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Hard drives, the good, the bad, and the ugly
Seagates always seem really cheap and that's because they are! Their failure rate seems incredibly high...I personally am a fan of western digitals, is pretty much all I use now, though I did have one die on me about a year ago, due to power supply dieing, lost over a gig of code and other files 
important stuff was backed up though. Also I remember reading larger drives having higher failure rates, can an confirm this? And what's your favorite brands?
Here's an article that explains everything you ever wanted to know about SSD's( in terms of internals) this for the ultimate geeks.
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Cool story bro.
I've never used a seagate drive.
An old external 250GB USB2 LaCie drive (which had a WD drive inside) died after about 6 years of near 24/7 operation. My old 80GB Hitachi DeskStar died about 2 weeks ago, after just shy of a decade of use.
My current PC has three Samsung Spinpoints (F1 640GB, F2 1TB, F4 2TB), they're great. My laptop has a Fujitsu drive in it.
I could muse about the deaths of older Quantum / Maxtor drives, but those things are long gone nowadays anyway.
Seagate aren't that terrible. I haven't bought one since their firmware troubles, but before that they were widely acknowledged one of the best manufacturers in the industry, and I've got an old PATA that's been working for five or six years.
Samsung seems to be pushing out great drives, even though the first drive I've had fail on me was a Spinpoint F3.
sounds like the perfect storm, or did you not use it heavily?
I only use WDs for SATA drives. After switching to SSDs I've never looked back when building my personal projects. Love the Intel and Sandisk SSDs.
Always seems relative to me. For example, I've got a friend who goes through Lacie externals like candy, while I haven't had one fail since 2006.
Are we talking about desktop or enterprise quality drives?
The former, why is the latter solid? And has anyone tried sony drives?
Yes, your results are backwards if enterprise, Seagate is far more reliable that Western Digital. The failure rate on Western Digital out of the bag is too high that I stopped buyign them, and the fact the raid edition drives are only SATA II, while seagate offers a full lineup of SATA III and SAS2 from 7200rpm-15000rpm
For desktop that will last in an enterprise setting, Hitachi and Samsung all the way. Seage and Western Digital I won't even consider at the desktop level.
@miTgiB we have noticed that WD fail VERY soon after you put them in if they are going to fail... other than that they are pretty good. I think buyvm also had bad luck with WD.... I'll tell you the worst luck we had was probably with hitachi.
I got a new desktop last Christmas and I believe it has a Seagate HDD. It's a 1TB HDD and ever since I've bought it, it makes scratchy noises when being read and written to..has anyone else experienced this with bigger HDDs? I found this abnormal as my old desktop's HDD was completely silent.
Doesn't sound good, I know that clicking sound is the near HD death sound. You should grab speed fan app(free) or similar and check out the s.m.a.r.t info. Good thing about speed fan is it generates nice online graph of the HD health.
Yeah sounds like DOA which of course can happen with anything. That's why I love newegg, they'll replace just have to pay for shipping I believe.
Thanks @taipres I will give that a go when I get home.
@taipres very soon being like 90-120 days (after newegg warranty) so then we have to send to WD
Found this to be interesting, read last year
IBM Building 120PB Cluster Out of 200,000 Hard Disks
I read Google has multiple harddrives die on them every single day...Also SEOmoz which is a top tier SEO group wrote about their hard drive issues(which were a lot) when they tried to index a 100 billion sites....can read about that here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-index-delay-explained looks like they ended up going with EBS, which sounds expensive. I think one day i'm going to start collecting hard drives for fun, and building raid system after raid system, as one can never have enough drives 
"Smashing all known records by some margin, IBM Research Almaden, California, has developed hardware and software technologies that will allow it to strap together 200,000 hard drives to create a single storage cluster of 120 petabytes — 120 million gigabytes. The data repository, which currently has no name, is being developed for an unnamed customer, but with a capacity of 120PB, it's most likely use will be a storage device for a governmental (or Facebook) supercomputer. With IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System), over 30,000 files can be created per second — and with massive parallelism, and no doubt thanks to the 200,000 individual drives in the array, single files can be read or written at several terabytes per second."
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/26/1349214/ibm-building-120pb-cluster-out-of-200000-hard-disks
I could do good things with a setup like that
we have 2 identical SAN's in this one office, one is populated with Seagate enterprise drives and the other with Western Digitals (both SATA2 enterprise)
in 2.5 years I have replaced one seagate but 5 Western Digitals.
At home I have both WD's (6x Blacks) and Seagates (6x 7200.12's) and not on has yet to fail (knocks on wood) so can't compare these
So if I had to buy a drive for at home, I would go with what is on sale.
Enterprise drives for the office? Seagate thank you very much.
My personal experience with WD has been bad...dead MyBook desktop, MyBook portable and WD Green on my home unRAID server
Best experience so far with Samsung.
On the subject of storage, has anyone tried creating one of these?
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware
They seem to recommend Hitachi drives.
Or is someone already using it for his "storage plans" heheh
I do like WD RMA procedure, easiest of them all. However I no longer trust them any more. Far higher failure rate for me within the last couple of years. Icing on the cake was on quite a few occasions the RMA I received back was DOA.
Seagates & Hitachi's for me now.
My desktop has one of the Seagate Hybrid drives, I don't get what all the hate is about them.
I'm using Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 2 TB SATA 6 GB/s NCQ 64 MB Cache from ages and work best than WD
Samsung/Seagate, Hitachi are the best drives you can buy for the money.
At work I manage an installed base of about 1000 devices (PCs, servers, storage) aged 1-5 years. I usually experience multiple disk failures per month. Intel (SSD) has the best RMA/warranty procedure, very fast and simple, but it is accessible to gold partners only. I used it only once, but the SSD drives are still relatively new. The best/fastest end-user RMA procedures are the WD and Seagate ones. Seagate will ship back a replacement drive with a giant "recertified" stamp on it: for DOA drives I usually activate the distibutor RMA procedure, this way i get back a new drive. I received back DOA recertified drives both from Hitachi and Seagate, but I simply sent it back and they exchanged the drive again. Dell also has a very good RMA procedure; they use a mixed bag of vendors, with a custom firmware. For enterprise (SAS) drives, I have the same @MiTgiB results: Seagate drives are by far the most realiable.
I know those ppl, it is usually lack of grounding that make them fail because of high voltage and spikes on the usb cable. If you dont have state of the art power installation that is bound to happen. However, if you take out the drive from the case it still works in most cases as the sata2usb bridge insulates enough to fail before the spike reaches the hdd proper.
I can confirm samsung being my favourites for consumer grade hdds. They are silent and cool and break rarely. Last time i had one break was the first time too, a 400 GB that was in a case which had vibrations from a decalibrated fan. How can ppl not notice the horrible noise or consider it normal, it is beyond me.
M
Ive only ever had one Seagate fail on me (last week), running two in my desktop now and still got one that was working last week which was purchased 8 years ago, which until recently has been used every day for 8 years.
I have always been pretty lucky with HDDs.
i still have all those HDD, and still working decently.
quantum fireball 10GB, 20GB, and Maxtor 80GB :P
One bigfoot dropped dead one day before I was about to retire it... I have still one fireball lct with one bad sector, used it as a swap partition on an old windows box i made for a neighbour. She got a laptop now so it is back to me.
My first hdd over 1 gb was a caviar 6 gb, still working perfectly, but, maaan, noisy as hell.
M
I dunno if it's the same model as yours but I have an old Maxtor 20GB and 60GB IDE HDD's all working very nicely, I've smashed the 60GB with a hammer a few times and dropped it a lot, it still works although it runs really loud. Plus it has normal Phillips head screws which is nice to see. :P
I've hated WD ever since I've got 3 broken drives delivered by them in a row, I use Samsung and Hitachi desktop grade drives in my desktop atm, and the same in my home servers and they run fine and have done for around 4 years. I did kill one Deskstar, I didn't have any space for more drives in my case so I ran the SATA cable and an external SATA power supply outside the case and it worked for a month or so then just died..
Western Digital is basically the only brand of drives I will ever use as I have never had an issue with them (1TB, 320GB, 250GB and 120GB)
Haha I remember those days, I wrecked many motherboards with ESD(electrostatic discharge), so eventually got a cheap ESD strap to clip on to the metal to ground myself, though I guess you could wing it by just having a hand on it. This BTW was back then when you had to apply your own thermal paste to CPU's, so was a pain cleaning that crap off each time and reapplying when adding to new motherboard.
They fail so frequently for me I save up 5 at a time to RMA to reduce shipping costs.