View Full Version : Most reliable hard drive?
Tiesto
04-23-2006, 09:48 PM
What are the most reliable hard drives you can buy I am building a new system and am going for stability with this build so any help would be appreciated thanks.
nn_step
04-24-2006, 02:32 AM
Maxtor Altas (no other Maxtor Drive though) it is SCSI but they last for Decades.. and I have NEVER Seen anyone with a dead one..
Mr. Tinker
04-24-2006, 04:04 AM
Seagates with the 5-year warranty are about as good as you can get in consumer class.
Tiesto
04-24-2006, 04:55 PM
Seagates with the 5-year warranty are about as good as you can get in consumer class.
Awesome thanks I should have been more specific on what I was meaning nn_step sorry, anyways is there any seagate drive that would be better then the other in terms of reliablity or would I be good with any seagate drive?
Mr. Tinker
04-24-2006, 05:38 PM
I'd check storagereview.com. I almost said that it won't matter when they all have the 5-year warranty, but the I thought that a replacement hdd doesn't mean anything when your data is gone for good, does it?
Heretic
04-24-2006, 07:14 PM
Awesome thanks I should have been more specific on what I was meaning nn_step sorry, anyways is there any seagate drive that would be better then the other in terms of reliablity or would I be good with any seagate drive?
I don't know if they've tested the reliability of the 7200.9 (they being storagereview), but the 7200.8 series was, by their findings, highly unreliable. Supposedly the problem they had with the .8 series was fixed with the .9. The 7200.7 had great reliability as well.
If you want to protect yourself against hdd failure you can make backups every so often of your data and/or run some sort of RAID setup. If you have the cash and case space, RAID 5 all the way :)
I am not buying that 7200.8 problem just yet. I have never heard that anywhere else and I have three which run without a hickup 24/7 since fall.
In fact after several desasters with Maxtor and none with Seagate I am very firm in the Seagate camp now. WD tends to screw up firmware but seems to be mechanically sound.
But in any case, any drive from Zipzoomfly will beat any drive shipped by Newegg by a wide margin.
STEvil
04-24-2006, 07:53 PM
friend bought a 300gb seagate, it arrived making whining and clicking sounds.
Other friend had a 250gb seagate, it died in about a year and he's waiting on the RMA at the moment.
So far I have:
160gb (make unknown)
120gb WD
200gb Samsung
300gb Maxtor
They're all doing fine.
As to THE most reliable drive, i'd have to say Quantum Bigfoot or Caviar 3400. I have one of each (4gb a peice) and they've been screaming (literally, you can hear them 2 rooms away) since ~1996 or so. Got a 13gb Quantum Fireball thats not far behind, too ;)
Daveb2012
04-24-2006, 09:52 PM
i probably see more dead seagates then anything else. hitachi isn't much better.
Jester FPS
04-24-2006, 09:54 PM
I'd have to say WD. They make some sick ass drives too
I got a 74gb raptor and a 320gb caviar both WD and have been smooth as butter. The large cache's also are a +, quick and reliable.
Mr. Tinker
04-25-2006, 04:02 AM
Well, looks like everyone has their own opinion. Anecdotally, I will tell you that I worked at a school and most computer had 40g Maxtors. Over the course of the year or so I worked there, we replaced over half the drives.
Stay away from Maxtor consumer class.
Independently of the manufacturer question, I have to warn people about "server-class" harddrives, such as 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SCSI drives.
These drives are a whole lot less reliably than consumer harddrives. The optimizations that happen during the production of consumer harddrive series are only possible because of a citical mass of returns, analysing the returns and fix hot spots of error causes.
The server-class drives are intended to be used in evnironments of redundant disk arrays, with operators standing by to replace drives on a permanent basis.
Thrilla
04-25-2006, 05:42 AM
I use a WD800 myself, 7200rpm with 8mb cache. I bought the drive 3 years ago, used it in 4 different systems, formated countless times, and I even used it as a mobile HDD for a while.
It still works just like new today :)
jimwah
04-25-2006, 06:07 AM
Like Heretic said, if you want complete reliabilty then a RAID setup is the only way, most half-decent motherboards will have a SATA RAID of some kind on board now. Get 2 cheap sata disks and RAID 1 them (mirror), if your board supports it then more performance might be had from a RAID 5 (3 disks rq'd) or 10 (4 disks req'd). With disk space being as cheap as it is, it's no longer over the top to use a RAID at home. HTH :D
Like Heretic said, if you want complete reliabilty then a RAID setup is the only way, most half-decent motherboards will have a SATA RAID of some kind on board now. Get 2 cheap sata disks and RAID 1 them (mirror), if your board supports it then more performance might be had from a RAID 5 (3 disks rq'd) or 10 (4 disks req'd). With disk space being as cheap as it is, it's no longer over the top to use a RAID at home. HTH :D
RAID-1 using the onboard SATA "raid" controllers is actually asking for desaster. Not to mention it doesn't give you any of the possible performance benefits.
jimwah
04-25-2006, 06:37 AM
The overhead of running a RAID 1 is surprisingly low, and the key consideration here was reliability - why running 2 disks mirrored would be asking for disaster is beyond me (if 1 fails you just plug in another and resync), maybe you had a bad experience with an onboard raid controller once; but IMHO they work fine.
The overhead of running a RAID 1 is surprisingly low, and the key consideration here was reliability - why running 2 disks mirrored would be asking for disaster is beyond me (if 1 fails you just plug in another and resync), maybe you had a bad experience with an onboard raid controller once; but IMHO they work fine.
There have been a whole lot of reports how people lost the data on the good drive when rebooting with a broken drive. E.g. over at anandtech.
You see these toy onboard controllers have all the software twice:
- first in the BIOS, for booting
- and then in the OS driver
These two can get out of sync, and they do in practice. The OS driver can be all as smart as it wants. Then as long as you are up you are fine when a drive breaks. The driver kicks the drive out of the array, you can backup your data and you are done.
If one drive breaks but is not entirely dead and you reboot, then what is the part in the BIOS doing? According to numerous reports it often ends up mirroring the data from the bad drive to the good one, since it has no clue what was going on while the OS was up.
The onboard SATA stuff might be good enough for RAID-0 since you lose everything on one disk crash anyway. But to use it for data safety in RAID-1 is like building a bunker from half-filled gasoline cans.
Also, to my knowledge none of the onboard SATA give a performance benefit in RAID-1 which better RAID systems do (although this is fixable by just updating the OS driver, doesn't need BIOS support).
nn_step
04-25-2006, 01:13 PM
well uOpt that is why some people buy Raid Cards... Hell of alot better than onboard and if your Mobo dies just move the controller card to the new Mobo, no dealing with reinstalling
well uOpt that is why some people buy Raid Cards... Hell of alot better than onboard and if your Mobo dies just move the controller card to the new Mobo, no dealing with reinstalling
Yeah but then you are :banana::banana::banana::banana:ed when your controller dies :)
Personally I prefer software RAID (pure software, OS only, not the MB onboard stuff, no BIOS touching the array).
xerogenesis
04-26-2006, 06:25 AM
Maxtor Altas (no other Maxtor Drive though) it is SCSI but they last for Decades.. and I have NEVER Seen anyone with a dead one..
agreed, have 9 yr old compaq proliants running these and have NEVER had a problem
xerogenesis
04-26-2006, 06:28 AM
Seagates with the 5-year warranty are about as good as you can get in consumer class.
very good drives as well, especially the NCQ enabled ones, though i wouldnt rule out WD raptors since they are enterprise class drives and have been known to run for some time
masterofpuppets
04-26-2006, 06:37 AM
I've had bad experiences with Maxtor, and good experiences. My first Maxtor disk, an old 60GB IDE one (I forget the modelname), failed within 2 years. The motor would make horrible noises while spinning up. It was never bashed around, and kept in good condition. Another Maxtor I've owned, which MeltedDuron gave me has been kept in rough condition (dropped the odd few times, etc), and works flawlessly, although a bit slow. It doesn't make any horrible noises, no bad sectors, it just works. I can't comment on Seagate. But I can comment on WD. I'm using 2 Raptors right now for general storage, they've been used quite heavily, and have been in RAID0 a few times. They work flawlessly, and have been for a good couple of years. I'm going to be getting a 300GB Seagate 7200.9 soon, anybody had any experience with them?