first HD failure ever...

western digital my passport, 160 gb. i bought the HD for around $70 early last year to be a back-up with my netbook when i travel.

i only used the HD a few times. this weekend i decided to use the HD as a back-up for my MP3 files and it died. glad that it died at home rather than on the road. it was the only WD HD that i have owned and i'll steer clear of the brand now.

i bought a 320 gb seagate freeagent at costco today for $49.95 plus tax. i was glad to see that the seagate fits in my WD soft case .

ed rader

Better not buy Seagate then. I've had one of them die (an internal, at that). Seriously, if a single failure scares you off a brand pretty soon you're going to find yourself saving all your original cards instead of using hard drives for backups and looking at every new vendor that comes along because you had a card failure from "brand Z".

Hard drives fail. That is just what they do. The only hard drive manufacture I stay away from is Seagate because of the way they handled the problems with some of their hard drives (7200.11 I think).

7200.11 are a new level of terrible for any company to have released. The method that Seagate has been handling the 7200.11 in repairing has made it all the worse. I've replaced almost all of my 7200.11 drives due to failure, and have even had to RMA ones that have already been sent for RMA.
I've been trying to get them to replace my 7200.11 drive with a 7200.12 at the very least in the equivalent size as I'm tired of sending these stupid things in.

Jon wrote in post #10990427
Better not buy Seagate then. I've had one of them die (an internal, at that). Seriously, if a single failure scares you off a brand pretty soon you're going to find yourself saving all your original cards instead of using hard drives for backups and looking at every new vendor that comes along because you had a card failure from "brand Z".

That's funny you say that. I have actually had 3 WD Hard Drives fail within a year or two, and not one out of 5 Seagates fail after 4+ yrs.

Just Sayin

Well, I haven't had any WDs fail, but both brands have gone through bad spells.

I manage a lab and we have approximately 200 drives if you add up all the test equipment, PCs, workstations, servers and such. A drive failure is pretty much a weekly event. WD, Seagate, Hitachi, IBM, they all fail at about the same rate. If you can not tolerate a failure, consider a raid array.

gjl711 wrote in post #10990559
I manage a lab and we have approximately 200 drives if you add up all the test equipment, PCs, workstations, servers and such. A drive failure is pretty much a weekly event. WD, Seagate, Hitachi, IBM, they all fail at about the same rate. If you can not tolerate a failure, consider a raid array.

Yeah. That's pretty much it. There are really only two brands of drives - those that have failed on you and those that are about to. Redundancy is the only answer.

I think each brand just has their bad series or batch here and there.

If I had data that I absolutely needed to be secure, WD is the only brand I would trust with it. My RAID arrays and PCs are stacked with WDs, Fujis, and Seagates. The WDs have always been the most reliable, in my experience.

Queue a poster who's had 6 Western Digitals fry in the last 2 months... 3... 2... 1... (because it happens with all brands)

JPepus wrote in post #10990483
That's funny you say that. I have actually had 3 WD Hard Drives fail within a year or two, and not one out of 5 Seagates fail after 4+ yrs.

Just Sayin

Which is still a few hundred thousand units shy of a scientific comparison.

They all go bad, keep as many redundant backups as it takes to make you comfortable. My amount is 3, (3) 1.5tb's all copies one of the next. 2 plugged into the pc via dock, 1 in a physically different location in case of real-world accident.

All hard drives will fail, it's just a matter of when.
My main rig has 13 drives, 12 WD and 1 Seagate. I expect to have more WD drives die on me than Seagates, since I currently have more of them.

15 years ago I was doing all Seagate SCSI drives with the occasional Maxtor SCSI drive thrown in, and I eventually had a stack of dead Seagates. The drives got a lot of wear and tear since they were used in a Newtek Video Toaster Flyer NLE.

ImRaptor wrote in post #10990482
7200.11 are a new level of terrible for any company to have released. The method that Seagate has been handling the 7200.11 in repairing has made it all the worse. I've replaced almost all of my 7200.11 drives due to failure, and have even had to RMA ones that have already been sent for RMA.
I've been trying to get them to replace my 7200.11 drive with a 7200.12 at the very least in the equivalent size as I'm tired of sending these stupid things in.

Fortunately, I only had one 7200.11 and decided to cut my losses as soon as I managed to retrieve all data from it after it had cut off communications with the outside world. And since I had only ever seen the innards of a modern HD in pictures...

http://www.flickr.com …w/sets/72157624​898880205/

Personally I use all brands but have a slight preference for WD Green/Black drives. Between myself and all of my friends I have seen drives fail from every manufacturer. The only way to avoid data loss is to have redundant backups and for the truly paranoid (or extremely important data) off-site backups.

I use a Drobo S for my redundant backups - want to use off site backups but haven't gotten around to it yet.

not to meant to hijack this thread, but does solid state drive have better failure rate? is it significant compared to hdd?