[TC] Gaming Forums

Heyya,

So I'm starting to wonder, what on earth is up? I've gone through.. two 1tb hard drive's, 1 from WD, 1 from Seagate, and now a 2TB drive.. from seagate..

They've all.. Failed O_o within 3-6months. Every single one of them. Now, what interests me more is that, my very old WD-DELL drive's, one with 250gb and one with 500, continue to work without a problem for several years now.. What's up with that?

The thing is, they've all been treated well and have suffered no major knocks, the 'environment' in my room is fairly stable and even with my new PC with a very air-efficient chasis, still a failure so early in it's life?

I'm starting to feel that, the smaller, older hard drives are more reliable and are of better build quality than the newer ones that are being brought to us because they've knocked off the price they also knocked off the quality. Am I right in saying that?

Inevitably this means I've to replace this 2tb hard drive that is now dieing so early in it's lifespan. I'm losing my trust quickly for both WD and Seagate but if someone can recommend me a drive that will last I would appreciate it..

Anything from WD it recommended, otherwise an SSD with a non-sanforce 2281 controller (Just look for the ones with either 64, 128, 256 or 512GB)

Seagate and WD are the best quality brands, followed closely by Samsung. Hitachi are the worst by some margin.
I have 2 1TB and 1 3TB Seagate (one's branded Maxtor) drives and they've had no problems so far. I've had a failure on my 1.5TB WD (see below), but its replacement is still gong strong.

Most likely either you've been unlucky, or there's something wrong with your system.

There's something known as Infant Mortality in most manufactured products, especially electronics. Basically, the vast majority of failures happen either in the first few months - the Infant Mortality period - because of manufacturing defects (usually <1 year, hence the 1yr basic warranty) or after several years when things start failing due to age.
With some kinds of hard drive failures, you only find out when you first write to/read from that part of the disk - I had that recently where some sectors a couple of hundred MB from the end of a 1.5TB WD drive were bad. Took me over a year to write enough data to fill it up that far to find out.

Regarding the environment: you said that your case is well ventilated - contrary to popular belief, a study by Google (they use many millions of hard drives) showed that HDDs actually like it quite warm - between ~30-40 degrees IIRC. If your room gets quite cool/cold and you have air from outside the case blowing directly on the drives, that may well cause problems. Much worse if it's cold AND humid.
It might be an idea to get some software (like speedfan) to monitor your drive temps.

(2012-11-23 23:32)Elmo Wrote: [ -> ]contrary to popular belief, a study by Google (they use many millions of hard drives) showed that HDDs actually like it quite warm - between ~30-40 degrees IIRC.

Read that study aswell, but it only said that very low or very high temperatures had a negative effect on the durability. After all google uses these drives 24/7 which means over time there will be small temperature changes and as 30°C+ isn't killing them it could be the change of the temperature that might be a harming factor.

Your hardrive at home will have loads of temperature changes in it's lifetime, so i personally rather keep my drives at room temperature, to keep material expansion to a minimum. Hardly scientific and only my two cents.

Faulty Power supply making them go wrong maybe ? Whenever I get a new hard drive I always test it with a program called Hdtune to scan for bad sectors, Even if the hard drive seems to work ok scan it to make sure everything works correctly. Don't use quick scan because it can sometimes miss bad sectors. If you find 1 bad sector then you send it back for a new 1.

If you case ain't cooled that well just buy some cheap fans to put in it because it will make a big difference. My Samsung drives last me 3-4 years & that's with every day use, I still got a Maxtor 120gb from 12 years ago & it still works fine

I'm not sure I would recommend a Samsung drive. My HM641JI is dying a slow and very painful death. Maybe it's because in September and October it was running in a 40F environment and ran at 15c, or because the low cache (8mb) just affects everything I do. I'm not sure, but I'm getting rid of this thing anyway.

My Seagate 7200.11 worked for a year and a half at 5400rpm, until the motherboard failed. And the 120GB WD IDE drive in my mom's old Dell XPS Gen 2 was corrupted in 2010 (7 year lifetime).

Go for Seagate or WD, maybe not Samsung.

Are you cooling the hard drives?

(2012-11-24 00:12)Pipa Wrote: [ -> ]Read that study aswell, but it only said that very low or very high temperatures had a negative effect on the durability. After all google uses these drives 24/7 which means over time there will be small temperature changes and as 30°C+ isn't killing them it could be the change of the temperature that might be a harming factor.

Not quite...

Quote:We first look at the correlation between average temperature during the observation period and failure. Figure 4 shows the distribution of drives with average temperature in increments of one degree and the corresponding annualized failure rates. The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend.

37°-45° Has the lowest failure rate (~1%)
30° is 2%
25° is 3%
20° is about 7%, but they had fewer drives that cool, so the distribution is a bit bigger.

They did show that older drives (3+ years) had higher fail rates (only up to about 2x though) at higher temperatures (>40°), but as it was a 9 month study, it's unclear whether that's to do with actual age or older technology.

Overall, looks like the sweet spot over the life of the drive is ~35°

They also acknowledged other studies which showed that changes in temperature of >15° can double the failure rate. However, they weren't clear if they meant operating temperatures or whether they were including initial warm-up time, although I'd guess it's operating temp.

(2012-11-26 01:05)Elmo Wrote: [ -> ]37°-45° Has the lowest failure rate (~1%)
30° is 2%
25° is 3%
20° is about 7%, but they had fewer drives that cool, so the distribution is a bit bigger.

That is true, but the conclusion at the end also said.

Quote:We can conclude that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there are other effects which affect failure rates much more strongly than temperatures do.

The heavy AFR increase between 25°C to 18°C from ~3 to ~9,5 seems a bit suspect to me. I also doubt that this data is any use to home users as we tend to use our harddrives rather differently.

Got a link to those other studies, i couldn't find any where they included temperature changes or high power cycles.

They had a reference from Seagate I think, but I couldn't find the actual study.