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It's looking like my hard drive has become corrupt and my computer is just a reboot away from becoming unusable. It's possible that the problem might be fixable (but the fixing process will involve a reboot, which I don't want to risk at the moment,) but just in case I've already backed up my important files to an external HD, made myself a LiveCD and am looking into replacement hard drives.

Are there any particular hard drive makes/models that are known for their reliability or lack thereof? I'm looking for a 3.5" SATA drive in the 250GB-1TB range. I was planning on getting a new drive soon anyway as my old 80GB one is getting increasingly cramped, but this sped matters up somewhat.

Most consumer drives are of similar quality.

Western Digital is pretty good. I've been using them for some time now; one of my 500gb external disks is going on 4 years old.

Drooling Iguana wrote:Are there any particular hard drive makes/models that are known for their reliability or lack thereof?

Not really. Statistically, the various manufacturers come out to about the same build quality. There are exceptions (like IBM's faulty Deskstar 60/75GXP drives several years ago, or Seagate's firmware issues several months ago) but that doesn't necessarily highlight any particular manufacturer as being inferior. If you took "i had a bunch of [brand] drives fail on me, never buy their shit" stories seriously, there wouldn't be any vendors left for you to choose from.

There's a fun graph charting price/GB for various hard drives on Newegg here; if you scroll down it also includes price/GB for flash media and SSDs.

The 'real names' are generally pretty close to each other. The ones to avoid are the ones you never hear of outside of 'wow that price in insane' or 'HP put this into a computer because lol lowest bidder.' In other words, avoid Samsung (they make hard drives? Sadly), Magnetic Digital (they exist? Sadly), Toshiba (never trust a hard drive manufacturer who doesn't offer a diagnostic package), and other similar niche drive brands.

White Haven wrote:The 'real names' are generally pretty close to each other. The ones to avoid are the ones you never hear of outside of 'wow that price in insane' or 'HP put this into a computer because lol lowest bidder.' In other words, avoid Samsung (they make hard drives? Sadly), Magnetic Digital (they exist? Sadly), Toshiba (never trust a hard drive manufacturer who doesn't offer a diagnostic package), and other similar niche drive brands.

Samsung and Toshiba hard drives are perfectly fine.

Given the high incidence of failure I see in customer drives from those two manufacturers in relation to other brands, I beg to differ.

White Haven wrote:Given the high incidence of failure I see in customer drives from those two manufacturers in relation to other brands, I beg to differ.

Do you have statistics to back this up?

Since the subject has, more or less, already come up and I don't think it's worth making another thread as long as this one remains available...I'd like to request a bit of advice here if you don't mind.

Which of these two hard drives would be the better purchase:

Verbatim 2TB USB/eSATA 2-Disk RAID

or

Samsung Story Station 1.5 TB USB 2.0

I was leaning towards the Samsung drive myself, to be honest, after reading some conflicting information about the potential reliability of the Verbatim drive when used in RAID-0 or RAID Big mode, but the recent comments about Samsung here are making me doubtful again. My first priority is storage capacity but I wouldn't want to completely overlook reliability either.

Do not use RAID-0 or JBOD ('RAID Big') mode if you value your data.

Completely anecdotal, but my computer friend and I agreed that Western Digital and Seagate are strong and worth the couple of extra bucks. Generally remember: you get what you pay for. If you're planning a machine with 2Tb of space and, all other factors accounted for, one vendor is 20% cheaper, you have to ask yourself, "Are they cheaper because they like red ink in the quarterly statement, or cheaper because they can afford to be as they cut a lot of corners in the manufacturing process?"

Of course, it's a gamble. Sometimes, that cheap-ass fifth-off dealie will turn out to be one of the random pieces that came through the corner-cutting with everything rock-solid, and sometimes the full-price option will be a lemon out of the factory. If that's the case, you owe yourself a hearty pat-on-the-back for being thrifty... But remember well the parable of the man with the cheap boots and the man with the expensive boots.

We're a small operation, so no, we don't have volumes of statistics. On the other hand I've been working there for seven years now, and I see a higher incidence of off-brand El Cheapo hard drives dying than I do reputable brands. Shadow has it right on this one, cheap shit is cheap for a reason, and that reason isn't 'Oh, we make drives just as reliable in a manner that's mysteriously less expensive than our competitors.' Reliability and performance cost, and in a hard drive those are seriously important qualities.

Now if you want a seriously reliable drive, pick up an enterprise-grade drive like Seagate's NS-series. Not sure what the WD equivalent is. Sure, they're designed for servers, but the price for the SATA variants isn't bad.

phongn wrote:Do not use RAID-0 or JBOD ('RAID Big') mode if you value your data.

Got it. However, would that be worse than picking a non-RAID drive from Samsung then? Or perhaps I'll get two of the RAID drives and use another mode (RAID-1) but that's going to be a longer term prospect.

Most hdd manufacturers make business-class hard drives that are more expensive but doubles the Mean Time Between Failures, so in other words it lasts longer.

An example is Seagate's 7200.11 line that has a 700,000 MTBF and their ES.2 line that has a 1,200,000 MTBF. Of course the ES/2 costs half-again as much.

This is probably the best you're going to get for actual data, but even this is way too narrow to truly conclude anything.

basically: they're all pretty much good, if you're worried go for a better warranty policy + back your crap up

and Samsung is a major manufacturer that makes good stuff; there's no reason to hate on them.

They're a major manufacturer of things that aren't hard drives. In the magnetic storage market, they're decidedly an El Cheapo bit player.

So... they sell a ton of drives, get very good benchmark results, and are usually far from the cheapest for their sizes. Where have you gotten this impression that they're low-tier from?

When I worked at a retail PC repair outfit I noticed that the customers who always bought bottom dollar items were also the most likely to abuse what they bought.
Also, because more manufacturers use lowest bidder components, there's more of them out there to fail.
So you can't really make a judgment call on manufacturer quality based solely on what you see coming across your repair bench.


That being said, I'm also a fan of Seagate and Western Digital .

The price premium for an enterprise-grade drive can approach 100% - at that price, you're probably better off putting that money into backup media.

It's also pretty laughable to call Samsung the "El Cheapo" brand - follow the link I posted earlier, the top ten highest GB/$ drives on Newegg are mostly WD or Seagate, with a couple of Hitachis tossed in as well.

White Haven wrote:The 'real names' are generally pretty close to each other. The ones to avoid are the ones you never hear of outside of 'wow that price in insane' or 'HP put this into a computer because lol lowest bidder.' In other words, avoid Samsung (they make hard drives? Sadly), Magnetic Digital (they exist? Sadly), Toshiba (never trust a hard drive manufacturer who doesn't offer a diagnostic package), and other similar niche drive brands.

Samsung sold ~14.6 million hard drives last year, which while smaller than the twin leaders of WD and Seagate at ~50 million each, isn't an insignificant brand. Samsung was bigger than Fujitsu or Toshiba back when they were separate.

What the fuck is "Magnetic Digital"? Where do you even get one of those? Was it a plain white label with black text on the drive? I can't help but wonder if you've got some shitty local beige-box manufacturer in the region sourcing relabeled refurb units for their hard drives to cut costs.

The only reason I would imagine anyone would have a Toshiba hard drive in their computer would be because they owned a Toshiba-built computer.

I've seen a few WDs and Seagates for reasonable prices so I'll probably pick one of them up tomorrow.

I've noticed that WD seems to have subdivided its line into "green", "blue" and "black" models. Am I right in assuming that the blue subline will most likely give the best value for a primary HD in a computer that'll be used for games but isn't meant to be on the bleeding edge?

Drooling Iguana wrote:I've seen a few WDs and Seagates for reasonable prices so I'll probably pick one of them up tomorrow.

I've noticed that WD seems to have subdivided its line into "green", "blue" and "black" models. Am I right in assuming that the blue subline will most likely give the best value for a primary HD in a computer that'll be used for games but isn't meant to be on the bleeding edge?

Yes. The Blue is the mainstream line. Green is for HTPCs and others who want to minimize energy consumption and heat generation. Mind you, the performance difference is not huge. The Black line is for high performance desktops. You probably would not notice a significant difference to the Blue line, though.

About the earlier discussion: there is almost no price difference between Samsung and WD mainstream drives (Green & Blue) around here. Seagate and Hitachi tend to be slightly more expensive. Samsung has been making hard disks for at least a decade and although they started as a value option, they have had mainstream drives for years. The main difference to the old players is that they do not make enterprise server level drives at all. Of course you could say that WD does not make them either, since true enterprise drives are still SAS or FC, which WD does not make.

Marcus Aurelius wrote:About the earlier discussion: there is almost no price difference between Samsung and WD mainstream drives (Green & Blue) around here. Seagate and Hitachi tend to be slightly more expensive. Samsung has been making hard disks for at least a decade and although they started as a value option, they have had mainstream drives for years. The main difference to the old players is that they do not make enterprise server level drives at all. Of course you could say that WD does not make them either, since true enterprise drives are still SAS or FC, which WD does not make.

WD has an SAS drive.

phongn wrote:Most consumer drives are of similar quality.

Depending on the product line, Seagate drives tend to have a habit of running hot which can be an issue if you live in a warm enviroment or your case has shit airflow.

But this isn't unique to Seagate. High performance or bleeding edge drives use more power and thus generate more heat.

I ended up buying this one, but it looks like I might not have needed to, since I just tried rebooting and my computer was able to load Ubuntu without a problem. I'm going to run some checks on this drive to see if the errors I've been getting are due to a hardware problem or if they're just garden variety corrupted files. If all goes well, I might be able to keep booting from the old drive and just use the new one for data.

phongn wrote: WD has an SAS drive.

Yeah, it seems they do now. I just assumed that since they manufactured no parallel SCSI drives, they would not make SAS drives, either.