Reliable Hard Drives

<p>An interesting article about who makes reliable hard drives (and who does not):</p>

<p>http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives</p>

<p>These are figures from <strong>one</strong> commercial user and thus are indicative but not certain. </p>

<p>Thanks Brooks. Interesting as I have two Seagate and one WD. I will look at Hitachi for a replacement. </p>

<p>Thanks, Brooks. This is interesting, and tends to validate my own decision to go with WD drives several years ago after some problems with Seagates. Even though this is the result of only one user's study, it appears to have been done diligently, and the wide gap in failure rates is pretty significant. The last graph showing survival rates is interesting because, even though Hitachi is marginally better than WD over the 3-year period, WD seems to remain steady while Hitachi declines, narrowing the gap between the two. Seagate, of course, rolls down a steep hill...</p>

<p>Working in this industry for quite a while, and having seen figures on vast amounts of hardware defects (well over the 28k referenced in the article), I can assure you that the failure rates per brand tend to fluctuate. It's very hard to draw a hard conclusion on the most reliable brand based on a single point in time. A second doubt about the article you link to: apart from a fairly small installed base, the breakdown only per size isn't ideal either. For example, there can be firmware update differences. There are enough examples in history of very specific drive models failing in excessive quantities, while the rest of the range was fine. All in all, nice article, nowhere near accurate enough data to draw serious conclusions. Large OEMs will generate the same amount of data in about 3 weeks. But they will never release these figures to the public, so that's why tech sites look at these ways to generate similar data.</p>

<p>WD and Seagate have solid reputations, and are by far the largest two - for a reason.</p>

<p>SSD reliability is important too, and not so great for Samsung:<br>

<a href="http://techreport.com/review/25681/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-testing-data-retention-at-300tb">http://techreport.com/review/25681/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-testing-data-retention-at-300tb</a></p>

<p>But how do we know who makes a drive? I bought a Samsung external drive from Amazon a couple of months back. When I opened the box all the documentation was Seagate. It failed first time I used it, and whilst Amazon replaced it instantly, it doesn't endear Samsung or Seagate to me.</p>

<p>I would tend to agree with Wouter - it's difficult to extrapolate from relevant data contained in the article to our personal choices without an exhaustive failure mode analysis matrix. </p>

<p>There are also differences between consumer and industrial usage patters such as power-on cycles, power-on hours, vibration, temperature/humidity, fragmentation, disk speed, environment cleanliness, etc.. </p>

<p>Although I must say my personal experience with a few dozen drives over the years mirrors the article's conclusion - really bad luck with Seagate, particularly Barracuda drives, moderate but still unacceptable luck with WD, and never a single Hitachi (TravelStar laptop drive) failure. :-) </p>

<blockquote>

<p>But how do we know who makes a drive?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>If it carries a large storage manufacturer's name (WD, Seagate, Hitachi/HGST), they made it.<br>

<br>

Among the large external enclosure manufacturers, it's also pretty easy to know who supplied the drive: G-Technology has always used Hitachi drives, both before Hitachi bought them and after. LaCie used to be whatever was cheapest, but they're now owned by Seagate and use Seagate drives exclusively. NAS vendors generally tell you exactly what you're getting.</p>

<p>A 2008 WD 320GB 3.5 inch USB hard drive died in summer 2010 and took my first two years of photography away with it.<br /> Amazing! 80+GB! From #1 shutter count to #17643! 2/3 of all the pictures I have ever taken!<br /> Since then I only trust RAID1.</p>

<p>RAID 1 is a good idea, and another one is to keep your backup drives off line and powered down except when actually backing up.</p>

<p>Dehuan Xin</p>

<p>It must have been terrible to lose all those pictures. But I'm not sure the best solution is to put all your trust in one system. Even with Raid1 I'd have an external drive , ideally kept off site unless you're not updating it. I don't have RAID1 and I have two backup drives, one here and one at my daughter's house in case of fire, flood, theft and the outside possibility that both my internal and external drives here fail</p>

<p>To kick in a few more anecdotes, in nearly 30 years of using various computers with a few dozen hard drives, including PCs and Macs, Western Digital drives have seemed more reliable than Seagate. I also had some Maxtor and Hitachi HDs in older Macs, but don't recall any particular problems with them, although there were too few to be significant. The two or three 20GB-60GB Western Digital hard drives that eventually failed were many years old and used in PCs that were on nearly 24/7, and survived many brownouts, blackouts, power spikes and nearby lightning strikes in my former rural home on a glitchy electrical co-op. And they gave plenty of notice before failing, with the telltale clicking, burrrring and odd noises.</p>

<p>So far the only digital photos I've lost to a hard drive crash, in 2010, were due to my own negligence in backups. At the time I was still backing up to CD and DVD and was certain - wrong, unfortunately - that I'd backed up my earliest digicam live theater and rehearsal pix from a favorite local theater. I had already backed up those photos to a second WD hard drive, which I later wiped without realizing it contained my only complete copy of those photos. It was only part of one year's worth of theater photos, but sure enough one of the company's actresses asked me for copies, a decade after I'd photographed a show she was in. Most of my photos from that time were on b&w film and I still have the negatives and many prints.</p>

<p>I'm a little more conscientious about backups now, but my method still isn't where it should be. I need to get another backup external drive and store it away from home.</p>

<p>Hi, David<br>

Yeah, always prepare for the worst. Sometimes I'm just too optimistic until something so bad happens that I have no way to recover the lost. I'm thinking about giving my parents a hard drive containing all my pictures, just to let them know what I've been doing these years and also to let them keep an extra copy for me.</p>

 

<p>I second the notion to keep a copy 'offline' - if by chance you'd ever get caught by something as vile as the cryptolocker trojan, your only hope is to have a copy of your data on a drive that's not currently connected to the PC.</p>

<p>Photo.net just sent out a newsletter about a sale on WD MyBook external drives of various capacities.</p>

<p>Maybe it's all simply a crapshoot. I bought a couple of those MyBook drives a few years ago from Costco and both controllers died within a year but the drives were unaffected; took them out of the external enclosure and stuck it in a cheap substitute and it worked fine.</p>

<p>I'm surprised that slow (4200 and 5400 RPM) drives are still being made and sold. I suppose it's cheaper for OEM users and saves a bit of power, and they have been more reliable in my limited experience, but who can live with that kind of slow speed these days except for storage-only purposes! <br>

</p>

 

<p>For reliability I suggest you select 'enterprise' models of the drives in the size you need. You can get this info at the manufacturer's websites.</p>

<p>I've been using a WD Passport Ultra 1TB USB drive for backups since October. My backups are still haphazard for photos - I'm just using the built in SmartWare, with only my photos and documents designated to be backed up to the external drive. It's a slowpoke 5500rpm HD, but the auto backup is simple to schedule as desired and reliable. However it probably won't retain my Lightroom catalog and edits in any sort of expected order so I need to tend to that as well.</p>

<p>A little history is in order.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a merger of the hard disk drive businesses of <a title="History of IBM magnetic disk drives" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#.22Star.22_Series_of_HDDs">IBM</a> and Hitachi.<sup id="cite_ref-2"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup> Hitachi paid IBM US$2.05 billion for its HDD business.<sup id="cite_ref-3"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup><br /> <br />On March 8, 2012, Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of WD common stock valued at approximately $0.9 billion.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST</p>

<p>Those who care about the health of their HDD should run S.M.A.R.T. periodically, just like visiting their pcp for an annual physical.<br /> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>An early hard disk monitoring technology was introduced by <a title="IBM" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM">IBM</a> in 1992 in its <a title="IBM 9337 (page does not exist)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=IBM_9337&action=edit&redlink=1">IBM 9337</a> Disk Arrays for <a title="AS/400" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS/400">AS/400</a> servers using IBM 0662 SCSI-2 disk drives.<sup id="cite_ref-5"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#cite_note-5">[5]</a></sup> Later it was named <a title="Predictive Failure Analysis" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_Failure_Analysis">Predictive Failure Analysis</a> (PFA) technology.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Many moons ago I was in a position to have some visibility into IBM and other HDD vendors' technology and manufacturing. Big Blue blew everyone else out of the water with their design, process and quality control. But they ended up having to sell the business.</p>

<p>All my desktops have TWO internal drives. For expedience, both the same size, though the secondary drives tends to have more freespace, not having the system and program files.</p>

<p>I use Windows RoboCopy to efficiently mirror what folders I care about.</p>

<p>I'd have to check, not even sure what brands I have, LOL. One thing I know, the odds of both drives failing, without warning, at the same time, is pretty slim. Maybe could happen from some sort of power spike.</p>

<p>Or theft or fire.</p>

<p>As the article points out at the end, drive manufacturers are constantly buying each other's product lines, so any data, even if it were relevant, which the article makes clear it is probably not, wouldn't apply to anything you could buy today.</p>

<p>Best to view data on a drive as being in a long-term, volatile, cache. Considering the whole storage system--including the backup and restore subsystems--it's possible to store data very reliably. What an individual drive is doing matters not that much.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>A little history is in order.<br>

On March 8, 2012, Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of WD common stock valued at approximately $0.9 billion.</p>

</blockquote>

<p> <br>

WD sold the business to Toshiba. More than a little history would give the full story.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>WD sold the business to Toshiba. More than a little history would give the full story.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>HGST web site still bills the company as "a Western Digital Company"<br>

http://www.hgst.com/</p>

<p>WD did sell some assets to Toshiba as a condition of being allowed to purchase HGST</p>

<p>http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=F8697DA0-111A-49E8-A484-5266D18526AB</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Looking through the boxes of decommissioned and dead drives I carted out of a server room for wiping/destruction last fall, the failed WDs and Seagates were equally represented along some Hitachi and IBM. I don't see a pattern other than most were the consumer models - the hardware that comes with a 1-year warranty.<br>

There have been times when I had a steady flow of a specific model/brand going back for warranty replacement, only to have the next generation of the same model last until the device was decommissioned (usually 5 years). QC got fixed, I guess.<br>

The WD 10K rpm drives have never lasted more than a year in a server RAID, but the 7200 rpm WD Black series drives have been running for years.<br>

The pain of recovery from backup (or not) have led me to spend the extra $$$ for Enterprise-rated drives - typically carrying a 5 year warranty, and using a quality RAID card for RAID-6 or RAID-10. Some of the RAID drives (Seagate and WD) were up 7/24 for five years.<br>

If you buy the low cost models, expect a lower expected lifetime, and remember that the 1,000,000 MTBF drive you just bought will be the one that fails in the first hour.</p>

 

<p>I keep multiple backups of all of my revenue generating images at my business and home plus print files on my Zenfolio website. I agree with William Kahn, don't keep the HD spinning uselessly if you aren't using it. Heat is an enemy of hard drives.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>WD did sell some assets to Toshiba as a condition of being allowed to purchase HGST</p>

</blockquote>

 

 

WD sold off the 3.5" business it acquired from Hitachi. It only kept the SSD and 2.5" businesses, along with the high end commercial drives. HGST/WD is selling a mix of drives but not the 3.5" drives referenced in the article in the OP. Note that HGST is not Hitachi, it's a brand for WD at this point.