Check in broken HDDs

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I am owner of (still running) WD Caviar 30Gb HDD. But I am interested in buying additional HDD. I have heard stories about repaired HDD that are reselling, so buying a "new" HDD is like a lottery to me. It seams that HDD can last for a year or 10 years, it depends more on the luck. So if you would share some of your experiences with HDDs. Statistics could shed some light on that matter.

Since my last bad experience was with Quantum Fireball, I would need some fresh experiences.

Thank you!

[ December 02, 2002, 22:45: Message edited by: ToTaL ]

 

I sort of came to a conclusion that harddisk that were not used (stocked) have a lower life than those that are still being used. I'm the I.T. guy in the company I'm working for. We originally have 16 units 4-year old P2-400MHZ at the start of 2002. They all have Seagate HD. By March, I have retired 6 of them in favor of new P4's. Of the 6 retired PC, I discovered just last month (after 8 months in stocked in a clean dry area) that 4 of them had become defective and I could not even reformat (high and low level format) them. The rest of the original 16 HD are still working fine. I also have a secondary Seagate HD that I've been using for almost 8 years now, and it had already been installed in about 4 different machines. Wierd... but it happened. I ended up opening the defective HD and now have a small collection of "metallic discs". For HD, I generally trust Seagate and Maxtor.

 

All the major manufacturers will offer 3 years warranty on IDE drives. That will unfortunately be return to base, so could take a while to get repaired though. Personally I'd stay clear of Maxtor and Western Dig, but that's a personal thing. Also wouldn't go for a current Fujitsu IDE as there are rumours of a generic problem in the current drives.

Seagate I would suggest is the way to go at the moment. Maxtor is probably the cheapest, but there shouldn't be a lot in it.

 

I had my one break after 7 months of 10h/day using. My older 300mb drive did not break after 7 years. Old ones are better

 

Three years garanty with my HDD, got it for two years, betcha it will crash the day after the garantuee expires, but still 20Gb is getting small and I´m gonna buy a 120Gb

 

Yes that is what is bothering me, my experiences showed me that most of computer parts either work for years or they broke soon after i bought them and after reduced warranty for HDD...
Why? Are they directly admitting that they had a lot of defective HDDs returned?

 

Quantum fireball? Same here...after two years of hard use it started to have "hiccups", then refused to start at all. Heh, now I have a Seage Barraquda and it has worked a lot better.

 

I've got a Seagate HDD, bought it in July this year, and in October, boom . Right now it's running, but barely. I just need that cash spare to replace it with a better one so I have a working rig while that peice of junk gets fixed if thats what I can manage to get done from Seagate with this warranty thing you've mentioned.

 

Tal,

The 3 year warranty is on distribution drives only. OEM might well only be 12 months everywhere.

In other words you'd get better warranty if you didn't buy a big brand name PC, because local PC builders will get their drives through distribution rather than direct from the manufacturer.

 

Head over to www.storagereview.com, and get some HDtach numbers.

The IBM 120gxp's are fast, and they are fairly cheep nowadays for the 60gig version. Like $70. But DO NOT try to use them for a server. If they are in constant use (not the motor spinning, mind you, I'm talking about the read and write heads), it will fail.

So, unless you're serving and your drive "light" is on constantly, they aren't a bad drive.

The newer WD drives beat them on sheer speed, though. Throughput and seek times. But you don't get quite as much space.

I had a 45gig 75gxp die out on me, and IBM replaced it with a 60gig 120gxp. About a year ago. It was a good swap.

 

As a general rule of thumb you should avoid Maxtors (that includes Quantums) at all costs unless you want to gamble that it's inevitible failure will occur within its warranty, in which case they'll replace it for free with a better one, as I was un/fortunate to find out.

I was lucky, most are not.

 

Hmmm, why couldn't i heard of this seagate problem with hdd's back in early July?
Ah well, a new hdd it is.

 

I recommend Western Digital or Quantum. I STRONGLY recommend you steer clear of IBM drives. I've had two fail on me in a 12 month period, both of them relatively young drives (certainly nowhere near 3 years of age). The parts supplier I sometimes use when building machines now refuses to stock IBM drives because they do not want to have to deal with all the RMAs. They've told me they WILL get me an IBM drive, but they won't give me any warranty, and I can deal with any hassles with IBM directly.

I've personally used WD, Quantum, and Maxtor. One of the Quantum drives I've used is still going strong after about 5 years and 3 to 4 upgrades (obviously just a secondary drive by this stage). The maxtor I had was a very long time ago, and it did eventually fail... but at an acceptable time (that is, after about 3 to 3 1/2 years, and in very hot, humid weather without any extra cooling). It didn't fail spectacularly, either... it just started getting more and more bad sectors. Not like my two IBM drives, which each managed to spontaneously develop this AFWUL clicking, grinding noise that really helps you visualise just how bad a state your data is in, and how much fun it's going to be to try to recover it.

 

I own a Quantum Fireball and a Seagate something. While the 4GB Quantum is approx 3 or 4 years old now it still does sterling service as my back up-drive. My newer, approx 3 years old, 20GB 7.200rpm Seagate is running almost 24/7 since last december (more precise: the day I got my flatrate), carrying the burden of saving constantly. No problems for me.

So I can recommend to have both, a Quantum or a Seagate, from my own good experience.

[ December 16, 2002, 08:42: Message edited by: Ragusa ]