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

One day I came up with the idea of taking my old hard drives and mounting them on a wall. (Hmm. It'll only let me post one link. There's another picture at the same location called HardDisksRight.jpg) About half of them were drives I owned and was actively using at the time they died.

My experience in the late '80s was that hard disks were not very reliable. There was a string of about 15 machines, probably 90% of what we delivered, that went through our shop on the way to customers that died within two months. Oddly, the replacement drives all lasted a long time. These were all the name brands at the time, Western Digital, Seagate, Miniscribe.

Drake

This opens a .PDF from Intel regarding the differences in drives.
http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf

It's a few years old, but still relevant...and no email addresses involved!

Like the much requested white paper and the other tracts I found via Google, this was interesting general information, but it is over 5 years old, which is a very long time in the data storage industry. The only recent info I found was the posts by the two guys who used to work for hard drive companies and they left several years ago. There seems to be no recent rigorous study. Even storagereview.com and tomshardware.com don't seem to have recent data other than reviews of particular drives. Storagereview has user-provided reliability data of a sort, but it only covers the period 2000 - 2006. I plotted the 6,246 data points they had for WD & Seagate and found a significant decline in user-reported reliability from Jan 2000 to Jan 2006, but what good is that in 2013? There was no significant difference between the two vendors. I guess the lesson is the distallation of what I read here: we are fortunate to have such huge storage capacities at such a low price and the prudent person will resort to reduncancy of some kind (RAID, frequent backups, etc) to safeguard data.

So right, maartsen. I have had an interest in this thread for the same obvious reasons as everyone, but am just blown away by Cnet's complete disrespect for the purpose of it by allowing it to become a bloated mess because of all the redundant requests for "the white paper" that dilute the usefulness. Come on Cnet, post a link to the damn info and delete all the "can you kindly send me a link to the white paper?" posts!

I don't find the discussions here any worse than those in other forums I follow. In this case there was an unusually large number of "me-too" people requesting the white paper instead of using their search engine of choice to locate one (or several) themselves. Unfortunate as that may be, it seems to be human nature and not uncommon in a forum that attracts a large and broad audience. I see less of it in highly specialized forums, but it's still there. Ditto on the large side discussion on the advice regarding disclosure of email addresses. You and I have now made our contributions to the chaff that has nothing to do with the original topic.
But one of the things that prompted me to view the thread in the first place was the large number of messages, which usually indicates a topic that interests a lot of people. It was mildly irritating to have to wade through a lot of irrelevant chatter to find the few gems, but I thought it was worth it to read what some knowledgeable people had to say on the topic. They clearly spent some time on their comments and I appreciated their efforts.
I don't think it's fair to dis Lee Koo, who not only does a good job (IMHO) of finding relevant topics that generate a lot of discussion, but also has the grace and good sense to not get defensive. I don't know the guy, but I like the way he runs this forum and I doubt that it is his full-time job at cnet and suspect that function may even be a collateral duty.

Yes, today's hard drives are a lot of junk because of all of the factors, including workmen ship. Manufacturers cutting corners. People learning technology not going to the best schools to learn how to fix or install hard drives properly. I had a tech come out to my house via a repair plan we bought with our computers from Staples four years ago to install a new hard drive and he not only did not know what he was doing, but, he also did not know how to get the operating system, Windows Vista 64 bit back onto the computer. If one is going into technology for a vocation, such as an IT Profession, a computer repair person or a programmer or an engineer, do not go to a community college like Northern Essex Community College to learn technology. You'll end up coming out of there with a degree that only gives you the ability to do a synopsis of The Return of the Native, because I know from experience by auditing a Java programming class. The programmer had an English Composition II teacher helping him teach programming through taking crash courses in Programming for the English Composition II instructor and a crash course in English Composition II for the programming instructor.

So, have a real skilled professional help you with your hard drive if you have any problems, but, be ready to spend some extra money or go to a place like Best Buy to have them fix it.

These I have had the most problems with over the last couple of years

Both Western Digital and Seagate have cut the warranty on their hard drives. Western Digital cut from three years to two, while Seagate cut from FIVE years to ONE.

They both know that what they are producing is junk. Of course, the price per kb has also dropped significantly. I am finding 2 tb drives for what I previously paid for a 500kb drive. I remember quite a few years ago paying over $1000 for a 500kb drive. It was an immense, heavy block that ran quite hot and needed it's own cooling fan.

In other words, keep everything in pwespective

I am a professional photographer and buy a lot of hard drives. After having 8 external drives fail I began to research hard drives. Delving deep into the manufacturer's websites I discovered that drives have a parameter called "MTBF" which stands for "Mean Time Before Failure." In other words, it's how long the manufacturer's tests indicate that it will last. The MTBF for every external drive that I have found is a small fraction of that of the better internal drives. I began buying only Caviar Black drives and putting them in external cases with fans. That has been 6 years ago and I have yet to have one fail! External drives are made cheaply to sell at a cheap price, which is all the uninformed buyer looks for.

The only "external backup" drive I would use is a WD Black, INTERNAL drive, in a well made, well cooled enclosure. I would never buy an off the shelf external drive "backup" for anything but temporarily moving files (and now a days use a flash drive since they're so cheap). The majority of people out there who want to back up their computers don't have the tech capabilities to put an internal drive in a proper case, so they buy a cheap, ready-made "backup" at Office Max, or use a cloud service and pay to have someone else worry about maintaining the rack of server drives.

Hard Drives always fail. Some fail quicker than others. That is only one reason you need a backup. I've had to use backups where users have deleted entire folders off of a file server. I've had users change a file, not test it for months and then want me to put it back where it was before they messed it up. RAID will only prevent media failures but not necessarily controller failures (still need a backup). Also, the new SSD drives have a limit in the number of read/write cycles. There are even apps that will tell you when you are getting close. But, as I've already said, the one killer of drives early on in their life is heat because someone didn't check out BTU or power consumption ratings before sticking an HD into a slot in their case.

I have never seen so many fools clamoring for information, posting their information on this thread in the hopes of getting something that is freely available. It's called a WHITE PAPER for a reason. Anyway, a SIMPLE GOOGLE SEARCH reveals the article in question, from Intel:

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-029229.htm

"This paper provides a technical explanation of the differences between enterprise-class and desktop-class hard drives. It is intended to provide system integrators with information to determine enterprise environment hard drive integration requirements."

From May of 2008, well before consumer drives started to suck this badly.

I haven't had any *desktop* drives fail recently, but the laptop hard drives, specifically 250GB and 320GB Seagates and Western Digitals in 2.5" SATA II, 5400rpm, don't last at ALL. New Acer, Dell, and Compaq laptops, purchased between 2008 and 2011. One in five lasted beyond the first year of casual to moderate use, and it was the least used laptop, the one that spent most of its time in a backpack in a closet. I just replaced that drive this month (15 months of service). All of those computers are currently running older, purchased used, SATA I drives in 120GB and 160GB sizes I picked up off eBay for $30-$40 each, and are all doing fine. Right now you can buy 120GB sized SSD's for about $90-$100. That is what I will replace these drives with when/if they fail. I feel I will be replacing many other things like keyboards and power jacks and screens before those older drives kick it.

I found a paper by Intel that makes the comparison. At the end are links to several more references and manufacturers.

I bought a Seagate 1T drive and it lasted 8 months. The refurbished replacement worked three months. I have
a WD 1.5 T hard drive that has died and needs replaced after less than one year. I've never had a hard drive fail
prior to the last year. I've also replaced hard drives in two Tosheba lap tops and two other desk top computers
last year. It is ridiculous.

I have used hard drives since 20MB was a good size - so I skipped the "bleeding edge" phase, but not much more.

In the olden days we tried to identify brands that worked better than others. By now, though, the survivors have merged and there is only a small number of manufacturers left. If there are issues, then, maybe that has something to do with it?

And, yes, there are different specs to which manufaccturers make drives. After all, even enterprise servers with petabyte disk farms use "small disk" technology today and have ever since IBM's 3390 drives became a historic failure and EMC-square became big by "knitting" a plug compatible replacement disk subsystem from a pile of cheap Seagate 2GB drives. (By the way, the predecessor of the 3390, the 3380, had roughly half the capacity of a regular CD, which hit the market around that time, but originally only as a music medium.)

For use cases where "always-on" and extended reliability is needed - think of 24x7 video surveillance, for instance - you can buy "better" drives by a number of specifications. But, surely, the "ordinary" hard drive that goes into everybody's computer should also work ok, or?

If you had asked me your question a few years back, when a reasonable disk size was around 40 to 200 GB I would have agreed. Quite a few of those didn't even last out the warranty period, some brands and models being worse than others. One of my suppliers shifted their business away from selling drives back then because they took warranty seriously and didn't like the cost of the extra handling they incurred.

Others preferred losing my business to returning my phone calls. Well, okay.

With the "terabyte class" of drives that are on offer today I haven't had any problems yet (and I keep knocking on wood, since eventually the first one will fail me.)

The good thing, though, is that with these big drives and USB3 I don't have any excuse for not doing my backups any more - and, yes, two generations on separate drives. That gives me three places for each item - the original and the two backups. So, in case you are right I hope to be covered

What I have found a few times recently is that an external (USB) drive failed and it turned out that the USB adapter had died; fortunately there was nothing wrong with the drive itself. It will be interesting to see what happens when I get a problem with the first USB only drive - I have at least one 2.5" enclosure that contains such a drive: No IDE or SATA connector, just a USB mini connector on the circuit board. I expect to have to find out at some later time how - if at all - one can scrape data from a working spindle on one of those ...

Maybe that is where my local data recovery service will get a second chance. I tried them once on a five year or so old 250GB drive that had just packed in without any sign of mechanical damage (I do live in an area with lots of lightning in summer.) But they came back with a big fat nothing. If I believe what they told me, then data recovery is mostly a myth. But that is a story for another day.

To be sure, I do have a small collection of really old drives that still work - from about 80 MB to 500 MB. They are waiting to be put "out to pasture" in my irrigation computer in the garage. The 500 MB drive is the warranty replacement for a drive that spent almost all of its just under 5 year lifespan sounding like an angle grinder - which according to the manufacturer was not a warranty fault - and then mercifully started read/write errors just before the 5 year warranty ran out.

That gets me to another problem I had from time to time. If the original merchant is no longer trading and you turn to the manufacturer you may hear a message like this: "Sure, we'll honour the warranty. Just ship the drive to our factory in Hungary (or Germany) for testing and a replacement will be on its way." Then you find out that by now you can buy three drives, each five times the capacity, for the shipping cost. Great, guys, thank you!

That was what was going to happen to my "angle grinder" - but I managed to get it to Germany in a friend's hand luggage and the replacement drive back the same way. I have to admit that I was really gloating that they didn't get away with their avoidance tactics. Needless to say, I never bought that brand again ...

After all these apocryphal stories, the summary remains that I have yet to lose one of my dozen-or-so terabyte class drives. The biggest I ever lost was a 500 GB drive that after falling off a coffee table while running on a temporary USB adapter still gave off the most recently written data before it packed in completely. All the older data was backed up and I ended up losing nothing.

One other thing:

Here and there I have had a system failing to boot although the drive was basically working. I eventually found out that there was a degree of corruption on quite a few files. (Of course, restoring from a backup that reflects those faulty files won't help you then ... yet another story.)

Ultimately, I suspect, this comes from a drve being in a write cycle when you lose power. That will result in an unreadable sector here and there. The drives are equipped to map replacement sectors over such damaged sectors and pretend nothing happened. And maybe nothing ever will. But if a critical file of your OS is affected your computer may not start or work properly. In this case you may need to do one or more of the following in order to get back to work:

1) attach the drive to another computer (possibly using a temporary USB connector) and backup all data

2) rebuild your system on a separate (new) drive reinstalling the OS and all software and restoring your personal data from backups (including the one you did in item 1) above.)

3) Once you don't need any of the data on the old drive you can now perform a low level format on it - or at least a full OS format - in order to make it fit to reliably hold data again. Rememebr, there never was anything really wrong with the drive, except that it couldn't finish a write operation properly on a number of occasions.


Finally, is there mileage in speculating about something else?

Could it be that - being under cost pressure - people putting complete low cost desktop systems on the market buy bulk drives from even lower than normal specs? Is it drives in those systems that you see failing?

I usually source my systems by components and I don't buy the high spec drives (yet) but I also buy "regular retail" components. Maybe that is why I don't have your problem. And what about all the external USB drives we get offered these days. Are they different?

And can it be that some of the drives we buy nowadays were in the floods in Thailand and are not quite good enough?