even the SMART status monitory facility.

Prime concern number one for failure is prolonged drive operating temperature at or above 38C, environmental temperature fluctuation extremes, benchmarking, power on cycling, number of hours remaining in continuous use, PCI/AGP frequency changing, physical knocks and bumps to the drive itself. All these and some more stressor factors will effect the actual drive experienced "lifetime" and failure rates pretty drastically. Hence, the broad brush is not really applicable.

Increased RPM is another factor which I've seen contribute to OEM and enterprise desktop/workstation drive failure rates. Many 4200-5400RPM drives did not fail or develop half as many bad sectors with an equal usage, environmental condition and time frame as the same manufacturer produced drives which featured no difference but 7200RPM spindle speeds.

Maxtor drives made before the DiamondMax 21 and after late 2002 (that I know) cannot endure consistent ≥37C temperatures for long. They will fail very quickly, develop an abundance of physical bad sectors and physical performance will deteriorate at an increased rate (from a new OS install) to beyond acceptable. You can forget about the "bath tub" MTBF graph rate with these conditions, though it means little value to us anyway.

Maxtor or Quantum HDDs manufactured during or before late 2002 I have honestly seen and experienced still running 18-20/7 perfectly strong for 5+ years. The only other 3.5–inch drives I've experienced with similar quality are Seagate and Fujitsu HDDs, pretty much regardless of the lineup.
For laptops, there are a few ruggedly drives and one of those is used by Matsushita (Panasonic) in their Toughbook laptops. Excellent drives by my experience and observation, most navy, air force, health care, government and state security personnel around the world have or still do use them.

Maxtor Atlas HDDs seem better than the previous lineups. I've no qualms about them, yet. Hitachi Deskstar for me are just as good if not better, and this is without considering statistical performance numbers.

Western Digital Caviars are good solid reliable drives in general. Raptors however, will form the bulk of drive failures within WD; RMAs and DOAs for major OEM suppliers. They are also renown for high failure rates for system builders & integrators.

Seagate Cheetahs are server class HDDs which have rightly so, performed for long in extremities with consistent quality and in optimal condition. I'm always impressed by them.

Manufacturer customer service has never bothered me or deteriorated to a point enough to be a concern in the HDD department.

The only HDD failures I've personally experienced from 06-2006 to 06-2007 are 3 Maxtor DiamondMax (?) drives and 2 Western Digital Raptors.

Large scale Imaging and especially >100MB Videoing seem to be the only isolated "usage types" that I've seen can degrade the drive quicker than expected. Even to the extent of 3x a faster rate.