Hard drive brand reliability survey - vote your experience

I have had good luck with Seagate drives in general. I have multiple machines in the house and have not had any failures with Seagate (All drives are internal 500GB or larger). I did have one funky experience with a Seagate 500GB laptop drive that started to fail after only 6 months. Seagate honored the warranty and all went well, except for the time spent to identify the problem. If you suspect a bad drive there are multiple free tools that help isolate the problem (Crystal Disk)

Regards.

110yd

tim wrote in post #11016752
...It's most just to see if any one brand is particular bad, or any brand particularly good.

But it wont. The way the poll is structured is such that no information can be gleaned. Your assuming that everyone has only one drive. For instance Look at the Seagate results. 13 have responded that none of their drives have failed and 9 have responded that one or more drives have failed. So, you have a 40% chance of your Seagate drive failing, right, according to the numbers.

However what if the 13 people only have one Seagate drive and it has not failed but the people who have had a drive fail have dozens of Seagate drives that have not failed but have had one or more fail. You just can't tell.

That's the situation I have. I have, on average, 1 drive fail a week, sometimes two. I manage a test lab and we have somewhere around 200~300 drives in servers and test equipment PCs and laptops. They are of all makes and models. I have had a failure for just about every manufacturer out there at one time or another. So I have to answer that all drives fail.

But If I add up all my drives I have about 1750 operational days a week. That is 250 drives spinning for 7 days. One drive failing a week gives me 1 failure every 1750 days or 1 drive failure every 5 years. So when you hear 1 drive failure a week, it sounds bad but when you take into concideration the sample size, it's not bad at all.

That's whats missing. You have no idea what the sample size is. Are 9 failures good or bad, you just don't know.

Fair enough. How should the poll be designed, so it's simple to vote and get reasonable results?

I have been trouble free with Seagate but I can't say the same for Western Digital while I have only had a few bare drive failures but have had 10 external enclosure failures in the past year. I work in IT so I deal with a large amount of HD's so it's not as bad as it seams but the WD are the only ones I have had enclosure failures with.

Here's my story. I've had 3 seagate drives over the past 2 years in my box, 2 1TB and 1 500GB. The 500GB failed within 4 months of me getting it, but the TB drives have practically been on for 2 years straight and are working fine....

I have had one WD 500GB SATA drive fail (click of death) in the last few years, out of a total of probably 10 WD drives in my house.

This "requirement" in the OP is silly though...
"Please ignore the Seagate firmware issue of a year or two ago. It's a once off and it would probably skew the results."

Since this is a drive reliability survey, that should absolutely count. I had three drives "fail" with that firmware issue. I had five drives in a RAID5 array, three got that firmware lock at the same time, that resulted in data loss even after I used the serial port trick to bring the drives back to life. To me, thats a drive failure. And hence I will never buy Seagate ever again. Not even a hot spare would have saved that array. And it cant be proven that it will be a one off...

Yeah the poll isn't scientific, and the only conclusion I can draw is that all brands fail and you should have good, regularly updated offsite backups.

I have several Western Digital Caviar black (1Tb & 2Tb). I did my research and found them to be reliable. Only bad drives occurred OOB. I've had most of them for over a year. Several years ago, I would only get Seagate. But from my 25+ years with computers, I've had a mix (Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, etc.). I've never had any HD failures, except for my laptop, which I dropped during a write process.