Western Digital reliability

Discussion in 'SSD and HDD storage' started by Sir Galahad, Feb 1, 2016.

  1. Sir Galahad

    Sir Galahad Guest

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    Yesterday, for the first time in my 18 years of PC building, I had a hard drive fail on me.

    It started with a SMART relocated sector count failure which windows 7 notified me about. I tried to run a Chkdsk which took 6 hours and then froze my PC when it was 99% complete. From then on that PC wouldn't even boot to windows with that hard drive installed. I put the drive in my main gaming rig with windows 10 and luckily it recognised it and I managed to do a full hard drive clone. After that I tried to format the drive but it failed after a few minuets and was no longer recognised at all by windows.

    It was a Western Digital Black 1TB drive (WD1003FZEX) I had in my LAN box. It has windows 7 installed on a separate SSD so luckily it wasn't that important.

    Up until now I always thought people were over reacting when they said hard drives were unreliable ect as I had never suffered a failure before. Now I'm worried about my other PCs especially as this one was the one I used the least and it had the most expensive hard drive in it. My other PCs have Seagate barracuda drives in them, a 2TB one in the gaming rig, 3TB in my 2nd PC and 2x 1TB drives in my retro gaming rig running in RAID0.

    The retro rig is the only one which has windows installed on the hard drive as the others have SSDs.

    Are Western Digital drives known for unreliability or have I just been unlucky here?

    I feel it really shouldn't have failed as it was only used to store games, has never been used as a boot drive, is only about 14 months old and isn't used very often (once or twice a week to play LAN games with my friends).

    Could moving the PC around allot have contributed to its early demise?
     
  2. CalculuS

    CalculuS Ancient Guru

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    Well i'm using a 6 year old WDD 500GB but anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

    Moving it may or may not have caused it to break, you could also just be very unlucky and the board broke.
     
  3. jbmcmillan

    jbmcmillan Guest

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    They are all subject to failure it's not if but when so it's silly not to have anything you don't want to lose backed up to at least two locations.
     
  4. nhlkoho

    nhlkoho Guest

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    Every brand will have failures. There is no perfect brand.

    I will say that every WD drive I have ever owned still works. I still have a 20GB drive from 2001 that still works.
     

  5. Sir Galahad

    Sir Galahad Guest

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    I also have a 20GB drive from around the same time that still works. As I say this is my first drive failure.

    I'm more worried about my other PCs especially as they are all using Seagate drives which are generally more unreliable than Western Digital.

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

    I do not like the failure rate on the 3TB barracuda drives. I have one of those in my 2nd PC and have all my important data on it. :frown:
     
  6. jbmcmillan

    jbmcmillan Guest

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    Better back it up when it's only on there no matter what brand it is.Three rules of computing back up,back up, back up.
     
  7. Sir Galahad

    Sir Galahad Guest

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    Two days ago I would have disagreed. Now however...

    What would you suggest as a backup? Separate PC? NAS box? RAID 1?
     
  8. nhlkoho

    nhlkoho Guest

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    Seagates have been garbage for me.
    If you can afford it, I'd get a cheap NAS and a few WD Reds for backup. I run a 4 bay QNAP NAS with 4-4TB WD Reds. They are quite and pretty fast.
    Or if you have a spare PC laying around you can always build your own with OpenNAS.
     
  9. jura11

    jura11 Guest

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    Hi there

    In my case,I bought 3 3TB HDD from Seagate,two failed,one failed(I/O error and HDD is not accessible) after 6 months of use,second HDD is failing,he have slowdowns at 900MB and transfer rate there is at 1.2mbps and 1.6TB transfer rate is lot worse and then at 2.3TB there is next slowdown and there is transfer rate at around 100kbps,due this I wouldn't recommend them at all and there I've important files,I've got warranty,but I need to recover there files,which I think will be possible,but will be painfully slow there

    Regarding the WD,I've got 3 1TB Black and 1 500GB WD Blue which are around 2-3 years old and there I've written lot more and they're still holding pretty much great,two of them have relocation error and they're stable sectors,they're doesn't increase at all after writing there

    I wouldn't use at all Chkdsk,he screwed my HDD and lot files has been missing and really Chkdsk to use is only on HDD which you are have already has been backup

    Thanks,Jura
     
  10. Sir Galahad

    Sir Galahad Guest

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    I like Seagate drives because of their speed. This is my 3TB drive after 1 year of use:

    [​IMG]

    Not bad for a mechanical drive using sata 3Gb/s.


    I've got a ton of old PC parts lying around so I could effectively build a whole PC for no money, apart from the drives that is.

    That would mean that I would have 5 full tower PCs though and 4 is already too much.
     

  11. nhlkoho

    nhlkoho Guest

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    Speed means nothing if they aren't reliable.
     
  12. jura11

    jura11 Guest

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    +1

    That's 100% true,I've got 2 Toshiba 3TB which has been most reliable HDD which I owned and WD too hasn't been bad,I just hate WD Green

    Thanks,Jura
     
  13. Sir Galahad

    Sir Galahad Guest

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    Finally got my RMA replacement today. Took 14 days in total.

    My LAN rig is up and running again after restoring the backup. Glad to report no data loss.
     
  14. slyphnier

    slyphnier Guest

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    any HDD FAIL ... and we cant predict when too
    so back up

    anyway i am wondering, how long that WD Black been used ? (its best if u know power count/on in smart info)
    u said its LAN box, do u take/move it often ?
    when moving u can hit/bump things, and it can add possibility why hdd fail early
    vibration and hard hit/bump arent same

    i myself make personal guideline
    - HDD failure rate should be pretty low within first 3years of usage

    - concerning wearing parts on hdd parts (motors, heads etc) ... i always replacing hdd after 3years of power on/usage (around 26280 power-on hours )

    - for temp i try to keep floating around 5C... like 36-42... 42 might to hot for some people... but it back to hdd model/series, like WD black, it run warmer than say RED/Green
     
  15. Noisiv

    Noisiv Ancient Guru

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    42C nowhere near too hot

    I remember there was a big HDD study which showed lower temps (<30) being more dangerous then say 50+C,
    and big temp. difference min/max being even more dangerous.

    I would assume due to condensation.
     

  16. mare17

    mare17 Guest

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    Like Noisiv said 40+ is no problem for hdds. I have 1 Seagate, 2 Samsungs, running 50k+ hours (24/7) temps averaging for 2 hdds, 38 to 45°c in summer, and for one 28 - 35, some run cooler than others (sensors). Just dont go to extremes, lets say 10+-c in 10 min, and youre fine.

    Also I woundt run a hdd past 55°c for a long period.
     
    Last edited: Mar 2, 2016
  17. Fender178

    Fender178 Ancient Guru

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    At work today I had to swap out 2 Hard drives that were Caviar Blues 500Gb due to them being close to death's door they still work but there were issues with the drives such as lockups during normal use and the Dell diagnostics tool said that the Drives were bad.

    Usually the Caviar Blues are decent drives. I never had a drive completely die on me. I had 1 drive that was on its last legs like it would barely copy any files to it or from it and that was an old Seagate 200gb IDE drive. I had killed a drive using one of them SATA/IDE to USB kits and the drive made a hiss sound and I smelled the smell of burnt electronics and that was a 750gb Seagate SATA drive my old boot drive from my Q6600 rig.

    Same with my former place of employment they used alot of them Seagate 3TB drives in NASes and at the beginning they were working great then after that particular batch they started dying left and right. Afterwards then they switched out the Segates for WD reds 3TB and never looked back. I even have a 3TB WD red drive in my main rig for storage and its been working very well.
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2016
  18. pimp_gimp

    pimp_gimp Ancient Guru

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    For new storage I'd go grab a NAS, and get some HGST Deskstar or WD reds to go with it.
     
  19. EspHack

    EspHack Ancient Guru

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    don't trust any hdd or ssd, they all can and will fail, eventually, keep backups and that's it, but yea we can say WD is generally more reliable than Seagate by majority's claim and some studies but there's people who would tell you otherwise, and they are not wrong either, see? in the end, don't trust any brand, just back up everything important, get used to it

    and yes moving a hdd from place to place will harm it for sure more than a sitting desk rig, the only drives that ever failed me are from laptops, and I remember a wd 160gb drive that I took to a friends house after a while showed a bad sector, so yes I'm pretty confident they don't like going out :p
     
  20. Sir Galahad

    Sir Galahad Guest

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    It was only used for about a year. I can't imagine the up time was more than about 2000 hours.

    Yeah it was moved around allot but I was always careful and it never received any major hits or bumps.

    The HDD temps were always around 40c in that case.
     

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