HDDs from Hitachi are the most reliable

#4748573

lucidus

2014-01-22 14:31

Hardly surprised to see Seagate as the worst. WTF is wrong with them ...

#4748624

ClockClocker

2014-01-22 15:41

I can attest that Seagate drives are the worst. I had 3 consecutive Barracudas that failed in less than a month of use and they were all from different batches. 😛uke2:

Strange. My GF has a 3TB barracuda and it works just fine for around a year now. Usually i buy Samsung.

#4748636

James Frazer

2014-01-22 15:57

I would have thought that the sale of Samsung's HDD division to Seagate would have seen them improve. Obviously not. I think I'll be going with WD in future as I have had personal negative experiences with Hitachi. Damn I miss Samsung's HDD's, they really knew what they were doing and it shows at the success of their SSD's now.

#4748640

vbetts

Moderator

2014-01-22 15:58

I've heard Toshiba's are the worst, Seagate I've heard mixed views about, I love my barracuda drives.

#4748647

alanm

2014-01-22 16:06

Had a couple Seagate 1tb units for a year now, no probs. Hope they keep going.

#4748663

schmidtbag

2014-01-22 16:34

I personally haven't had much bad luck with Seagate, but I think what separates them from WD is their more in-depth SMART diagnostics and they're pretty good about replacing defective drives. On the other hand, by adding more diagnostics, Seagate drives are more likely to "fail" even if there isn't really a problem.

#4748665

Corbus

2014-01-22 16:36

Damn..just bought a 2tb SSHD, oh well. I'll see how that works for me.

#4748701

nicugoalkeper

2014-01-22 17:12

I personally haven't had much bad luck with Seagate, but I think what separates them from WD is their more in-depth SMART diagnostics and they're pretty good about replacing defective drives. On the other hand, by adding more diagnostics, Seagate drives are more likely to "fail" even if there isn't really a problem.

+1 from me to.

#4748713

UZ7

2014-01-22 17:34

Yeah, not all drive models are created equal, they should have the same playing field. 1TB 1 platter? 2 platters? 3 platters?

#4748764

Kaarme

2014-01-22 18:49

Some Seagate models carry only a single year warranty over here. Maybe it differs from country to country, but honestly an HD with such a short warranty tells the manufacturer itself doesn't expect much from it. Fortunately that's only some of their models, so I can still keep them in mind in addition to WD, whichever happens to have better prices at the moment.

#4748780

Reddoguk

2014-01-22 19:20

The make of the drive means nothing. It's a lotto just like people, some live long while others die young.

#4748790

elpsychodiablo

2014-01-22 19:33

Thats funny, i cant count how much importaint datas i lost which i never get back on Harddisks of Western Digital, IBM/Hitachi, Hitachi Notebook Harddisk. I already run years 7200.12 500GB in in Stripeset Raid 24/7 and 3 7200.14 2GB Raid 5. I have 6 Harddisk of Seagate 7200.9 with 160GB not in use i dont know what i should do with them and they still works fine 😀 So i dont give a XXXX to that News.

#4748845

BLEH!

2014-01-22 20:43

This mirrors my experiences. Only drives I've ever had die are a Seagate, randomly, for no reason, and a Hitachi, which I dropped when it bounced off the bed (long story).

#4748853

rflair

Moderator

2014-01-22 20:50

Knock on wood. I never had a HD fail on me. Like Pill I have some old IDE drives with 10+ years stored in cupboard that still work to this day. Even have one of those 1.5TB Seagate that chugs along in a SATA3/eSata enclosure, its about 5-6 years old. I did have a PSU fail maybe 10 years ago and that took out an old WD drive in a magnificent way. I heard a high pitch whistle from the PC, looked over and saw a blue/white flame cut threw the metal housing of the drive and then a big cloud of smoke. The drives motor must have been spinning in the 50K+ RPM range.

#4748863

schmidtbag

2014-01-22 21:04

This mirrors my experiences. Only drives I've ever had die are a Seagate, randomly, for no reason, and a Hitachi, which I dropped when it bounced off the bed (long story).

Drives never fail for "no reason". Your motherboard might not inform you there's a problem, but if you run SMART tests, I'm sure you'll see tons of red markings with dates recorded LONG before the error occurred. If you can't even get SMART results, that could be an issue with your power supply. Seagate has a tendency to over-exaggerate problems in SMART, but the thing about mechanical devices is once there's a slight fault, it won't take much for it to spread into something severe. As for dropping drives, that USUALLY won't have any impact at all as long as it isn't active. You might permanently destroy a few clusters here and there, but it should still be operable. I think one thing to keep in mind is whether you buy many of the same drive. If all the drives are the same model and made from the same batch and if one of them fails, there's a good chance that the others will fail shortly after.

#4748875

CronoGraal

2014-01-22 21:21

Time for a Guru3d HDD torture roundup? >:3

#4748908

allesclar

2014-01-22 22:17

wouldnt disagree at all. I only use Hitachi and Samsung.

#4748911

John

2014-01-22 22:24

I read this article way before it was on here and kinda laughed. All the Seagate Drives i have had for the past 3 years are all working and 2 go through incredible amounts of writes and very large file transfers daily. Does anyone else find this article silly?.

No? Don't you think this company, which has over 12k Seagate drives, has a better basis of saying which drives are reliable than you, as a home user do? I have Seagate drives in my file server too, and they are also fine. Along with an armada of WD GP drives, which have never failed me either. Plus some WD drives that have seen continuous writes/reads for 5 years in a row. Doesn't really mean anything. Also, the article states that these "pods" that they use probably put more strain on the drive than normal, due to vibration and such.

#4748925

BLEH!

2014-01-22 22:45

Drives never fail for "no reason". Your motherboard might not inform you there's a problem, but if you run SMART tests, I'm sure you'll see tons of red markings with dates recorded LONG before the error occurred. If you can't even get SMART results, that could be an issue with your power supply. Seagate has a tendency to over-exaggerate problems in SMART, but the thing about mechanical devices is once there's a slight fault, it won't take much for it to spread into something severe. As for dropping drives, that USUALLY won't have any impact at all as long as it isn't active. You might permanently destroy a few clusters here and there, but it should still be operable. I think one thing to keep in mind is whether you buy many of the same drive. If all the drives are the same model and made from the same batch and if one of them fails, there's a good chance that the others will fail shortly after.

No warnings, even with SMART enabled, turned it off one night, turned it on the next day, bang, drive stopped working.

#4748928

John

2014-01-22 22:48

I'm not a home user and yes the data is very inaccurate. "Hitachi are the most reliable drives" is plain wrong when the only units even tested from the competition were their most unreliable models and the most common units (1TB and 2TB and 500GB) were not included. Furthermore the testing was done over only 4yrs max and goes against MTBF data. lso there was a mix of consumer and eneterprise drives from all sides. Nothing was apples to apples.

I agree the headline could be misleading, but if you read the article everything becomes clear. In their case, Hitachi has been the most reliable, and Seagate's been ****. There's nothing wrong with it, and it's interesting none the less. When it comes to HDD reliability, everyone has an opinion. And it's usually along the lines of "yeah well, I have had like 4 Seagate drives and none of them have failed. Seagate rulz". Seeing statistics from big companies like this, who literally live off of storage, is, to me, interesting. Now, I'd like to see stats from, say, Google. That would be interesting.