[Resolved] The hard drive market today; who is reliable?

Hardware Hub Storage
1

UPDATE 05/29/2016 - I'm actually rather impressed with this WD Blue so far. It scared the piss out of me when I first plugged it into my USB adapter because I couldn't hear it spin up, and couldn't feel it vibrate either. But the LED flickered on, and was ready to transfer. The relative silence and lack of vibration of this drive has been eerie because I'm so used to older drives, but it inspires confidence in regards to longevity.

On a loosely related note, I got the drive just in the knick of time. Windows was having none of it, and I couldn't transfer my data through the GUI - it would "discover" all the items, get stuck, and disappear. I eventually live booted linux and copied everything through the terminal. A few reboots later, I wanted to see how bad things were, so I benchmarked the drive... 10MB/s... 10MB/s... 0MB/s. I think it totally died now. RIP 1TB Seagate Barracuda - you did your duty admirably.

So here is my story, and my sudden concern with HDD reliability:

My computer originally consisted of an 60GB OCz Agility III SSD and a 1TB Seagate HDD (there were prior storage configurations, but my computer has been a series or perpetual upgrades for about 8 years, so this is the point I deem most relevant /tangent). With the SSD too small, and slow, and me up to the brim on the 1TB as well, I upgraded the main storage drive to a 256GB Crucial SSD and added a 4TB SSHD which died in a few months totally unexpectedly with no prior warning.

This was a rather traumatic experience since I was already deeply entrenched in that drive, and so was Windows, as it took several minutes to boot following. With no games installed, lots of clean up, and the hassle of an RMA process, I just fellback to my gaming laptop for about a year or so - eventually the warranty expired, and RMA is no longer an option. I finally got around to upgrade my computer.

I decided to get an 1TB Mushkin Reactor SSD to store all my games (along with 380X and case fans). I literally just installed it yesterday and, just my luck, that good ol' 1TB Seagate drive finally started to click, so death is eminent (SMART is going berserk as well with warnings). I so want a good old pure mechanical HDD for mass storage (downloads, media/movies/music/photos/installers, etc). However I'm having issues the market today, particularly deciding who is reliable because this experience is traumatizing to me as it was my first HDD death that I couldn't prepare for. I'm kinda avoiding both Seagate and SSHDs this time around (besides, I shouldn't need extra performance of SSHD - just extra point of failure). I'm also poor, especially from recent upgrades. Who makes an affordable, reliable hard drive these days? I was looking at WD Blue, but apparently the Blue lineup has assimilated the Green lineup, which, based on customer reviews on Amazon and Newegg, were plagued with issues, so that's giving me pause.

Suggestions? I don't mind a slow spinning drive, so as long it's reliable.

2

I don't buy cheep drives I learned that with my wd green drive. So my recommendation would be WD Black I have 2 of them in my gaming pc and no issues with them at all for a 7200 rpm dirve they work really well. When it comes to SSD I usually go with Samsung evo I have never had an issue with these ssd. I also wouldn't recommend buying cheep drives to begin with because sooner or later you will end up with a dead drive and end up spending more in the long run then if you just bough a bit more expensive drive from the start.

3

HGST. @Logan uses them in his NAS. And I have 2x 3TB HGST NAS drives in my PC.

1 Like
4

OCz Agility III
I'm pretty sure that was my very first SSD
I think hgst is the king for lowest failure rates at the moment

1 Like
5

OCz Agility III
I'm pretty sure that was my very first SSD

$2.50/GB was a bargain for an SSD back then. I still have mine in an external enclosure with a Virtual Disc feature, so it has all my Linux iso's on it.

6

Some useful links:

Blackblaze Q1 2016 Hard Drive Stats
Backblaze Hard Drive Data and Stats

2 Likes
7

Even having reliability as a concern, I don't think the WD Black drives are worth their absurd price premiums. They are literally doubled the cost the Blues - so I could better reliability buying 2 Blues in a RAID 1.

8

I kinda take Blackblaze's data with a grain of salt. While I do think it's valuable data, it's also skewed by their aggressive tactics to get drives as cheap as possible (taking them from external enclosures, buying refurbs, etc.) Considering a lot of data from all 3 were from flooding period that shorted supply and reliability, and think the other manufactures, especially the big 2, are dis-proportionally high failure rates.

9

I mean, just look at the difference in sample sizes. 23k, 37k, and then 238 and 1.7k drives.

Also doesn't consider the different models. Seagate is highly skewed towards the 4TB models.

1 Like
10

See I find that list amusing

I apparently have been very lucky because all of my drives are Seagate and the only driver I have ever had failed was because it was in an external Dock and I kicked it off the table accidentally I will have to pull the smart data but I know damn well one of these Seagate drives is over 10 years old

11

All my drives have also been Seagate, and the 4TB SSHD was the first to fail. The 1TB I have lasted 5 years with near 24/hr operation (rarely shutdown computer, and did P2P sharing). That drive also survived 3 case transfers (not including other hardware overhauls). Seagate is alright in my book, but as objective as I try to be, psychology and emotional distress are real things.

1 Like
12

The only hard drives I have ever had go bad on me pretty much my own damn fault

I do currently have a 4 terabyte Seagate that I can hear making some type of rotational sound I don't know if that is a bad thing or not but it does have me concerned as that particular drive has my anime collection

I would very much like to invest in a 6 or 8 or 10 terabyte single Drive but it seems the price point gets completely messed up as soon as you go above 4 terabytes

Not to mention at that amount of storage in one space is very scary
At the least you would have to buy two of them to mirror it

13

RAID 5 is good. Get some extra space from each additional drive as well as redundancy/failure tolerance. If I had the case for it, it might be a route, but I have effectively an ITX case. I have the Corsair Air 240, so the fans were slim fans because you only have a 15mm clearance down there with an mATX board. Those fans were much needed as my EVGA GTX 760 ACX would cook in there. With those fans, my 380X tops off at 62c under MSI Kombuster.

Also, only 3 drive mount for 3.5" drives and not enough SATA 6GB/s ports. So I pretty much have to have a single reliable drive. Could do a RAID 1, but I'd need to add another SATA power connector cable to my PSU, and it's already a rats nest in that compartment. SFF struggles, especially when working with standard sized hardware.

14

Samsung for SSDs and WD Blues, Blacks or Reds for other needs.
I had one Samsung die on me due to me cheaping out on a Rosewill PSU (could be a similar happening for you). Never had issues with Western Digital so far.
I avoid Seagate as I had 8 HDDs fail on me over night (NAS died, WD Red and Samsung 750 Evo survived).

WD Greens are strange, they do not really belong in this world.

15

+1 for Hitachi 3TB NAS drives and Hitachi in general
and WD black have 5 year warranties, I've sold a shit tone of WD blacks and none have come back.
and I've learned to hate Seagate/Samsung drives but don't trust the cheap WD drives any more than them, the WD greens are cheap for a reason same with the dirt cheap Seagate's.
SSD's just don't buy the most dirt cheap ones, I've always got samsung or kingston, none failed yet...........

16

Well, for mechanical storage it's not the first time i have heard, that HGST (Hitachi) is the most reliable.
For SSD - i would rather go with a brand that makes it's own NAND - Toshiba (ocz), ADATA, Samsung...

1 Like
17

I have an HGST 3TB drive in my HTPC and it's great, if not a little loud. I have two Seagate 2TB drives in my desktop, and one of them is a warranty replacement from a drive that bit the dust 3 years ago. But their reliability has gotten better since then so it's probably safe enough to be confident in them.

18

Honestly I go for Intel SSDs or Samsung SSDs nowadays

19

I recently saw 2 x seagate 300GB SAS drives in a RAID 1 mirror both fail so had to replace both and do a restore from backups, they aren't even cheap drives, basically don't trust any RAID array really, have it's data mirroring to a decent quality single drive internally and then backup that to a rotation of at least 3 external drives so all bases are pretty much covered.

20

Oh yeah... I forgot Intel...
After the 840 issues with Samsung and all other issues i have had with their products in general, i tend to stay away from Samsung, but they get overpraised everywhere, so may be there is something good...