What happened to Hard Drive Quality?????

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Profile TimeLord04
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Message 1925715 - Posted: 22 Mar 2018, 2:06:47 UTC

It seems to me in reflection that Hard Drives, (especially Western Digital), manufactured 10 years ago or longer had better quality and longer life expectancy than modern Hard Drives...

My dad just suffered ANOTHER computer failure due to a faulty drive! His ASUS Laptop, (NOT even three years old, yet), had a catastrophic failure and would NOT boot as of this morning. This is the SECOND hard drive failure in ONE week that my dad has suffered through! I don't know, yet, the manufacturer of the Laptop Hard Drive; but, the HP Envy Desktop system had a Western Digital Blue. The HP Envy Drive was also approx. three years old!

Combine these stats with MY recent Hard Drive failure of a drive that BARELY hit TWO years old. This was a Western Digital Black, 1TB Drive. Is this a push by the Tech Industry to steer us more into SSDs????? Unfortunately, for the Lay Person, SSDs are STILL TOO expensive! However; as my dad needs his Laptop for work, I turned him towards a Samsung 512 GB SSD which came to $248 + Tax. In addition to this SSD, the computer repair place is going to extensively test the failing Laptop Drive, (which I managed to recover utilizing Win 10s Recovery and Repair Tools, AND these tools STRIPPED EVERY 3rd party Program from the Windows Installation), and IF possible will clone the drive to the SSD. I managed, (after extensive time spent), to recover the Win 10 Partition and it became Bootable, again. However; it NOW takes 5 Min to boot from a Reboot situation back to the Login screen. This drive is doomed for permanent failure SOON!

Why are modern hard drives failing at a greater rate than their older, better quality controlled, counterparts??? Has anyone else been observing this situation???


TL
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Message 1925724 - Posted: 22 Mar 2018, 2:42:01 UTC - in response to Message 1925715.  

Yes I've noticed it too. My work has about 35 micro desktop PCs that use laptop or 2.5 inch spindle HDDs. I've had 4 of those HDDs die in the last year. All of our computers are 3 year leases so it's pretty sad when I have to send a PC in for a HDD replacement for a PC not even a year old. But for the last 2, I've ordered SSDs at our expense, because it will be a faster PC once I can re-assign the PC to a user.

I still have my first 1 TB WE HDD that I bought some 7 or 8 years ago. It's been thru a lot over the years, but it's still running. I have a USB adapter on the moment to backup, or rather take an image of my OS drive of my main computer.
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Message 1925726 - Posted: 22 Mar 2018, 2:47:57 UTC - in response to Message 1925715.  

I had major issues with Seagate years ago so switched to WG. A few years ago had many die within a month on several rigs so switched to Toshiba drives. No problems to date with them.



I now keep a spreadsheet of the date purchased, Manufacturer, Capacity & date actually installed.

On this rig, had 3 die on me last year. They were old IDE drives well over 10 years old & well hammered.
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Message 1925771 - Posted: 22 Mar 2018, 11:02:47 UTC

Since back in the 90s, having issues with Seagate and Maxtor drives, I switched to Western Digital and never looked back. I just replaced an 8 year old WD 500GB Black a few months ago because it was on it's last leg, finally after all those years. It was my system drive. I have an identical drive as my data drive and it has no problems as of yet.

I just built a new Z370 PC and installed a Samsung M.2 NVMe 250GB drive (960 EVO) as the system drive and the 2 WD drives are now data drives. That's not my PC. I will be building a Z370 PC for myself as soon as I can get the M.2 and RAM and a new tube of Arctic Silver. I will move my data from my current data drive to the new HDD after installing Windows on the M.2 drive.

There's a utility called CrystalDiskInfo (current version v7.5.1) that will show the health of HDDs. That was what I used when I found my old drive was going bad.

Samsung SSDs have a very low failure rate and will replace the HDD in modern laptops (not the M.2 drives, the SATA drives). As a matter of fact, I can upgrade my 2006 laptop to an SSD drive. They are much more efficient and faster than the traditional mechanical HDDs. They use less energy and will reduce battery usage.

I'm thinking you may have run into a bad batch of WD HDDs.

Anyway, there's some food-for-thought. :)

Siran
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Message 1925808 - Posted: 22 Mar 2018, 16:07:43 UTC

Blame the advance of technology and the pressure of cost-cutting. Drive disks are using much higher areal density platters with ever smaller magnetic domains. What took 10 platters to make a 1 TB drive ten years ago can be build with one platter today. That reduces the cost of the drive but at higher risk of failure when the new technology fails. The only way to achieve the reliability of the past today is to buy enterprise level drives. Data Center drive reliability reports show that Seagate and WD have the worst reliability and Hitachi and Toshiba the best.

But I don't know why someone shopping for a disk replacement for a consumer level computer would not just replace with a SSD at similar costs today.
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Message 1925928 - Posted: 23 Mar 2018, 4:38:00 UTC

Blame it on the race to the bottom. Long time ago all drives were Q/C'd to server class. There wasn't a consumer class available. Now you have a hard time finding a server class drive, and you won't in an external case.
Both WD and Seagate have had extensive runs of flaky drives. Fortunately they both haven't had a bad run in the same time frame.
First drive I got was a Fujitsu. Had a 5 year warranty. 4 years 9 months in had a failure and they replaced a board on it. Ran another 4 years before the enclosure died. By then it was too small to bother with.
Presently the oldest drive I have running is an 80Gb Samsung that came out of another system that has to be from about 2006.
I've gone through my share of thumb drives.
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Message 1925962 - Posted: 23 Mar 2018, 7:16:59 UTC

Laptop HDDs tend to fail more often due to the laptop moving around. I replaced the mechanical drive in my current laptop with a SSD. Apart from being faster there is no moving parts so less chance of failure as a result. Then it all comes down to the quality of the electronics, pay a bit more for a decent one.

I only have WD hard drives in my rigs. Haven’t had any issues with them in the last 5 years or so. If a cruncher died I would swap out the drive and reinstall it. For a daily driver you need regular backups of it, and you only realise how good your backup plan is (or lack of) when it dies. Heck I even backup my file server which has enterprise grade drives on a raid controller.
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Message 1925976 - Posted: 23 Mar 2018, 10:15:55 UTC

Mark,

I bet your laptop boots faster too, huh? :)

The Z370 8th gen I built boots Windows 10 so fast from the M.2 that the P.O.S.T. takes longer than the boot process. lol

Siran
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Message 1925978 - Posted: 23 Mar 2018, 10:22:08 UTC

Gary,

My laptop is from 2006 and has the original HDD in it. I'm not sure what brand the drive is, but I'm thinking it is a Toshiba drive. :)

Siran
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Message 1925997 - Posted: 23 Mar 2018, 13:53:03 UTC

We got the ASUS Laptop back, yesterday. They cloned the original hard drive to a Samsung 860 Pro SSD, 512 GB Drive. The original hard drive was... --- WD Blue 500 GB!!!!! One more WD failure over a week's time, and the third WD Drive to fail in two month's time in our family! :-O

I will now be saving up to clone both the Hackintosh Drive and Win 7 Drive to SSDs over the next year and a half to stop this nonsense! Dad's ASUS Laptop now boots SOOOO FAST, that by the time I turned the Logitech M510 Mouse, the screen had already been at the Login for about 3-4 seconds!!! Dad says launching programs is "snappy..." too! :-) He's quite impressed with the SSD! We got it for $247 and change + Tax!!! (Plus $79 for the cloning.) Also, picked up two MyPassport External 2TB Drives for backups... One for the Laptop, and one for the new Farragut, SETI ID: 7066606. Also picked up a WD Black 1TB Drive for old Farragut, (the HP System), and restored that to HP's Factory Settings. I've placed an Ad on Nextdoor for the HP System to hopefully recoup some of dad's money for the new Desktop System and the Laptop repairs. The hard drive was about $80 with Tax, so I placed the Ad for $340... We'll see if anyone bites. The Hp isn't even a full three years old, yet. (Core i5-6400, 2.7GHz, 12GB DDR3 RAM, (2x6GB Sticks), Integrated HD-530, WiFi, Blue-Tooth, and two HDMI Ports.)


TL
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Message 1926020 - Posted: 23 Mar 2018, 15:55:38 UTC

Knock on wood, but I still have one old rig running on a Seagate SCSI interface with a PCIE adapter card.
They don't make 'em like that anymore, apparently.
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Message 1930989 - Posted: 20 Apr 2018, 5:16:05 UTC

Yeah, quality control on HDDs these days is a complete and total joke. My WD RE2 500gb drives from 2006 are still mostly alive and functional. I have a total of five of them. One refuses to be in a RAID anymore, but has been just fine for two years now being a single disk. And one more recently decided that it had thousands of bad clusters. The other three are still going strong.

I have 1tb Blacks from about 2009 that are still going strong, as well. Absolutely no issues with those. And two 640gb Blues from 2008 are still fine.

However, I noticed this in 2013 or so, that if you go and look at the reviews for 3tb and larger, it is a minefield of DOA and "failed within 30 days", whereas 2tb and under seems to be pretty OK, and that's across all the manufacturers, not just one in particular.

It's almost like all of the mfrs got together and decided to be equally bad.



That being said... HGST seems to be amazing. I stumbled across a blog post by Backblaze that broke down their HDD statistics by quarter (this linked one is for the whole year of 2017) which shows the number of drives they have by model, running hours, and failures.

For two or three years now, HGST is in a class of its own, only having ~1/10th the failure rate of the parent company, WD.

So.. my 4x500 RE2 raid5 got upgraded to 4x4tb DeskstarNAS. It's been great for the almost year that I've had it running. Absolutely no issues, and I've written about 30tb to it and read many times more than that from it.



So.. overall, HDDs are generally pretty crap these days, but HGST seems to have their act together. I just wish I could get those MegaScaleDC series drives brand new.. everywhere online sells them through a third-party: goHardDrive. They get retired drives from datacenters, reset the SMART data, rub off the serial number and date of manufacture from the label, and then sell it as "brand new." Google that, it's true.
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record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)
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Message boards : Number crunching : What happened to Hard Drive Quality?????


 
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