Reliable HDD?

[MacGyverSG1]

I'm looking to add more storage. I'm thinking about getting a 2TB HDD (1TB if prices don't drop any time soon). The problem seems to be that reliability for 1TB+ HDDs is terrible right now. Many DOAs and HDDs failing shortly after installing.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a HDD @ 1TB+?

 

[BrightCandle]

Asking for a reliable HDD is like asking for a a faithful prostitute, its impossible to find such a combination.

HDDs are inherently unreliable as they use moving parts. Its inevitable that they will fail. Rather than trying to find reliable ones instead set up backups such that failures reduce your downtime, and RAID to eliminate the downtime (combined with backups of course).

 

[VirtualLarry]

Asking for a reliable HDD is like asking for a a faithful prostitute, its impossible to find such a combination.

That's a pretty dismal view of the industry. While it is true that HDDs can fail at any time and you should be prepared, the fact of the matter is, the vast majority of HDDs last for quite a number of years. (At least my WD drives have.)

Although the information is somewhat anecdotal, it seems like more modern HDDs are getting more unreliable than before. This is also reflected in the lower warranty coverage of modern HDDs.

Who in their right mind should expect to have to replace their HDD every year? (Referring to current 1-year warranties.)

 

[Fallen Kell]

I can not really recommend any consumer level drives anymore. There are reasons why all the manufacturers dropped their warrantys from 5 years or 3 years to 1 year now. The Western Digital 2TB+ Greens all die within the first 2 years of ownership. The Blues are not any better, in fact, I believe they are worse. The Blacks still are good, but I believe that is because they have not switched to the 1TB/platter, which I think is the real issue. At work, I have had every consumer Seagate drive die within the first 2-3 years. The Samsung F1 series of drives were the last decent ones before they changed something in their manufacturing line which causes the newer ones to also die within a couple of years....

Basically, they dropped their warranty to 1 year because they would be replacing 60-70% of their disks if they all kept a 5 year warranty.

 

[ericloewe]

Despite all the negativism (which I share to a point...), I can say I've had the following drives working with no problems:

• 2 x Samsung F3 Ecogreen 1TB used 24/7 for ~1.5 years, now store a backup offline
• 2 x Samsung F3 Ecogreen 2TB used 24/7 for ~1 year, now used as online backup since ~1 month ago
• 2 x WD Caviar blue 1TB used once in a while for ~2 years, still in use
• 2 x WD Caviar green (EARS) 1TB used quite heavily for ~1.5 years, still in use
• 2 x WD Caviar green 500GB used 24/7 for ~1.5 years, still in use
• 4 x WD Caviar green 2TB used 24/7 for ~1.5 years, still in use
• 1 x WD Caviar blue 160GB used 24/7 for ~1 year, still in use

So, according to some horror stories, I'm going to have a bunch of drives failing soon.

 

[thelastjuju]

Seems like the higher the capacity, the more "green" the drive, and the lower the warranty are your three factors when determining how long a hard drive you buy today will last you.

Honestly, if the WD1001FALS went back to $60 (instead of the $170 they want now!) I'd buy like 10 of them on the spot..

.. if you want a drive 2tb+ in size that will last multiple years, your best bet is to find a used, SAMSUNG manufactured F4 off ebay. I wouldn't take a risk with the Seagate version. If the dropping from a 3 year to a 1 year warranty isn't a red flag, I don't know what is. Then again, you also might be skeptical of why anyone would be giving up perhaps the only 2tb+ drive with a SOLID track record.

It really does seem like its RARE to find people with Green drives that have been running for MORE than 2 years. I'd love to hear the poster's results above me again, after just 6 more months. Both of my green drives only lasted 1.25-1.5 years, and the replacements only made a few months. Meanwhile, I have about a dozen WD Blacks and Blues and older IDE drives that just refuse to quit.

 

[Charlie98]

It seems like I'm reading of a lot of failures with the 'green' drives... I understand the desire to lower power consumption but I think it's at the expense of reliability. I'm staying away from them in the meantime.

I've gotten the best service out of WD and Hitachi drives, but they are all sub-1TB drives. 2 of my 500GB HDD's are Hitachis made after the flood, 1 just before, they seem to be doing very well. I have one recent Seagate .12 1TB drive I just installed for my HTPC... the jury is still out on that one.

 

[thelastjuju]

It seems like I'm reading of a lot of failures with the 'green' drives... I understand the desire to lower power consumption but I think it's at the expense of reliability.

I've gotten the best service out of WD and Hitachi drives, but they are all sub-1TB drives. 2 of my 500GB HDD's are Hitachis made after the flood, 1 just before, they seem to be doing very well. I have one recent Seagate .12 1TB drive I just installed for my HTPC... the jury is still out on that one.

I got a lot of shit for suggesting this a while back.. but its still my opinion that the manufacturers like Western Digital KNEW they were scaling back longevity when they introduced things like the head parking nonsense.

Hard drives used to be RATED to last a certain amount of these cycles. Now, they rarely advertise that rating, and have introduced a "power saving feature" that simply increases that very cycle rate by parking the heads every few seconds.. So the green drives effectively "age" at a faster rate. However, people caught on and realized they could adjust the "intellipark" timer, and its hard to tell which brand new WD Greens do this since they are now releasing so many derivative models.

http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critical-design-flaw-found-in-wd-caviar-green-hdds.html

The lower power consumption is also a joke.. we are talking about literally THREE less watts per drive.

 

[Fenuxx]

It's like it's always been, you get what you pay for. I wouldn't touch a WD "Green" drive with a 10 foot pole. No advertised RPM speed, crap warranty, mediocre reviews.

The WD Blacks have 5 year warranties, cost more, and perform better than the Greens.

 

[Soundmanred]

I have 16 drives ranging from 500GB to 3TB, green drives, black drives, 5400RPM, 7200 RPM, ????RPM, Samsung, Hitachi, WD, Seagate,internal and external and not one of them has died that was the manufacturers fault. The majority of the drives are powered on 24/7.
(I had one die when I had it in an external case, powered on and tripped on the cord, causing it to fall 3+ feet while spinning. I'd attribute that to user error.)

 

[IGemini]

I'm personally comfortable with Samsung and Hitachi drives. My long-runner is a Hitachi 7K1000 with over 2.5 years of runtime (as a main OS drive), and still has only 1/10 of its sector cache reserve used. I would go with WD Green but I use Linux often enough that the head parking could be an issue.

I really don't care about the "green" moniker. To me, it's a budget option to opt in favor of space. For a media server, I still haven't gotten to the point of saturating the SATA bandwidth for my purposes.