Storage forum: Are today's new computer hard drives just simply junk?

I have bad luck with their Green Drives but they have replaced all but one which was several years old. WD Blue and Green have a two year warranty and Black have a 5 year warranty. Red which are raid certified have a three year warranty. Red is new and I have them in a Raid 5, so we will see. I have had problems with the Green.

This post seems to have generated quite a controversy over an alternate situation concerning whether or not it is advisable to post one's email address in a public forum when what is really desired Is a simple bit of information that might be easily attained if we could just post a link to a particular site.

I would really like to read anything that is available that has to do with this so called "enterprise class" hard drive as would quite a few Cnet members. I understand the implications of posting one's email address and I try to avoid helping to generate more spam so I would like to ask the administration here to allow the posting of the link to this particular piece of information just so people don't have to post their email addresses.

I have had no failures with my desktop drives. I use maxtor . I also have a cooling fan/heat sink mounted on the drives. this reduces heat and so far no problems. this is with a new desktop.

I still have a windows 98 desktop with word / document software I still use , this has the original drive. this also has cooling fans mounted to reduce heat in the drive.

you do have to clean these out when they start to collect dust.

A large percentage of participants in this thread asked for the white paper Rabear2010 mentioned (and generated a significant side discussion on the advisability of publicly disclosing your email address). I did a Google search on "white paper on enterprise hard drives" and found several. One was as 12 page pdf by Intel, who was simply discussing the difference between enterprise and desktop drives and not recommending (or even namimg) any particular HDD. It can be found here: http://express.ikoula.com/sites/default/files/fiche_disques_enterprise.pdf
Another paper (by a manufacturer of SSDs) made a case for SSD over rotating discs without recomending (or naming) any specific brands. That paper discussed results of large studies by Google and by Carnigie Mellon of HDD failure rates (4% to 8.4%) at server farms. According to them, there was no significant difference in failure rates between the enterprise and desktop types of HDDs. It can be found here: http://www.acaltechnology.com/_files/franchise/SiliconSystems/whitepapers/Cost%20effective%20HDD%20replacement.pdf
The Google result also lists papers by Dell, HP, Fijitsu and others. In addition to providing more than one viewpoint it might be safer than putting your email address in this forum.

If you can't mention brand names on C-Net forum, then it should be based in China, or Tehran, because it would be a restriction on knowledge, speech, and contrary to the underlying purpose of C-Net as a validator for technology and technology products. Mention the names if it's relevant to the discussion!!

my email is [Email address removed to prevent abuse, please read: http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7588_102-5406266.html PDF link has been added to original post: http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7588_102-5400680.html] and I would appreciate info about the Enterprise class of hard drives. Ron.

Message was edited by: Lee Koo (ADMIN) 01/07/2013 11:17AM

Message was edited by: Lee Koo (ADMIN) 01/07/2013 11:17AM

Some manufacturers have a higher quality consumer drive. Look for things like a 5 year warantee, bearings on both ends of the spindle, etc. Don't know if these desktop drives are the same as the commercial drives, but one vendor's premium desktop drive specs quite a bit like its enterprise class drive.

I seriously question your using 1000 hard drives in a 4 year time period.
A four time span is is 1460 days, which means 1.5 days you are replacing a drive.
Please explain.

You're right Dave!!! The older hard drives from years gone by DID LAST LONGER. But when you consider how little data (Compared to today's drives) they held it begins to make since. I think that since the time when some guy set the first soldering iron to the first circuit board, millions upon millions of electrogadgetgeeks and electronics engineers have been trying to figure out how to hold more data in less space and make it faster and faster to access. My first hard drive was a whooping 20MB. (No one could ever use that much space!!!). But it was far better than storing my data and programs on a cassette tape.

Since the early 80's when we got off of recording tape and on to hard drives, miracles have happened in terms of size, capacity, and speed. I think the reason the older hard drives lasted longer is simply that they held less data and didn't have to work so hard as the computer industry has grown. If you look at the torture we put drives through today you'll start to get the idea. Today we run multiple programs simultaneously, use a portion of the hard drive for pagination (memory in excess of your RAM), and drives run at speeds up to 15,000 RPM. The same drive is storing 10,000-100,000 times more data than my old 20MB hard drive, and accessing the data I need in around 9 milliseconds.

But I think the biggest change you're referring to is when we made the switch from IDE type hard drives to SATA type hard drives. I think the same rules apply. In the newer SATA hard drives you're seeing up to 2 Terebytes of data compared to only a maximum of 25% of that on some of the best IDE drives. So the question when buying hard drives is really, "What is the most reliable" for me?

You mentioned in your question that you back up your data on a regular basis. To that I would say "Good for You". That is the only way you can be assured of redundancy of data in the event of a failure. When my customers come in I've begun the practice with the customer's permission of backing up every computer if it needs it or not. So on to my mostly humble opinion regarding your question.

First of all, we always back up our data. Any drive can and will eventually fail. Period. So if you want to safeguard your data, you need to develop a data back up program that works for you.

Second, regarding price is an interesting issue. You would think that a Black 500GB hard drive would be as good as the same companies Blue 500GB hard drive? Or Green, or some other configuration. But my experience with modern hard drives is that you get what you pay for. I stick pretty much with Western Digital Black hard drives. It's not their highest priced hard drive, but I have found them very dependable over the years. I'm not digging on other companies here, but I am making a statement of fact that I've had the best experience with Western Digital Black models.

There was a period over the recent past due to severe flooding of their plants, that hard drive prices went up considerably. At the same time, Solid State Drive prices started coming down. Of course, SATA drives are still considerably cheaper, but I believe these events placed the SSDs in the public eye in a big way. As for me, I recommend the SSDs if my customers can afford them. And again, I'd postulate that in this case you will once again get what you pay for. I stick exclusively with Intel for SSDs mainly because I've never had a problem with a single drive since I started using them about a year ago. If you shop around, you can grab a pretty nice 240GB hard drive for under $200.00. I can remember when the price per GB was about the same for IDE hard drives.

Why does the price vary so much with hard drives? I think hard drives are like anything else you see in the computer domain. There are companies that make a line of very high quality products with a higher price, and a lower quality product made with inferior components and older technology that they sell at a much lower price. Both product work, but the higher quality more expensive product should perform better and last longer. You should also get a better warranty with the higher priced product and perhaps, better service support.

I'd like to wish all of you out there in the CNET communities a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Joyful New Year. I'm so glad the Myans were wrong.

Happy Holidays

I'll second Charlie on this. I've built probably 20 computers over the years with at least 5 different drive mfg'ers. Since the last failure I've stuck with WD Black drives with a 5 year warrranty. The drives have given excellent service, only one has failed. I checked on it and the tech said it was still under warranty, it was about 4 years old. It had never been registered with them They sent me a new one and I sent the old one back.

SSD drives have been around awhile now and seem to be reliable, although the first one I got a couple years ago failed quickly. The mfger stood behind it and replaced it. They do need to be partitioned and formatted to minimize cross block addressing. All the windows versions prior to 7 start the main partition at sector 63, so every read and write has to access 2 blocks on the drive. Not optimum. I understand that win 7 and win 8 can do this automatically with the TRIM function.

I think for the first part we use our hard drives rougher than in the past so they last less but also are felt as possible pieces of tech to be replaced on a wim. If they are not working up to expectations , you might want to look for a tougher hard drive. I've seen Western digital "black drives" that seem to be listed as tougher but for normal play ssds are coming to light and should be tougher for your needs.

My thought on price comes to hoping you won't "notice?" or just how the supply is at any time. I got aggravated when I bought a seagate drive and its price varied by color and not storage. That even happens with cars now too . You also have the excitement that with Thailand where the drives aren't made in the U.S and are made elsewhere to which can tweak the price depending on their conditions and not our conditions we see and we forget they are made that far away .

I hope this gives you some info to chew on and I hope you find the drive that meets your tough requirements.

It also depends on what the manufacturer says the hard drives are suited for. For example one companies Blacks cost more due to the higher RPM of the hard drive and therefore better read/write performance. but the Greens are more for their low power use, storage and their size represents that, they also don't recommend them for OS hard drives (Like I have done...) but the Blue (Same as the Black but usually just a little slower)

Temperature also plays a large role in the life of the components in a hard drive.
Ultimately Hard Disk Drives are yet to become "obsolete/junk" because in terms of storage size they are (currently) king.

Here in NZ we pay from $80 to $250 per hard disk drive, I personally buy for price/size (around the $100-$139 mark) and there is only one brand that I have had good experiences with and as of yet have none fail (less than 5 years old mind due)

Solid State Drives are great for speed (for the speed increase/cost I'd still go foe HDDs) but still for a decent size is pricey and still are prone to electronic failure or components same with anything...

Use Raid certified disks like the WD Red. Every Raid device manufacturer will tell you that and guarantee that you have problems long term with just using any disk.

Useful information there, thank you. Western Digital is quite frank in their product description of the Red series - they are made to be more durable and reliable. Good to know! Seagate bills their Enterprise line the same way. Just never noticed this before. They don't tend to get the reviews or the retail promotion - and the Seagate models are at quite a price premium - but more reliable drives are still being made. So its not the technology, its the commodity nature of the business model. Consumers need to fight back, and demand better. Very good thread here.

Question:

Are today's new computer hard drives just simply junk?

The truth is that there are so many factors involved when it comes to today's computers that come into play; you probably have noticed many answers already that state the fact that drives have much larger capacity than the older ones. They are much cheaper as well but there are many other factors I believe that play into what may seem like hard drives being a dime a dozen so to speak.

Let's first consider form factor, as this really hasn't changed in decades we have these drives of ridiculous capacity that are still respectively 3.5 or 2.5 inch. I have a 20GB drive sitting here right now that is a 3.5 inch internal drive; in my current PC I also own a 3.5 inch drive that is 3TB or 3076 GB drive. If you do the math a 3TB drive is the equivalent to 153.6 20GB drives yet they are using the same 3.5 inch cases. I think at some point the Hard Drive Manufactures have to reconsider the smaller form factors and allow for a bigger case rather than trying to cram so much space into one 3.5 or 2.5 case.

For us builders and gamers we are used to a decent size mid tower that has generally 4 to 5 slots for hard drives. This being the case for the storage capacity that we need these days wouldn't it make more sense to create a drive that could use up all 4 or 5 slots giving them the ability to probably create much larger capacity drives without resorting to trying to make thinner plates and more of them to fit into the one little case. I feel that we have lost of our reliability on this factor alone; I also feel that it could easily be resolved.

Another factor I feel is an issue is compatibility that the manufacturers of the Hard Drives don't take enough account into either when it comes to all the different combinations that we are going to use them in. I have a 6 core AMD processor with 16 GB of RAM and a Gigabyte Motherboard and a 750W power supply with a 2GB NVidia Graphics card. I have a Solid State Drive as my main OS and Program Drive, Along with 2 more standard SATA drives that total another 6TB's in various partitions. The amounts of different configurations that are now possible as people are more computer savvy then they were 20 years ago is just astronomical.

Going back to the power supply issue I have found that when you have bad electricity that the hard drives are usually the first things to go. So if you aren't 100% on your configuration when it comes to power needs you will probably go through hard drives like light bulbs as they are very picky when it comes to power regulation. Having an adequate battery backup unit for your PC can make a lot of difference when it comes to how often you end up replacing your hard drives.

Then there are the wear and tear factors as someone else has pointed out, our demands on hard drives are so much more these day than they used to be. With high speed internet and multiple PC's in a home network we transfer data to and from these drives like nothing we did before back then. During the days of dial up internet you wouldn't even consider downloading an entire album or your whole day would be shot. With most people having Broadband internet and a few PC's in the house that share files, and transfer files or copy files from each other this puts a lot more strain on the hard drives than ever before.

I would say that what it really comes down to until some of these concerns are addressed is that perhaps you should really ask what you need to be stored locally and then look into cloud storage for things you rarely need access to. Amazon S3 Web Service provides ridiculous amounts of space for almost nothing. I have about 100 GB's worth of things on my S3 server that I pay about $0.80 per month to have stored on redundant servers. I can download it from any computer that has internet connection and I don't worry about any of this data when it pertains to a failed hard drive.

Are there some lemons out there I am sure there are, but that is what the warranties are for. My advice is not to store anything that you are not willing to lose on any local disc whether it is a hard drive or ROM drive. Because the truth is a fire or other unforeseen disaster could take out either one or all. So if the data is critical follow the example of businesses that have been for years paying for offsite backup solutions. With the S3 service you have that opportunity for mere pennies.

In the long run it's a wait and see when it comes to what the manufacturers will do but sooner or later they will have to address a lot of these issues because it's going to become cheaper to make better drives than keep replacing them under warranty when they fail.

Best of Luck
PcTechPaul