engadget.com — From one of the Internet's largest databases comes an interesting look at hard drives the Google way. With hundreds of thousands of these babies being put into use each day by the Internet giant, this evaluation points to "drive manufacturer, model, and age" as being the primary factors that induce hard drive failure.
Feb 19, 2007 View in Crawl 4
lostspyderFeb 19, 2007
No 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.
glitch82Feb 19, 2007
Did you even RTFA? Apparently drive temperature has less to do with failure than you are suggesting.
bobcrotchFeb 19, 2007
*grind*deathstar*grind*
dafragstaFeb 19, 2007
As many others have said, these stats are interesting but not very helpful without brands/models. Why would Google not rat out the s**tty 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 2004Seagate 250GB SATA 7200RPM Still works, same as above. Got it in 2005Seagate 400GB IDE 7200RPM Still works, same as above. Got it in 20062x Seagate 500GB SATA 7200RPM Still works, sitting in RAID 0 on my main box2x 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.
unl1m1t3dFeb 19, 2007
I 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.
ldavidFeb 19, 2007
That's quite funny...because every single drive I have bought that wasn't a Seagate has failed on me.
digitapFeb 19, 2007
This article by not telling who what etc is of NO USE to anybody on the ground, trying to pick the best drive
laser314Feb 20, 2007
New 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.