The make of the drive means nothing. It's a lotto just like people, some live long while others die young.
Thats funny, i cant count how much importaint datas i lost which i never get back on Harddisks of Western Digital, IBM/Hitachi, Hitachi Notebook Harddisk. I already run years 7200.12 500GB in in Stripeset Raid 24/7 and 3 7200.14 2GB Raid 5. I have 6 Harddisk of Seagate 7200.9 with 160GB not in use i dont know what i should do with them and they still works fine So i dont give a XXXX to that News.
You can do two types of advanced replacement from Seagate, one is free but slow (though you need to give them your credit card number in case you never return the bad drive) and the costs money but they send it very quickly (two day mail I think).
I own 8 Barracuda's, had 9 but lost one to a power surge. Oldest was bought in 2007 and still trucks along. (actually I also got some 10 yrs old IDE but not in use). I wasn't going to mention it as I didn't want to be seen as biased. Nothing wrong with WD either, but to claim Hitachi (Toshiba) are the most reliable drives based on questionable data is misleading.
This mirrors my experiences. Only drives I've ever had die are a Seagate, randomly, for no reason, and a Hitachi, which I dropped when it bounced off the bed (long story).
Knock on wood. I never had a HD fail on me. Like Pill I have some old IDE drives with 10+ years stored in cupboard that still work to this day. Even have one of those 1.5TB Seagate that chugs along in a SATA3/eSata enclosure, its about 5-6 years old. I did have a PSU fail maybe 10 years ago and that took out an old WD drive in a magnificent way. I heard a high pitch whistle from the PC, looked over and saw a blue/white flame cut threw the metal housing of the drive and then a big cloud of smoke. The drives motor must have been spinning in the 50K+ RPM range.
Well, i never saw so many HDDs failing like now! and most of them are WD... RMA's and more RMA's to my dealers... every week!
Drives never fail for "no reason". Your motherboard might not inform you there's a problem, but if you run SMART tests, I'm sure you'll see tons of red markings with dates recorded LONG before the error occurred. If you can't even get SMART results, that could be an issue with your power supply. Seagate has a tendency to over-exaggerate problems in SMART, but the thing about mechanical devices is once there's a slight fault, it won't take much for it to spread into something severe. As for dropping drives, that USUALLY won't have any impact at all as long as it isn't active. You might permanently destroy a few clusters here and there, but it should still be operable. I think one thing to keep in mind is whether you buy many of the same drive. If all the drives are the same model and made from the same batch and if one of them fails, there's a good chance that the others will fail shortly after.
I read this article way before it was on here and kinda laughed. All the Seagate Drives i have had for the past 3 years are all working and 2 go through incredible amounts of writes and very large file transfers daily. Does anyone else find this article silly?.
No? Don't you think this company, which has over 12k Seagate drives, has a better basis of saying which drives are reliable than you, as a home user do? I have Seagate drives in my file server too, and they are also fine. Along with an armada of WD GP drives, which have never failed me either. Plus some WD drives that have seen continuous writes/reads for 5 years in a row. Doesn't really mean anything. Also, the article states that these "pods" that they use probably put more strain on the drive than normal, due to vibration and such.
I'm not a home user and yes the conclusion is very inaccurate because of what it's based on. "Hitachi are the most reliable drives" is plain wrong when the only units even tested from the competition were their most unreliable models and the most common units (1TB and 2TB and 500GB) were not included. Furthermore the testing was done over only 4yrs max and goes against MTBF data. Also there was a mix of consumer and enterprise drives from all sides. But since there's no specific info on how the testing was done there's no way to analyse the results. Nothing was apples to apples. Lastly Hitachi Deskstar drivers are historically unreliable, it's almost an insult to the intelligence to have one company claim they are suddenly the most reliable drives available ahead of BOTH Seagate AND WD, based on unreliable testing.
No warnings, even with SMART enabled, turned it off one night, turned it on the next day, bang, drive stopped working.
I agree the headline could be misleading, but if you read the article everything becomes clear. In their case, Hitachi has been the most reliable, and Seagate's been ****. There's nothing wrong with it, and it's interesting none the less. When it comes to HDD reliability, everyone has an opinion. And it's usually along the lines of "yeah well, I have had like 4 Seagate drives and none of them have failed. Seagate rulz". Seeing statistics from big companies like this, who literally live off of storage, is, to me, interesting. Now, I'd like to see stats from, say, Google. That would be interesting.
One of my external HDD's is a HITACHI the rest are Samsung (internal and external). The Hitachi is the one I keep a weather eye on!