HDDs from Hitachi are the most reliable

CybrSage

2014-01-22 20:30

I like Western Digital, mainly due to the advanced replacement RMA drives you can get I've got a few RED drives now, not sure how good they are yet but i've RMA's a few greens over the last three years and they seem to be starting to fail now in my raid array

You can do two types of advanced replacement from Seagate, one is free but slow (though you need to give them your credit card number in case you never return the bad drive) and the costs money but they send it very quickly (two day mail I think).

#4748838

Pill Monster

2014-01-22 20:33

I own 8 Barracuda's, had 9 but lost one to a power surge. Oldest was bought in 2007 and still trucks along. (actually I also got some 10 yrs old IDE but not in use). I wasn't going to mention it as I didn't want to be seen as biased. Nothing wrong with WD either, but to claim Hitachi (Toshiba) are the most reliable drives based on questionable data is misleading.

#4748845

BLEH!

2014-01-22 20:43

This mirrors my experiences. Only drives I've ever had die are a Seagate, randomly, for no reason, and a Hitachi, which I dropped when it bounced off the bed (long story).

#4748853

rflair

Moderator

2014-01-22 20:50

Knock on wood. I never had a HD fail on me. Like Pill I have some old IDE drives with 10+ years stored in cupboard that still work to this day. Even have one of those 1.5TB Seagate that chugs along in a SATA3/eSata enclosure, its about 5-6 years old. I did have a PSU fail maybe 10 years ago and that took out an old WD drive in a magnificent way. I heard a high pitch whistle from the PC, looked over and saw a blue/white flame cut threw the metal housing of the drive and then a big cloud of smoke. The drives motor must have been spinning in the 50K+ RPM range.

#4748857

FearFactory

2014-01-22 20:55

Well, i never saw so many HDDs failing like now! and most of them are WD... RMA's and more RMA's to my dealers... every week!

#4748863

schmidtbag

2014-01-22 21:04

This mirrors my experiences. Only drives I've ever had die are a Seagate, randomly, for no reason, and a Hitachi, which I dropped when it bounced off the bed (long story).

Drives never fail for "no reason". Your motherboard might not inform you there's a problem, but if you run SMART tests, I'm sure you'll see tons of red markings with dates recorded LONG before the error occurred. If you can't even get SMART results, that could be an issue with your power supply. Seagate has a tendency to over-exaggerate problems in SMART, but the thing about mechanical devices is once there's a slight fault, it won't take much for it to spread into something severe. As for dropping drives, that USUALLY won't have any impact at all as long as it isn't active. You might permanently destroy a few clusters here and there, but it should still be operable. I think one thing to keep in mind is whether you buy many of the same drive. If all the drives are the same model and made from the same batch and if one of them fails, there's a good chance that the others will fail shortly after.

#4748875

CronoGraal

2014-01-22 21:21

Time for a Guru3d HDD torture roundup? >:3

#4748877

AC_Avatar100400

2014-01-22 21:24

I read this article way before it was on here and kinda laughed. All the Seagate Drives i have had for the past 3 years are all working and 2 go through incredible amounts of writes and very large file transfers daily. Does anyone else find this article silly?.

#4748879

Pill Monster

2014-01-22 21:29

I read this article way before it was on here and kinda laughed. All the Seagate Drives i have had for the past 3 years are all working and 2 go through incredible amounts of writes and very large file transfers daily. Does anyone else find this article silly?.

Yes, I'm surprised Hilbert posted it as news tbh....

#4748908

allesclar

2014-01-22 22:17

wouldnt disagree at all. I only use Hitachi and Samsung.

#4748911

John

2014-01-22 22:24

I read this article way before it was on here and kinda laughed. All the Seagate Drives i have had for the past 3 years are all working and 2 go through incredible amounts of writes and very large file transfers daily. Does anyone else find this article silly?.

No? Don't you think this company, which has over 12k Seagate drives, has a better basis of saying which drives are reliable than you, as a home user do? I have Seagate drives in my file server too, and they are also fine. Along with an armada of WD GP drives, which have never failed me either. Plus some WD drives that have seen continuous writes/reads for 5 years in a row. Doesn't really mean anything. Also, the article states that these "pods" that they use probably put more strain on the drive than normal, due to vibration and such.

#4748923

Pill Monster

2014-01-22 22:43

No? Don't you think this company, which has over 12k Seagate drives, has a better basis of saying which drives are reliable than you, as a home user do?

I'm not a home user and yes the conclusion is very inaccurate because of what it's based on. "Hitachi are the most reliable drives" is plain wrong when the only units even tested from the competition were their most unreliable models and the most common units (1TB and 2TB and 500GB) were not included. Furthermore the testing was done over only 4yrs max and goes against MTBF data. Also there was a mix of consumer and enterprise drives from all sides. But since there's no specific info on how the testing was done there's no way to analyse the results. Nothing was apples to apples. Lastly Hitachi Deskstar drivers are historically unreliable, it's almost an insult to the intelligence to have one company claim they are suddenly the most reliable drives available ahead of BOTH Seagate AND WD, based on unreliable testing.

#4748925

BLEH!

2014-01-22 22:45

Drives never fail for "no reason". Your motherboard might not inform you there's a problem, but if you run SMART tests, I'm sure you'll see tons of red markings with dates recorded LONG before the error occurred. If you can't even get SMART results, that could be an issue with your power supply. Seagate has a tendency to over-exaggerate problems in SMART, but the thing about mechanical devices is once there's a slight fault, it won't take much for it to spread into something severe. As for dropping drives, that USUALLY won't have any impact at all as long as it isn't active. You might permanently destroy a few clusters here and there, but it should still be operable. I think one thing to keep in mind is whether you buy many of the same drive. If all the drives are the same model and made from the same batch and if one of them fails, there's a good chance that the others will fail shortly after.

No warnings, even with SMART enabled, turned it off one night, turned it on the next day, bang, drive stopped working.

#4748928

John

2014-01-22 22:48

I'm not a home user and yes the data is very inaccurate. "Hitachi are the most reliable drives" is plain wrong when the only units even tested from the competition were their most unreliable models and the most common units (1TB and 2TB and 500GB) were not included. Furthermore the testing was done over only 4yrs max and goes against MTBF data. lso there was a mix of consumer and eneterprise drives from all sides. Nothing was apples to apples.

I agree the headline could be misleading, but if you read the article everything becomes clear. In their case, Hitachi has been the most reliable, and Seagate's been ****. There's nothing wrong with it, and it's interesting none the less. When it comes to HDD reliability, everyone has an opinion. And it's usually along the lines of "yeah well, I have had like 4 Seagate drives and none of them have failed. Seagate rulz". Seeing statistics from big companies like this, who literally live off of storage, is, to me, interesting. Now, I'd like to see stats from, say, Google. That would be interesting.

#4748947

IcE

2014-01-22 23:03

Yes, I'm surprised Hilbert posted it as news tbh....

Hilbert got a bot a long time ago that just fills this section automatically with "related" news.

#4748949

John

2014-01-22 23:05

Hilbert got a bot a long time ago that just fills this section automatically with "related" news.

That's for the forum section only. News are posted on the front page manually.

#4748956

hallryu

2014-01-22 23:13

One of my external HDD's is a HITACHI the rest are Samsung (internal and external). The Hitachi is the one I keep a weather eye on!

#4748960

Pill Monster

2014-01-22 23:17

I agree the headline could be misleading, but if you read the article everything becomes clear. In their case, Hitachi has been the most reliable, and Seagate's been ****. There's nothing wrong with it, and it's interesting none the less. When it comes to HDD reliability, everyone has an opinion. And it's usually along the lines of "yeah well, I have had like 4 Seagate drives and none of them have failed. Seagate rulz". Seeing statistics from big companies like this, who literally live off of storage, is, to me, interesting. Now, I'd like to see stats from, say, Google. That would be interesting.

Hehe....here you go. 😉 I knew those results were worthless..... http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee426/pillmonsta/Capture-33.png~original

#4748964

John

2014-01-22 23:22

... The 3TB drives are still at 9%, compared to 1% for Hitachi and 3% for WD. It doesn't disprove the fact that Hitachi also performed much better than both WD and Seagate for all capacities.

#4748968

Pill Monster

2014-01-22 23:28

... The 3TB drives are still at 9%, compared to 1% for Hitachi and 3% for WD. It doesn't disprove the fact that Hitachi also performed much better than both WD and Seagate for all capacities.

Basically Seagate's most unreliable large volume drives (1.5TB, 3TB) were cpmared against Hitachi/WD. That chart would look a lot different if the Seagate's had been 1TB and 2TB models, but Backblaze look for the cheapest deals...and ended up with standard Hitachi and crap Seagate/WD. I forgot to mention WD took over Hitachi in 2012 then more recently Toshiba. Half the Hitachi drives could have been made by WD....not sure about that though. I'm just saying it's not a fair comparison.