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I too chose two Toshiba 2Tb drives to run in Raid 1 configuration. They replaced three Hitachi 320Gb drives running in Raid 5 configuration for last 6 years with no bad sectors on any of the drives (tested them before retiring). My understanding is that Toshiba took over the Hitachi hard drive business. And to add to others statements regarding drive brands, I think it's true that they are all about the same. Seagate gets a bad reputation but the fact is they do sell more drives than others and as a computer tech I've used all brands and seen them all fail on average about equally. |
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It's true that the more platters in a drive the hotter and more noisy it runs but as platter densities have increased platter numbers have decreased. With 1Tb per platter these days, you can buy a 1Tb drive and it'll only have one platter. Also with the higher densities comes better performance so larger drives are faster than smaller capacity drives. The trick is to find the current "sweet spot" which right now seems to be around 2Tb capacity (best bang for the buck for both capacity and performance). But with 4Tb drives showing up on the shelves it'll change again in a year or two. |
As far as I can tell, all Hard Drive manufacturers have 'bad batches'; I don't know why this should be the case, but it seems that it is. This makes interpreting any 'anecdotal data' almost impossible, but everyone has the impression that some manufacturer or another produces rubbish, and it is 'kind of' true; at some time, most manufacturers have produced rubbish, and there is someone out there who will tell you about it, and tell you that the ones that failed for them, are ones that you should under no circumstances buy.
Overall, that'll be everything. That said, I haven't had an issue (...yet? I'm touching wood now, just in case I'm cursing things) with the IBM/HGST Deskstar drives, having missed out the 'Deathstar' generation, and I've just bought 1T Ultrastar (which is a slightly old drive, now). Its a bit 'clicky-clicky-clicky' when accessing data, but otherwise good, but I notice that HGST used 5 platters for a very conservative data density (for reliability) but higher dissipation than they might have achieved with 4 or even three platters. |
I've bought Seagate, Western Digital, and Fujitsu. The Futjitsu lasted 12 months before it cacked itself, it was noisy and slow and relatively expensive for what it was.
One Seagate was dead when I opened the package but was replaced no questions asked. I have never had any difficulty with Western Digital and actually prefer them. I had a DVD recorder for tv a few years ago and it had a 250GB Samsung I think it was and it died during a move from my old house to my new house. |
"Western Digital Black" seems to be the way to go. They are the only WD drives with a 5 yr warranty. Has anyone had issues with these?
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I'd like to see statistics that Seagate hard drives are any less reliable than the other majors like Western Digital since everyone here is shitting on them. My last 5 hard drives have been SG Barracudas, made tons of use out of all them since the 90s, they never failed on me, I just upgraded them when I needed more space. My only personal experience with Western Digital has been with an external hard drive that failed after about a year. My anecdotal evidence says WD blows.
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The point is not defamation, or defecation, but the sharing of knowledge and experiences. |
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Interesting thread you have here. It's always nice to talk about quality of a hard drive. I also work in computer company and we sell all kinds of hard drives, but I could not really say which are better than the others (aside from warranty time and few small factors like noise/power consumption, speed, etc). I've noticed, that usually failure rate is higher in first months of use regardless of manufacturer (I guess it is a time needed for manufacturing defects to show up), if it lives past this, usually it works a long time until it starts to wear out (then failure rate rises again).
On this occasion I've noticed an interesting statistics which confirms my thoughts. I personally prefer Hitachi, WD black and Samsung drives for these tend to be quieter, faster and I had best luck with them :) |
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- SAMSUNG HD204UI (Spinpoint F4 AFT), running 24/7 for 23069 hours now, no problems - Seagate STM3500418AS (Maxtor DiamondMax 23), running almost 24/7, 20839 hours, no problems - The WD mentioned above - A bunch of older drives, working in some special purpose systems (Jukebox, etc) in the range from 10GB to 200GB, even cheap ones, like my Excelstor Jupiter 80GB (Hitachi disk design licensed to Excelstor for manufacturing), some of them older than 10 years. |
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In for 2TB, in for 3TB...
After 6 months of continuous use of the Toshiba HDKPC09 on the desktop, I have now installed a new Toshiba 1TB 2.5" drive in my perfect laptop. My "perfect" laptop is a Toshiba Satellite M45 S2693. It has been running Slackware 12.x with selected updates since forever, with the original drive. The drive had 40,000+ on it hours and still passed the smartctl tests, but had an increasing number of reallocated sectors, and was always in need of more space. I considered getting a newer computer but could not find anything I liked in my price range - plus I REALLY, REALLY like this one, having lived 12 hours a day for several years at its keyboard! It is perfect, after all! I installed Slackware 14.1 to a cleared partition and decided it was fine for my uses, so I decided to upgrade this one instead of going for a new one... full boat of RAM and new drive. I have been very happy with the drive which was the topic of this thread so I found a Toshiba MQ01ABD100 1TB laptop drive for about $60 and installed it a few days ago. I partitioned it to replicate the original and copied everything via a third computer. With that seamlessly running, I then further partitioned the drive and installed Slackware 14.1. That will allow me to continue everything familiar without interruption while I add and configure the 14.1 partition to take over when ready. Just another drive data point for those interested, I'll update in 6 months if still happy! |
Just one more data point - and one more Toshiba drive...
I had to replace another drive in another older system with a lot of life left in it, AMD Phenom IIB, so after another round of reviews I settled on yet another of the Toshiba drives that I initially purchased: Toshiba HDKPC09 (DT01ACA200), 2TB. So that is 5TB of Toshiba drives I have purchased in the past year, 2 X 2TB and 1 X 1TB (laptop). All good so far! |
I'm curious as to why a few are bandying around such numbers as "20% failure rate" when every consumer data collecting service I've ever seen states actual overall hdd failure rates at under 1% for ALL manufacturers. This seems nearly inconceivable given the speeds and tolerances at which hdds operate, but apparently it is so. Such exaggerations as 20% usually come from the phenomenon wherein it matters little if your odds are 1% failure since if you're unlucky, that instance is 100% to you.
FWIW for the few times I've been unlucky I've gotten excellent service from all manufacturers, even replacement with a larger, faster drive when the model I had was no longer available. Enterprise service is even better. I've known recording studios using Seagate SCSI drives in RAID (and if you didn't realize it long audio/visual recording sessions are very strenuous on hdds) and whether 5 months in or 5 years they drop-shipped replacements the following day. BTW I don't think IBM has manufactured any hdds for years. As bad as some series of the DeskStar drives were (class action suit) I still bought several and just made sure they were kept as cool as possible. While on the subject of thermals, back when I was a relentless over-clocking hot-rodder (among other things) I did "smoked airflow tests" on several cases. It was plain to see that if a case has it's hdd bay in various places but the more common one of roughly the lower front half of the case, unless there was a fan blowing directly across the bay, they were almost always "an eye in the hurricane". No matter how forceful or how many CFMs one pushes, a dead spot is common at that location. If you want long life out of any electronics, especially electromechanical devices, it is a wise investment to keep them cool. Fans, cases and even heatsinks are much cheaper and less traumatic to replace than drives and data, and even cheaper than extended warranties. |
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