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

Mr. ParrotSlave,
I believe ib your last paragraph you are referring to the "planned obsalescence" in the home computer industry, also known as "upgrades". Similar to Ralph Nader's discovery of planned obsalescence in automobile manufacturing some time ago.
When I purchased this computer 3 years ago, it was on sale at 40% of the normal price. The salesman admitted it would be obsolete in 2 years. To be expected for a computer 40% off, as you say, there must be a reason for this connsiderable price reduction. In fact it is my main desktop and works satisfactorily ('knock on wood', except that everything's made of plastic now).
I can still get parts for my 1988 Chevy, but my first HD runing win95 may be useless. I find it frustrating that systems I have paid for must be repurchased, even though they are still working to my satisfaction. They have been declared 'obsolete', and service is no longer available.
With all due respect, the home computer is "the gift which keeps on taking".
I mean no disrespect to other computer users on this site. Computers are a most fascinating diversion for me.
I am retired and my income has been considerable reduced. Thus I have much more free time, but much less money to spend. My interest in computers has greatly increased during this time, though. I only wish I could afford to "keep up with the Joneses".
I enjoy visits to this website.

I haven't seen mention of solid state hard drives in this debate yet. Sorry if I missed it. Many of the issues to do with conventional hard drives are to do with moving parts, so I was just wondering what people's experiences were with SSDs.

On recommendation from my local PC repair man I have been replacing my internal PC conventional drives with 250Gb SSDs whilst storing large amounts of data on a number of conventional 2Tb external drives. The thinking behind this is that most of the constant hard work a hard drive has to do is to do with running the system. Keeping all but my small daily office files on external drives takes the pressure off the conventional drives and reserves them just for data. (Films, music and graphics in my case.) They are virtually idle until I fetch data. This, I hope, will extend the lives of all my drives. It is also worth mentioning that my systems speeds are now phenomenal. SSDs are so much faster, especially with a clean install. Programmes and local data load seemingly instantly, whilst remote data from conventional drives on my network appears to fetch faster too.

In the ideal world I would probably look for a total SSD solution, but SSDs are rather expensive especially the higher capacity ones. Capacities go up to 0.8Gb at the moment. I will wait until capacities go up and prices come down before I go the whole distance on SSDs. Intel give their view of things HERE

I have been thinking a lot about your question regarding hard drive reliability and I am not really sure I have the answer you are looking for. In some ways, it does seem like hard drives are not lasting as long as they once did but if you look at how much more we ask of them now then 10 years ago, it is pretty amazing that they even last as long as they do. If you really think about how a hard drive is made and what it actually does, it is truly incredible that the thing works at all.

If you think of the life of the drive in terms of how many years that you have owned it, then yes, they do not seem to be lasting as long as they once did. However, if you think of it in terms of read/write operations or how much work the hard drive is doing, then I think you may find that the hard drives are actually lasting longer. Look how much more we ask a hard drive to do today. There are background programs that are checking for updates, virus scanners that are running automatically, programs that are backing up your data, automatic defragging and screensavers that are displaying your photos when you are not using your computer. Then we have music playing in the background, video, gaming and other disk intensive applications running as well as people just tend to use their computers far more than they did before. Compare this to what your computer had to do 10 years ago and I think you will find that the hard drives are actually lasting longer in terms of how much data actually comes and goes from the drive. Another factor that may be contributing to the feeling that hard drives are not lasting as long is that more people are using laptops now, where the hard drives tend to have a shorter life anyway.
I do believe that you do get what you pay for and paying a little extra for a Black drive or an enterprise class drive is a better investment than going with the lower priced hard drive. I also feel that SSD drives have not been around long enough for me to even guess about the life of these drives although they are really fast and can certainly hold up better where high shock and vibration is concerned. I have an older Motion Tablet that is mounted in my truck that I use to remote back to my office. I was replacing the Hard drive about every 3 months or so until I replaced it with an SSD drive 2 years ago and it has been running ever since. It also does not crash when I hit a big bump in the road like it use to with a regular hard drive and runs much cooler now.
In the end, having a good, redundant backup plan is still the only way to insure that your data is safe. If your overall plan is really well thought out utilizing a combination of raid drives (when possible), image backups and live data backups or maybe even cloud storage then a hard drive failure should be no more than a mere nuisance and you can be back up and running in a matter of a few minutes.

FYI - Just pondering over your question, has prompted me to reevaluate my own data backup and drive replacement plans. In the past, I have always retired my working hard drives after 3 years and I am now thinking about reducing that to 2 years after two premature drive failures this year. I am also contemplating additional data backup schemes for my really critical data. You can never have enough backups...

Dana
Wayland Computer

I'd be interested in the info you spoke of in your answer to the CNET question re: hard drive durability
Bill

How does one request the Enterprise Class HDD pdf pages from member Rabear2010? An aside: I have no problem posting my email address. My name, address, phone number are public information already - adding an email address to the stack is not a problem, at least for me. And, my spam filter seems to really work well. Lee Koo, thanks for all of the time you invest in this great site.

I am looking into buying a new laptop as mine seems to be on it's way out. You said you were very careful about picking out hard drive manufacturers and model numbers that will fit your needs, can you expand on that please? I do a lot of genealogical research, among other things, & therefore need a reliable laptop to transport around to the different areas I travel to for my research. I would really like to get one that I can rely on for as long as possible.

white paper on hard drive differences

A white paper by Intel will show in the results Enterprise vs. desktop

I also love Spinwrite. GRC (gibson research) has done a great job with this product over the years. I do not know of another fair priced product that will do what this product will do.

CCLEANER is another of of those excellent tools that can help clean up a machine.

Another useful tool you might like is Glary Utilities Glarysoft www.glarysoft.com

I've replaced more hard drives in the last year & a half than in the previous 15. I've even had warranty replacement drives fail w/in the first week. I don't buy drives in retail outlets, although I will occasionally buy from Tiger Direct when I only need one or two. These aren't the cheapest drives by any means. The biggest reason is that hardware has become a commodity. Manufacturers have also sold product for less than my cost shipped from one of the factories in order to grab market share or acquire competitors. As a result, quality in general has deteriorated & QA isn't any better, because it's cheaper for them to just replace the part.

It is my understanding that they all have a meter their measures their finite life and it goes down fairly fast. I don't have an SSD, but will someone address it's life span. It is pretty expensive and most are so new, but the manufacturers do say that they degrade and put a meter on it for you.

Rabear2010
Thanks for your evaluation of the new hard disks, and I'd really appreciate your list of sources for enterprise hard drives.

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Message was edited by: Lee Koo (ADMIN) 01/07/2013 11:12AM

Does anyone remember the cold hard facts about spark plugs? When first designed, that would last forever, until some arseclown genious in marketing shared his made to fail logic and explained how this type of a design will mean way less sales in the future. Yes its as simple as that people. Unless you work for the white house/NASA, etc. we the average consumer get the "designed to fail so you go out and spend your money ASAP on their products" junk. The gadgets are cooler with tons of bells and whistles, but why should they be held to a higher standard that todays ADD consumers just do NOT hold them to anymore. Believe it or not, youre all guilty in one way or the other. If your cell/smart phone starts acting up, what do you do?.... huh?... you whine and complain and go "buy" a new one, a "better" one thats the "latest and greatest" and you justify it with "well i wanted this new one anyway". Meanwhile, those of us who actually demand quality products for our money, get bs'ed into a replacement phone thats simply a "refurbished" old model from one of the other failing phones in the junk pile of returned phones. Then these crooks tell you its "the industry standard" these days to replace your NEW phone that you bought NEW, with a USED phone that has been "fixed" and "brought back to industry standards". LMAO, In fact, these snake oil sales teams try to convince the ignorant that this "refurbished" phone is actually BETTER than your original, in the box new one! AND youre all TOO BUSY to bother with the fact that youre getting screwed and you just say "fine!" and move on. This phone will continue to have issues until your warranty runs out(which is quite soon these days) or you decide to(again), BUY the latest and greatest hard sold gadget that promises the world....... and the cycle begins all over again, and again...
So whats the answer, well its not want most want to hear NOR are willing to accept and take head on, and thats DEMAND they make QUALITY products that have better warranties, AND replace your NEW junk phone with ANOTHER NEW ONE IN THE BOX, NOT A USED "REFURBISHED" ONE!.Then they will be more APT to make quality that lasts and delivers what they promise, or people will just keep getting new phones for no extra charge and they will be HELD ACCOUNTABLE for their JUNK, NOT US. Make sense? Any questions? Its not like these gadgets are cheap either, STOP this ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY trend that started in politics and has trickled down to mainstream society like super heated mercury.
So in THIS case of the hard drives, they must be held accountable for failures and be made to by law replace the drive with a new one, and RECOVER all the data lost due to their failed product at NO COST TO THE CONSUMER, PERIOD. Lmao, THEN and ONLY then, you WILL see quality products that do what these BS'ers are promising they'll do.
The Sicilian

I. too, would like the white paper that makes vendor recommendations, if you still have the time and inclination. I have modified my profile to accept emails. If there is a problem, I have no problem with posting my email on line.
Thanks

Interesting. Didn't realize this had progressed so far. As a longtime PC enthusiast, if I could have picked two brands to survive the shake-out, Western Digital and Seagate would have been good choices. But still, competition is a good thing, and there's precious little left. My system drive is a Hitachi now, and its held up for over a year, so crossing my fingers. I went to the store to get a Western Digital Black, and the salesman showed me that the Hitachi was on sale for half the price. He said it didn't make any difference any more, that they were a commodity item, and that seems largely to be true. Unfortunate, but true.

The post was extremely unscientific -- but I will attempt an answer.

The definitive site for hard-drives is certainly not CNET. It is here: http://www.storagereview.com/
They include a comprehensive reliability review, but sadly, you don't get to learn about reliability
until AFTER a drive has been out a few years... you can still look at early comment though, and
remember that there is a bias in that people tend to report the fails and not the "running smoothly"

I haven't used 1000 drives in four years as one poster had. I've used 50, and only one has failed.
(Three external drives failed, they were all 'Fantom" brand and they were all electronics in the
USB box, not the hard-drive itself). In general I get 5-7 years out of all my drives, and i haven't
noticed recent changes. Since I used to design hard-drives, let me give you some insight
into the design tradeoffs.

I have worked for IBM, Seagate and Maxtor/Quantum.
When I started designing hard-drives in the 1980's, storage cost $10/Megabyte.
Now it costs about ten cents a Gigabyte or $0.01/Megabyte. So cost has fallen
by a factor of 10,000. There is probably NO other metric in the computer
industry that has improved so much. Modern hard drives (since 1990) have
had essentially the identical design. Every generation the heads are made smaller
and the channels are made faster. Costs are brought down by combining
previously separate components. (Look at the chip count on circuit boards on
the last 20 years. It's gone down by literally a factor of 10).

I always thought there was a market for incredibly reliable hard-drives, but the
marketing guys always said, "just make the faster, bigger and cheaper". Having
said this, the materials have improved so much that the "head crashes" that were
relatively common in the 1980s are less common now. There MAY have been a
peak in reliability in the early 2000's, which is when I left the industry. Since that
time, flying heights have decreased so much that the heads are essentially in contact,
but new cleverness like dynamic fly-height control have been intended to protect
the drive from this problem. One COULD ship a drive with three-year old capacity
(for example, ship 500 GBytes today) and it probably WOULD be more reliable
than the latest capacity points ... but people generally did not seem to want
to buy the old technology. When I buy drives, I do tend to wait at least a year
on a new capacity point before buying. The first drives at any capacity ARE less
reliable.

In general, drives these days fail on electronics more than they fail on head crashes.
Also, if you are rating external drives, the third-party drives (the real cheap ones,
Fantom, LaCie, etc) use their own electronics. I have had bad luck with those.
I always buy my external drives from an actual hard-drive company (WD, Seagate, Hitachi).

Since I HAVE seen the sausage made, I ALWAYS run my computers fully mirrored.
(That's two hard drives, with one backing up to the other every Sunday night). Since
hard-drives are dirt cheap there is NO EXCUSE for not having mirrored drives (except
that system makers never build them that way!!). Of course you could mirror
to an external drive. ALSO ... companies do periodically ship a really bad drive.
It could be ANY company. Seagate, IBM/Hitachi, Maxtor/Quantum and WD have ALL shipped awful drives (I'm not even counting Samsung ... I just wouldn't buy those). So when I mirror, I always have drives
by two different manufacturers. You just don't know who is having a disaster this quarter, and
you don't want to find out by losing your data.

More industry insight. We would grade the drives (like eggs). The best ones went to Apple, Compaq (when
they existed), Dell ... etc. In other words, the name brand companies got the best drives. The lower
grade drives went to "distro" (e.g. Newegg ... Fry's). (Having said that, I currently buy most of my drives
from Newegg ... but ... I mirror). You could spend more for an "enterprise" drive. They have similar components, they are tested more severely. They may spin faster (which is a bad thing for reliability BTW). But anything
can, in principle, fail. Mirror the drive.

By the way ... back at IBM in the 80's, we would actually try to prove that our drives would last 7-years.
It was expensive to do, but those drives cost $10,000 for 20 Gigabytes ... so we could afford it.