What is Digg?55 Comments
- sotopheavy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+62I really really wish they would have mentioned brands and the failure rates of each one!
- axiomata, on 10/12/2007, -3/+50Useless without brands/models.
- spiderland, on 10/12/2007, -7/+38Just say no to paraphrase/click-through articles.
Direct link to paper: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf - dfay, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20*click*IBM*click*
- GliTCH82, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15*cough* is good? *cough*
- lostspyder, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15No kidding on the brand thing. It would finaly put an difinitive end to the great hard drive debate. Save geeks some more time to argue about graphics cards, or processors or every other component in a computer.
- markp93, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16*cough* Seagate *cough*
- GliTCH82, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Did you even RTFA? Apparently drive temperature has less to do with failure than you are suggesting.
- bobcrotch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12*grind*deathstar*grind*
- Zuhaib, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16A blog.. While Engadget might be a blog in the sense that its a website where people post stories, it has become more then that lately. A site that reports some of its own content (did you see there coverage of Apple? Breaking leaked or new news. Reviews, and etc etc.) makes it more of its news site like CNET. And to be saying this on Digg, a web 2.0 site like this whole blog explosion is just stupid. I am not a fanboy for Engadget (like its habit in the past to sometimes rip off other blogs) but give respect when its needed
And to call /. a blog, is just. ugggg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A site that came out before the word blog become popular (97 for /. and 99 for the word blog) is just sad. Also /. is a news site like digg, if you dont know Slashdot check out its wiki before you post about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot .
And your rant on pdf, i am sorry pdf is soon to be open standard and if you have used LaTeX you will know that it produces a pdf file.
All of these digg rants on pdfs and blogs are just stupid. - kalleanka, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13@Y0tsuya: Arguing about which drive fails first is a waste of time.
The only thing that is a waste of time it to read your pointless post.
Of course we care about which brand is "best". I would be very happy to read a paper by Google where they present which brands are best. - Ibanezfoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Funny, in the 500 or so computers I manage, Seagates have nearly 100% failure rate, Maxtor about %60, IBM about %40, WD about %20.... never lost a Fujitsu that I can remember.... or a Samsung, but then we rarely use Samsung anyway. We purchase mostly WD or Maxtor because they are readily available and inexpensive. The IBM drives all go in the IBM servers. These are just off the top of my head due to my warranty lookups/RMAs.
- ldavid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Those graphs are really interesting. I would have never of thought that a little heat for your HDD is good...guess I was wrong.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Odd, I've used both Seagates and Maxtors in my system, and I can say from my own personal experience that my Maxtors have lasted a much longer time. I have a 20gig that's worked for 8 years, a 120gig for 5 years and now a 250gig external that has been on for about 3 months. None have failed or had any issues.
My Seagate died within a year! That's unacceptable, but they did replace it free and quickly - though since I've sold it.
However, noise-wise, Seagate wins hands down. If I don't have my music on, my Maxtor sounds like a lawn mower ripping through my ShuttlePC. - superal1394, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I use whatever is cheapest, be it western digital, maxtor, seagate, whatever, because I use failure as an excuse to upgrade. You just need to keep proper backups
- samdu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6SMART's not perfect, but it's nice to have for the things that it CAN pick up. Those things would go undetected otherwise.
- noreturn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6That's interesting. I used to buy only Maxtor, until I had 3 separate failures on 3 newer drives. The 40 gig Maxtor from last century still goes strong, but I've come to the sad realization that Maxtor no longer makes their drives like they used to.
- Urgo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Thanks for the interesting article, but as others have said, I wish they said what brands they actually used.
[rant]
Over the past 10 years or so I've primarily used Maxtor drives in my systems, with the occasional ibm, western digital, or segate. My own results have shown that every single western digital that I've had has gone bad (about 10). Out of about 30 maxtors I've used only one of them has died. And as for the other brands I've had no issues, but have not had more then one or two of them.
Also, for anyone who wasn't aware, Seagate is Maxtor now, and I will continue to only buy this brand and never again trust a Western Digital with anything more then a swap file.
[/rant] - mcrbids, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Lots of replies like "Maxtor Suxorz", "Seagate Suxorz", "Maxtor Roolz!" and "Western Digital can do no wrong".
Guess what, folks? They all have good runs and bad runs. I've been doing this for 15 years, All companies have their lines that are great, and their lines that are utter crap.
So I've learned that, unless you are dealing with a LARGE number of drives, what you buy is inconsequential. Plan on a failure, make sure you have backups of anything important, and get whatever you find most affordable! - schmuckle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I think getting HDDs depends on the luck of the draw. I have heard people that hate Western Digital drives and say they are the worst. I have had no problems with and WD Drives. Hell I have a 40 MB WD drive that I bet still fires up. I have bought 2 Maxtors and they have both died on me. In the military we used Seagate and I saw a ton of bad SCSI drives. Recently I worked on a system that was having problems and lo and behold the problem was a bad Seagate drive.
My personal experience tells me to always buy WD, but I know they don't have a perfect track record either. It just so happens WD has been perfect for me. - dafragsta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5As many others have said, these stats are interesting but not very helpful without brands/models. Why would Google not rat out the ***** hardware vendors?
That aside, here's my experience, based on my elephantine recollection of virtually every piece of equipment I've ever bought.
Seagate 40MB Had bad sectors, but since I was broke, I made due for several months on it and actually never lost data.
Maxtor 540MB. Had to RMA this one twice. My first hard drive that I ever bought that didn't come with my original second-hand PC.
Maxtor 2.0GB I had this drive for at least two years and eventually sold it as part of a secondary system.
Maxtor 3.5GB I bought this to complement my 2.0GB which was getting full, wound up in the same secondary machine.
WD 6.4GB Took a nasty spill in a tower that got knocked over. Had bad sectors. It was out of warranty so I made it a paperweight.
Seagate 8GB Didn't work at all with 430BX and 430VX chipsets (data corruption while writing) but worked fine in my secondary system and older chipset. I know it worked for at least two years after I got it.
I noticed a substancial rise in failures after this point, since only the 540MB ever failed for no obvious reason.
Maxtor 17GB This drive failed with the click of death after about a year and a half. The PC was toted to various LAN parties, but the day it crashed, I woke up to the sound of "snapple lid" clicks.
Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM I had two of these drives. Both had to be RMA'd thanks to the click of death ~6 months apart. (One failed on first powerup after riding in a U-Haul on my move to Austin.
Maxtor 40GB 5400RPM Failed a couple months after the second of the 7200RPM drives. RMA drive has developed bad clusters.
Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM I got this as an RMA replacement for one of the 7200RPM 40GB drives and still works as of it's retiring to the closet.
Maxtor 40GB 5400RPM click of death 2 years after I got it.
Maxtor 200GB external RMA'd after first month for firewire port failure. Second drive had unrecoverable errors after about 8 months. Total lemon and a waste of money because the warranty period was only a year.
WD 120GB 7200RPM Still works, in service on my fileserver. Had it since 2002.
Seagate 200GB 7200RPM Still works, same as above. Got it in 2004
Seagate 250GB SATA 7200RPM Still works, same as above. Got it in 2005
Seagate 400GB IDE 7200RPM Still works, same as above. Got it in 2006
2x Seagate 500GB SATA 7200RPM Still works, sitting in RAID 0 on my main box
2x Seagate 300GB External 7200RPM They still work and sit in rotation as my double layered backup plan for all the important stuff on the 1TB RAID 0. These drives are still working after ~8 months.
I haven't given the >=400GB internal Seagates a fair test period and the external Seagates are pretty much just as new, but it's important to note that no non-Maxtor drive has failed me without a good reason. All the Maxtors I've had that have went bad have pretty much done it within a year. Seagate offers a 5 year warranty on all internal drives which is unmatched right now. (AFAIK) I'm thinking their bottom line would be affected if they had a high DOA rate or a high rate of failure long before the MTBF. I used to give Maxtor the benefit of the doubt, but no more. I'm sticking with Seagate unless they rub me wrong. Their drives are also very competitively priced. - Zuhaib, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5phlag, you would have a point if Engadget had just reported a link so slashdot and said "here go read it" but they actually did a pretty good summing up the article, making it really not necessary to read it as it is pretty deep and very dry. If you read Slashdot's little write up you will see its just a blurb to get you to read the report much in the way digg does them.
I like reading the article, but thats because i am also a Slashdot reader and tend to lean towards that more techy side of things and this has some application in my day to day life. You right right middle men blog sucks if they dont add anything or clear up the article but this is good.
As for the article itself, i do find it sad Google did not name brands, as i assume they did not want to receive flak from the makers, but it would have been nice for them to do so. I am a Seagate man only because i had bad, bad luck in the day with IBM Deskstar line of drives (I have 4 of them in my drawer as i speak.. and one in my system that acts as a Beta Drive for any new OS i wish to test.. thats is the only drive that still lives) and a friend pointed me to Seagate and they treated me right and i just stayed with them. No real experience with other drive mfg. so i wont knock on them. - asaturn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4personally, I seem to have the worst luck with Maxtor hard drives. BUT: one thing nice about Maxtor, they will replace a drive if it is within warranty, no questions asked. I found a DVR in the trash once. it had a dead Maxtor 80GB hard drive. I sent it in and Maxtor sent me a new one. no receipt needed. they requested the dead one back but I forgot to send it (it's still sitting in a box near my desk) - they haven't complained.
- ldavid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's quite funny...because every single drive I have bought that wasn't a Seagate has failed on me.
- betona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3As a happy user of grc.com's SpinRite, I wonder if they'd get any added benefit of using that sort of tool? It means your drive is down for a considerable amount of time for analysis & repair and that may not be palatable for a large user of drives.
- Mambo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I enjoyed the summary, seeing as the PDF link is too detailed for most people to comprehend.
- mattlamb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3 Seagate appears on one statistic to better most other brands: 9 drives that perform better by 50% compared to other drives in Storage reviews surveys..
http://www.storagereview.com/php/survey/survey_result_tree.php?mfrID=25&sort=famScore&k1=uHdG9BGYn6&id=15106&ph=1a3ca07c7569c50cb5c11d6ff8f0d2d6
I still use a 500mb (Quantum fireball)drive that came with my powerPC 7200 over 12 years ago as my boot drive for a G3 B&W server. - chubbstar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3if this were true, google wouldnt suggest that trends occur based on company.
- ajchavar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3WD has always worked fine for me, and I got a really cheap one ($87/200GB external) and have put it through hell. . . which reminds me. . .i need to back it up again . .
- Viral, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@carl0ski
Please elaborate on your 80% claim, because there are a lot of SMART errors which give no serious indication of anything, and the article does label the most important ones...
"Our results are surprising, if not somewhat disappointing. Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count." - Phlag, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Engadget may not be a classic blog, but how does linking to Engadget for this article benefit the reader? Unless the title is "Engadget analyzes Google's Hard Drive Survey," or something like that, then we probably don't need to go through the middle-man.
- GliTCH82, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I used to think the exact same way you do, but after working on the field for a while I've now seen both new and old drives from every HDD maker crash. The result is, while I used to prefer Western Digital I now only go with Seagate, but only for the price/performance/size factor and I only build systems with either RAID1 or 10 on Intel storage controllers.
- Barnolde, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Most HDDs nowadays are all pretty equally good quality (save for defective devices), with some brands slightly outperforming others. I've never had a bad experience with one and I've gotten flawless performances for a little under a year with Seagate 300GB and Maxtor 300GB. I've even got a 120GB MDT (Magnetic Data Technologies, not as popular as the other brands) that's been in my Xbox since late 2002 and under heavy use and tinkering with hasn't acted up once.
- chubbstar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3ive had a horrible time with my maxtor drives. i think they were manufacturing errors cuz they both withing about 6 months after i bought them crashed. yes, TWO drives. of course it wasnt EXACTLY at the same time (maybe a few months apart) but they both crashed even after i isolated everything to see if my computer was at fault.
they sent me some new ones (under warranty of course) ut it was a nuisance to continually format and transfer hundreds of gigs of stuff. next time its western digital all the way.
the end. - fmaxwell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@superal1394
"I use whatever is cheapest, be it western digital, maxtor, seagate, whatever, because I use failure as an excuse to upgrade. You just need to keep proper backups"
I use FAILURE PREVENTION as an excuse to upgrade. Rather than let a $150 drive crash cost me untold hours of time, I replace drives as bargains at higher capacities appear. That keeps the drives in my primary PC young -- typically less than two years old and usually less than one. I've got a pair of 320GB drives now. I'm looking at 500GB drives and considering the use of mirroring RAID on the two existing 320GB drives.
Backups are great, but very hard to manage when you might rip 3 5GB DVDs one day, download a DVD ISO image of an OS, install an application or two, and move 50GB of files from one directory to another. Since ever-growing drive capacities have quickly made tape, CD-R/RW, and DVD-/+R/RW impractical for backups, one is normally forced to use other hard drives, often in external USB enclosures. That limits the depth of your backup. If you do incremental backups, you discover a problem: Most (all?) backup software fails to keep track of files that are deleted. So you reinstall the full backup and then run out of space installing the incremental backups because your hard drive is now full of files you deleted in the interim. If you backup your hard drive on a nightly basis, you end of thrashing it, and the backup drive, to an untimely death. So you end up compromising and trading off convenience, drive life, and risk. That's why I try to minimize the need to restore from my backups. - jonconnelly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
- digitap, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This article by not telling who what etc is of NO USE to anybody on the ground, trying to pick the best drive
- laser314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2New marketing idea, HD preheaters. Keep your HD warm while PC is powered down. Extend the live of your HD. Never cold boot your HD again.
- UNL1M1T3D, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I am not a big fan of Maxtor drives. They seem to have a high failure rate in my experience. Hopefully they will get better since they were purchased by Seagate.
- pcummins, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Generally I go by the number of hits Google gets for "western digital" or "seagate" and "bad blocks" "died" etc. In my experience some drives die quicker than others (IBM DeathStar, anyone?), but in general I recommend eyeing up any drive that starts giving SMART errors (excepting seek/CRC errors on Seagates, they always report them) and consider replacing them sooner rather than later.
Western Digital offers higher duty cycle drives (such as the RE/RE2 range) for a few more bucks over the standard models at the high GB range (320+) which is worth it if you pummel the disk (we've had people bad block them from overuse, such as bioinformatics work), the standard el-cheapo disks only really qualify for 1/2 million hours MTBF and maybe 50% or less duty cycle.
Business wise I'd imagine Seagate will nudge people towards their SCSI range for more reliability which would indicate to me that failures on their PATA/SATA range is a good way to push Seagate SCSI. Western Digital don't have that luxury unless you consider the RE/RE2 range, but I'd imagine failures are not in their interest as the person would switch to Seagate SCSI (or other forms of SCSI disks).
Of course, people have their own favourites that they swear by, but ultimately all disks will fail eventually so best to have good backups done daily or more than daily to keep up to speed. Laptop hard drives are particularly vulnerable to impact damage/theft, so it's a good idea to get smartmontools out to have a look. - gaervern, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You need substantial numbers to make an informed choice (too bad Google didn't preset brands). People reporting experience from five or ten drives don't help. So, I bought an external WD MyBook because at least it looks cool.
- TheNakedChef, on 10/12/2007, -17/+18A blog, that links to a blog that links to a pdf. Bury
- mikehill33, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Everyone knows drive failure is related to Pr0n surfage.
- LogicalThinker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Why is everyone picking on Maxtor and Seagate?
Tell me more about Fujitsu, Samsung, Toshiba and Hitachi drives. - ldavid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1lmao...who admits such addictions?
- Y0tsuya, on 10/12/2007, -7/+6Arguing about which drive fails first is a waste of time. You should plan on the drive failing eventually. The way to prepare for that is to implement something like RAID5. It's even more robust if you add a hot spare to handle successive drive failures (3ware support this).
- jordanlund, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Every failed drive I've had over the years has been a Seagate. Every single one of them. This is despite owning Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum and Maxtor drives.
- ArminPiTT, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1all those HDD's kinda look like what's in my desktop system........FILLED WITH P0RN!!!!!!!!! *checks around to make sure girlfriend isn't looking over my shoulder*
- curbcheck, on 10/12/2007, -10/+6Maxtor was at the top of the failure rates, obviously.
- youareretarded, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1So who is going to be the first to paraphrase the pdf and give us the info we are looking for? (and yes I'm too lazy to do it myself:p)
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