What is the Best Hard Drive?

Discussion in 'hardware' started by SweX, Jan 21, 2015.

  1. SweX

    SweX Registered Member

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    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
     
  2. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    Interesting results. Thanks for sharing.
     
  3. lotuseclat79

    lotuseclat79 Registered Member

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  4. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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    Interesting, but at the moment I only care about SSD's, I'm still planning to replace my second 1TB HDD with a SSD.
     
  5. mirimir

    mirimir Registered Member

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    I stopped using Seagate drives years ago :)
     
  6. imdb

    imdb Registered Member

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    i think it's too early to make that move, given their price per gb.
     
  7. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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    I'm planning to buy a 500GB SSD, storage size is not that important to me. It should take me 5 years or more to fill it.
     
  8. Dragon1952

    Dragon1952 Registered Member

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    Takeaways: What are The Best Hard Drives
    4 TB Drives Are Great

    We like every one of the 4 TB drives we bought this year. For the price, you get a lot of storage, and the drive failure rates have been really low. The Seagate Desktop HDD.15 has had the best price, and we have a LOT of them. Over 12 thousand of them. The failure rate is a nice low 2.6% per year. Low price and reliability is good for business.......https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
     
  9. zfactor

    zfactor Registered Member

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    hitachi desktop drives for me is one i very rarely use WAY to many failure's in the past with them. i can not at all agree with those findings. i have had way to many of them fail way to soon. and i also disagree on the seagate drives. honestly anymore i would take one of those over the newest western digital ones. i find seagate drives to be very reliable. imo samsung has been the best overall for me but they are now part of seagate and are getting harder to come by and desktop drives are rare anymore from them. but many newer seagate drives have incorporated the samsung tech into them since they bought them a few years ago. since then seagate drives have been bullet proof for me. i can not in any way agree with that review.

    note: we service and sell literally around 1,000 (approx) drives each year overall between new built systems and swap outs and repairs. i use seagate OFTEN in many of our new builds and i have for a few years now and i just dont have issues with them dying. i have only had to replace a few drives in the last couple years and most of the time they are western digital.

    now laptop drives are a different story i do like hitachi LAPTOP drives and have had very low failure rates with them but i still think the samsungs are a more reliable drive overall.
     
  10. Dragon1952

    Dragon1952 Registered Member

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    http://www.seagate.com/about/newsro...ompletes-aquisition-samsungs-hdd-business-pr/
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 26, 2015
  11. whitedragon551

    whitedragon551 Registered Member

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    That has to be the most inaccurate list I have ever seen. I work for a managed service provider that deals with Lenovo exclusively. Lenovo packs their desktops (M92, M93, and M93 Tiny's) all with Hitachi HSGT drives. We have had over 30 of them fail within the first year. They dont even need to be in a PC that is on all the time and they fail for no reason. They are absolute garbage drives. No way only 1% of them fail within 4 year period of time.
     
  12. hawki

    hawki Registered Member

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    Though all HD Manufacturers likely include some type of similar statements, I found this to be of interest:

    Seagate Annual Report - Latest filed with The SEC is For Year 2014: SEC Form 10Q

    "ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS

    Risks Related to our Business....................

    Due to the complexity of our products, some defects may only become detectable after deployment.

    Our products are highly complex and are designed to operate in and form part of larger complex networks and storage systems. Defects in our products, or in the networks and systems of which they form a part, directly or indirectly, have resulted in and may in the future result in:

    increased costs and product delays until complex solution level interoperability issues are resolved;

    costs associated with the remediation of any problems attributable to our products;

    loss of or delays in revenues;

    loss of customers;

    failure to achieve market acceptance and loss of market share;

    increased service and warranty costs; and

    increased insurance costs.

    Defects in our products could also result in legal actions by our customers for property damage, injury or death. Product liability claims could exceed the level of insurance coverage that we have obtained to cover defects in our products. Any significant uninsured claims could significantly harm our financial condition."

    http://investor.shareholder.com/sea...221037Z10-K_HTM_DC73001_ITEM_1A__RISK_FACTORS

    Repairs and replacements: Actually seems to be an improvement since 2102, but could also be the result of reduced market share. Figures are in millions and are stated to be costs of repairs and replacements::

    2014: (228 )

    2013: ( 276 )

    2012: (284 )

    http://investor.shareholder.com/sea...__FINANCIAL_STATEMENTS_AND_SUPPLEMENTARY_DATA
     
    Last edited: Feb 28, 2015
  13. NGRhodes

    NGRhodes Registered Member

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    30 out of how many ?
     
  14. whitedragon551

    whitedragon551 Registered Member

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    About 200 various M92P Full size, M92P Tiny's, and M93P full size desktops. Everyone of the ones that fails does it randomly. Most are rarely used. They sit in remote locations in a warehouse and are used once or twice a week to modify an Excel document on a network drive.

    Whats funny is under warranty the Hitachi drives are replaced with Seagate drives almost every time. Lenovo clearly knows Hitachi is cheap and will fail and when it does they send a superior drive to replace it.
     
  15. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    I have been using 10 HDs in laptops and USB ranging from 60GB to 2 TB since 2005 (Samsung 3 years old, Hitachi 7 years, WD 5 years, Seagate 4 years, and the oldest one which I don't know the brand name, 10 years), they are all working properly. My theory for this reliable performance is a vibration free environment, I never walk with my machines on, nor use them on my lap, luck might be a factor as well...
     
  16. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    Q: What is the best hard drive?

    A: The one which is backed up..
     
  17. Hadron

    Hadron Registered Member

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    Western Digital have been my preferred choice of hard drives for many years.
     
  18. NGRhodes

    NGRhodes Registered Member

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    That is a very high failure rate, what is interesting is they are failing with little use, dodgy batch/model/installation(at manufacture) ?

    Is that speculation or have you asked them ?
     
  19. whitedragon551

    whitedragon551 Registered Member

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    Thats personal experience. Each HD was covered under warranty and each one was replaced with a Seagate rather than a matching Hitachi.
     
  20. MisterB

    MisterB Registered Member

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    I've had one drive go bad recently but not completely fail. The data left on it is still readable. It is WD, around 7 years old. It had some heavy use, about the most of any drive I've used over the last few years so having to replace it was not unexpected. I don't use very large drives for anything but cold storage. On live systems, I don't put anything bigger than 320gb. It takes me quite some time to fill a 200gb data partition and at that point, anything I want to keep is copied to an offline cold storage drive and the rest erased. I am moving very slowly towards SSDs as the cost becomes lower. I've never had any problems with Seagate but I don't use any of their newer drives. In the last 15 years or so, I've had very few drive failures--maybe 5 or 6. Most of the time, there is a definite cause like the drive being dropped or jarred while writing.
     
  21. Stigg

    Stigg Registered Member

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  22. luciddream

    luciddream Registered Member

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    I always swore by WD back when I used IDE & SATA HD's. They were just tanks. To my (personal) experience the things just lasted and lasted, while other peoples were taking craps and needing to be replaced, mine were still going strong. And that's while using them hard. They're affordable too. I found the Blue ones to be the best.

    But now I'm migrating to SSD's, and my favorite is the Samsung 850 Pro. I just ordered a 256 GB one for $165. That's plenty of space for me, as I won't be using the box I'm putting it in to store a bunch of data. I have other HD's and an external one at that to store data I want to hang onto. This drive (and box period) will be just to use a computer. To browse, basically. I have another machine for multimedia use and gaming. And a laptop with a nested VPN setup and VM for... other things.

    And I notice the 512 GB one is almost twice as much. If not for that discrepancy I may have thought about buying it. Probably still not though. I only like my HD to be as big as I need it to be --- lesser seek times, keeps it in shape better
     
  23. SweX

    SweX Registered Member

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    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/
     
  24. RJK3

    RJK3 Registered Member

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    I'm sure the list is accurate as it's in their best interest to keep thorough records. It's also bound to be more reliable than your company's sample of 200, given that the sample size for the Backblaze data is over 40,000 units.

    Still, they are just one company, so there could be variances in what batches companies receive depending on location. It'd be great if other companies would provide this kind of information for consumers, even if it's likely that they'd be using something better than consumer grade hard drives.
     
  25. J_L

    J_L Registered Member

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    To the original question: A modern SSD.
     
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