Hard Drive Reliability Study: Food for thought

Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia : Practical Relevance

just saw this at toms hardware. pretty surprising results

i personally have felt confident with all of them offering 5 year warranties, but this really makes me a bit paranoid to backup more often

 

Head Crashes, Axle Wedging, and Firmware Corruption... Oh my.

 

Thanks for the link - it was an interesting read.

Although personally I haven't had any hard drive failures in any of my machines, problems do happen with all hard drives. Not much you can do about it except keep multiple regular backups.

Also note one point made in the study - by no means does the study conclusively say one brand's drives are more unreliable than another's - each generation of each brand is different, and each particular model within a product line is different as well.

For example, look at Seagate: the vast majority of their drive failures are from the firmware issues they had with certain drives a while back. Does that mean their other drives (say, the popular Momentus XT) are unreliable as well? Nope.

Bottom line: no hard drive is fail-proof. Keep copies of your precious data if you don't want to lose it!

 

no real news there, just a wake up call for people who (used to) believe in warranties and are ignorant of backup needs.

warranties have always been a sales/marketing tool and have little or no relationship to the reliability of a piece of equipment.

 

yea, im glad the article made sure to write about the limitations etc of the study. it did however provide an interesting read on what usually goes wrong and to me the most shocking thing was the lifespan before things went wrong.

 

A warranty does not warranty your data just a drive

Backup anything important, especially now with HDD's so cheap you can get a 2TB HDD for right at $100 on sale these days.

 

basically , don't buy a seagate from the looks of it..

 

It's an interesting study, but there are so many factors that impact drive-life that it's hard to take their results as much more than an interesting factoid. I certainly wouldn't make a buying decision based on this. Especially when you factor in that most drives that are DOA or die early in their life do so because of poor handling.

Case in point, I got a drive in for review the other day that was shipped only in a UPS bubble envelope. The thing worked, and then we stressed it and it still worked, so this time it looks like we got lucky. But NewEgg, Amazon and others have been very guilty of poor packing. That's why it's critical to fully test a new drive before putting data on it.

 

That's exactly the sort of blind conclusion that some people are apt to make from these studies. Let me reiterate:

There are so many factors and so many different models that you just can't make conclusions like that.

 

Still there is not a lot of reports of faulty hard drivers on nbr , and normally people post about faulty stuff so failure rates in the report seem a tad exaggerated.

 

its just that results, I do data recovery as well and if I was to just publish results i would be calling Hitachi unrelaible as most of the drives coming in dead the last 2 years were Hitachi's that were overheated and cooked in Apple Time Capsule units. alot of it depends on what equipment we work on daily and most commonly, as well as that equipments application and use. If I had say 500 Seagate drives in a very hostile envireoment and alot failed in 2 years would I be calling them unreliable to 500 Western Digitals happily humming along in laptops that barely move?

 

You mean drives that come with the machines or drives that are added later? I would suspect that drives inside the machine are somewhat immune from the handling risk I was talking about.

We get 50-100 dead drive reports per week, though we're obviously more storage focussed than NBR at large.

 

I suppose on NBR most drives come pre-installed with a few people upgrading them, what percentage i don't know.

I have read this study into hdd failure, though it is in desktop servers and is 3 years old.

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&so...Vqfnx1udw&sig2=N9uvsIkO43fLITwddxFm-A&cad=rja

 

hey Brian. What sort of hard-drive error would cause windows to hard-freeze randomly.

Like once or twice every few days.

edit: pretty sure it's the hard-drive since the diagnostic in the bios says that's what's wrong. Ram checked out alright, assuming that the rest of the hardware isn't bad.

 

Depends on your attention span. If reading a headline and looking at one or two pictures is all it's good for, then, yes, that's what it looks like. If it's long enough to actually read a whole article [gasp!], then the result is very different.

 

do you mean the bit about that seagate, and that the problems might be fixed.