[vox-tech] Hard drive Reliability

[Alex Mandel]

On 07/22/2013 09:02 PM, David Spencer wrote:
> What brand are you buying and what rotational speed? I've had good luck with Seagate at 7200RPM. But that's just me. I always mirror whatever drives I get.
> 
> -- Dave Spencer
> 
> On Jul 22, 2013, at 7:58 PM, Peter Salzman <p at dirac.org> wrote:
> 
>> For the past couple of years I've been buying 2TB drives because they're so cheap.
>>
>> But I think I've lost more drives in the last 5 years than I've ever lost in my entire life.  I haven't been keeping records, but I swear it feels like many of my drives last 2-3 years.  Are others finding the same thing?
>>
>> Are there any manufacturers known to be more reliable than others?   Less reliable than others?

If you read the reviews online, yes reliability is dismal the larger the
drive in the consumer bracket. Quick viewing of newegg reviews for 2 TB
drive from Seagate and WD shows about a 25% failure/unhappy rate, 3 TB
drives approach 50% failure/unhappy, not enough reviews on 4 TB yet to
say. Hitachi and Samsung got good review in the 2 TB range for a while
but Toshiba bought the Hitachi drive brand and no one is sure about
quality now.

The only suggestion I can make is to buy the Enterprise drives for ~
double the price which are rated for longer hours, higher shock etc. or
expect to swap drives every 2-3 years.

You may have noted that drives only come with 1-3 year warranty now, as
opposed to 5 year which used to be the norm. So I think they may be
taking a calculated risk and manufacturing drives that are actually
highly likely to fail after 3 years. I'm sure someone has some graphs
online of probability of failure rate for common drives over time.
Wouldn't surprise me if it's much steeper decline than it used to be.

Enjoy,
Alex

FYI, the brands I mentioned above are the only spinning disk ones known
to be any good (depends on models) and according to some sources may be
the only brands that exist now.