Known-good drive manufacturers, known-trusty PC review sources

It's time to upgrade Linux in my machine. Since I use Ubuntu and upgrade by more than one revision at a time, this means that the smart thing to do is to not trust the automatic upgrade software, but instead to start out with a blank disk drive and rebuild.

(Ubuntu is supposed to do a clean upgrade, but what it actually does is try to keep all your old settings -- so you end up with a software- generated kludge. And besides; I archive my old disks in case some customer from way back when comes out of the woodwork).

So -- who's known for reliable disk drives these days? If it makes a difference I'm looking for at least 300GB, with no real upper limit on size (other than its impact on price and reliability).

And -- are there any sites or magazines that are known to do a good job of reviewing PC hardware, or are they all just whoring for the manufacturers?

TIA.

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My liberal friends think I'm a conservative kook. 
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Reply to
Tim Wescott
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AFAICT Seagate and Western Digital are tops but not perfect. Informed rumor gives then both a failure rate of a few percent, so watch the warranty period which varies a lot. I recently lost a Samsung that was replaced and a barely-out-of-warranty WD. HDTune has detected failing drives for me by dips in their transfer speed, though the Windows boot drive shows dips anyway from OS overhead.

I keep two copies of low-value files, three or more of important ones, and clone the boot drive.

A few minutes ago I finished copying 1.05TB of files onto a new FreeAgent backup drive that I had burn-in tested continuously for several days with Seagate's SeaTools and HDTune's error scan. A USB3 Espresscard in the old laptop boosts transfer speed from USB2's 20MB/S to 60 - 80MB/s, limited by the internal PCI-E bus speed. The drive can do 125MB/S on a USB3 base borrowed from another drive.

Reply to
Jim Wilkins
1TB SATA drives are available for about $150 these days. I do a fair number of DVRs and NVRs in my day job, so I use whatever my manufacturer recommends.
Reply to
Bob La Londe

There's a thread in the storage group that links here:

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Short quote: Our philosophy is to plan for equipment failure and build a system that operates in spite of it. We have a lot of redundancy, ensuring that if a drive fails, immediate replacement isn?t critical. So at his leisure, Sean also spends one day each week replacing drives that have gone bad. As of this week, Backblaze has more than 9,000 hard drives spinning in the datacenter, the oldest of which we purchased four years ago. We see fairly high infant mortality on the hard drives deployed in brand new pods, so we like to burn the pods in for a few days before storing any customer data. We have yet to see any drives die because of old age, which will be fascinating to monitor in the next few years. All told, Sean replaces approximately 10 drives per week, indicating a 5 percent per year drive failure rate across the entire fleet, which includes infant mortality and also the higher failure rates of previous drives. (We are currently seeing failures in less than 1 percent of the Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630 drives that we?re installing in pod 2.0.)

Reply to
mike

Western Digital , 320 Gb drive that's designed for media storage/playback usage - they got a name for it but it escapes me right now . And last one I bought was less than 70 bucks delivered . They've been pretty good to me , replaced drives that were in the last weeks of warranty . Last Ubuntu I tried was a total cluster .

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Snag 
Learning keeps 
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Reply to
Snag

Seagate and Hitachi are very reliable in my experience. We don't track MTBF very well on our storage arrays, but it seems that the old age failures start becoming prevalent at around 10 years for pre-ROHS drives (all RAIDed so drive failures are not an issue). I'd expect the post-ROHS dries to have a much shorter life before they start frying their little tin whiskers.

Reply to
Pete C.

None of the manufacturers are reliable and all have their failures. Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi seem to take turns producing winners and losers roughly every 6 months. Note that both the Seagate and WD factories in Thailand were under water from about Sept thru Nov last year and that it took a long time for both to recover.

I think a better question would be which drives are the least disgusting these days. This is about 9 months of accumulated "to be tested" and "maybe can be revived" drives. I go through about 2 to 4 drives per week doing various sales, upgrades, transplants, and crash recoveries.

Bigger is faster, mostly because of the larger cache on the drive but also because the head seek distance is typically smaller. However, the bigger they are, the harder they crash, so pick something that's slightly less than the state of the art.

Western Digital is my favorite for about the last 3 months. They have

3 different grades. Green at the bottom, Blue in the middle, and Black at the top. I've had 100% bad sector failures out of 4 drives on the Green drives. However, WD has a workable no-argument warranty. I've exchanged under warranty one Green drive twice. The 2nd time, they shipped me a Blue. No problems with Blue or Black out of about 40 drives since about March 2012.

There's a catch with the warranty. WD offers a 5 year warranty on most of the Blue and Black drives. That's nice, but if you use it, the exchange drive only has a 90 day warranty. I was lucky and had the exchange drive die within the 90 days.

I could say some things about Seagate and Hitachi, but my lunch is getting cold. Another day.

Check the reviews on the various sales sites, such as NewEgg and Tiger Direct. User comments get my attention. Eliminate anything that looks like it was written by a clueless idiot, and read the rest.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I like reading the Newegg customer reviews before I buy anything.. especially the negative ones. When they have a lot of reviews (say more than 50) I've found it pretty reliable. Sometimes the customers are just not very savvy, or they could be dishonest, of course. They indicate "verified owner" when the reviewer bought the product from Newegg, so at least those reviewers have some skin in the game.

Last time I looked for new desktop drives (admittedly a year or so ago) most of the > 1T drives had reliability issues, I bought a couple

2T Hitachis (best I could find at the time) and they've been working well in a mirror configuration. I've used a whole bunch of the WD Black drives (500 and 750G) and they've been quite reliable and fast. Had a lot of trouble with some others such as the super-fast (and super-hot-running) WD VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM drives.

Taking a quick look, one of these is probably what I'd buy today in your situation:-

WD5003ABYX (WD 500G) ~$107 shipped

or

ST1000DM005 (Samusung 1T) ~$90 shipped

Newegg used to ship their drives pretty carelessly but they've been (the last few years) investing 75 cents each in a Uline carton for each bare drive so more of them arrive alive.

I would avoid drives with very few reviews.. they are probably too new to have much history.

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

That shouldn't be the case, according to their web site:

###

Limitation of Remedies

YOUR EXCLUSIVE REMEDY FOR ANY DEFECTIVE PRODUCT IS LIMITED TO THE REPAIR OR REPLACEMENT OF THE DEFECTIVE PRODUCT.

WD may elect which remedy or combination of remedies to provide in its sole discretion. WD shall have a reasonable time after determining that a defective Product exists to repair or replace a defective Product. WD's replacement Product under its limited warranty will be manufactured from new and serviceable used parts. WD's warranty applies to repaired or replaced Products for the balance of the applicable period of the original warranty or ninety days from the date of shipment of a repaired or replaced Product, whichever is longer.

###

As I read the last sentence, the replacement should be covered up through the end of your original (e.g.) 3- or 5-year warranty. If your original failure occurs just before the end of the original warranty period, the replacement should be covered for a minimum of 90 days.

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Dave Platt                                    AE6EO 
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior 
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Reply to
Dave Platt

First of all...you should be aware of this site

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Its the gold standard for Linux distros. There are other versions of Linux and BSD that may be better.

Im looking at OS4 at the moment myself.

Secondly...

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Gets a lot of my business. Check their ads for media

Seagate is still top of the line and since the Japanese got their drive plants dried out...

Third..there are lots of sites that give unbiased reviews. Finding them...is problematic.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

  1. Lie
  2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
  3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
  4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
  5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
  6. Then everyone must conform to the lie
Reply to
Gunner

FWIW, I installed a Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 as an additional drive into the desktop about three years ago. That gets tortured to the hilt by incessant RAW file read/writes from my SPICE simulations which I do a lot lately. All day long. It's probably like using a car as a taxi in a busy town. Holding on without problems, and this drive cost all of $60 at Newegg.

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Regards, Joerg 

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Reply to
Joerg

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And check

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and read the reviews and the popularity bar on the right for most popular versions.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

  1. Lie
  2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
  3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
  4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
  5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
  6. Then everyone must conform to the lie
Reply to
Gunner

The WD Green are fine so far.

Tom's Hardware still has useful stuff on it. Dunno that they review drives, though. I manly use them for mobo tests, then buy a box store machine that has that mobo.

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Les Cargill
Reply to
Les Cargill

My preference is WD. But, which ever one you pick look for a 5 year warranty. The Enterprise class stuff is supposed to be better. You might look at the WD RE4 drives.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

I started having everybody turn their desktops off when they leave and having the systems hibernate after 15 minutes idle. The drives seem to last a LOT longer. I had been replacing six or so a year.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Who the heck "sends in" a defective drive? Unless it fails very, very early on (before any proprietary data is loaded), I can't imagine taking that kind of risk to save some part of $100.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward" 
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Which -may- mean that someone intelligent took a good careful look at it and ran it through more testing than usual. When I worked field service repair the serial numbers I fixed never came back.

On Seagate GoFlex external drives I've noticed that the read transfer rate may vary erratically during the first few test passes, then it stabilizes as though the heads have burnished off rough spots or cleared debris. I know the heads fly above the disk but their passage does have an effect.

jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Reply to
David Eather

That's nice, but that's not how it seems to work. When I checked the warranty status of the drives that were returned by WD, they varied from 3 months to about 5 months. None were even close to what the remaining full warranty period should have been. WD seems to interpret that paragraph to mean "any random period between 90 days and the balance of the warranty period".

I just got another drive back, so let's see what it produces. The original drive was purchased on Feb 16, 2012. I don't have a record of when the drive was manufactured, but my guess is prior to the Thailand floods or about July 2011. The manufacturers warranty is

3 years for this drive which means that the warranty should expire in July 2014. So, why does it expire 14 months early on Mar 31, 2013 ? Kinda looks like a 4 month warranty extension to me.

WD may sound bad, but they're better than Seagate. Seagate had managed to lose two warranty returns and charged my credit card for another even though I had proof of delivery for the returned drive. It took about 5 months to untangle, mostly in my favor. In the past, I've had to email support for a replacement serial number because several in retail boxes from Best Buy would not register on the Seagate web pile.

Incidentally, note the NewEgg price history on this 320GB drive:

Like I said, select the LEAST disgusting hard disk vendor (or the lesser evil).

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Software

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Buy "entrprise quality"from any manufacturer and you stand a chance of getting a good one. Personally, I stay away from WD right now due to some bad experiences - but that's with consumer grade crap.

I've had good results with Seagate Enterprise drives

Reply to
clare

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