# Spinning hard drive failures - are they becoming more frequent?



## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 18, 2017)

A couple of years ago I had four Seagate drives fail within a month of each other, just out of warranty. The company reps were nasty on the phone - repeatedly - so I won't buy any more of their products.

Western Digital is much more helpful and pleasant on the phone, but I've now had two of their My Passport backup drives fail - both of them under warranty and they're sending a replacement, but it's still a PITA having to spend 72 hours copying all my samples over.

Is this just the gods punishing me for being a bad person, or is my suspicion that they're failing more often real? It's not like drives never used to fail, but it was pretty rare.


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## rottoy (Oct 18, 2017)

I haven't experienced it frequently with either company, so I'll just leave this here.


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## synthpunk (Oct 18, 2017)

Good ventilation/normal room temperature ?, bi-yearly compressed air cleaning ?

OWC purchased/WD exchange went flawless here the couple times I needed it.

Time to think about working Samsung T3 SSD portables in the future budget or steal your wife's ? 

If Im buying anything HD in the future it will be Glyph. Incredible company!


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 18, 2017)

Actually all my machines are in my garage, which does get hot, but that's been over 20 years. Samsung T3 SSD portables... I'd rather spend the money on some really good hallucinogenic drugs and just pretend I bought those drives. Stealing my wife's, sure.

Glyph is a good company, and I bought a 330MB (yes MB) drive from them - also over 20 years ago. OWC was good about replacing a dead SATA 3 card under warranty. But VARs tend to be too rich for me to justify (with the exception of VisionDAW computers).


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## chimuelo (Oct 18, 2017)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> A couple of years ago I had four Seagate drives fail within a month of each other, just out of warranty. The company reps were nasty on the phone - repeatedly - so I won't buy any more of their products.
> 
> Western Digital is much more helpful and pleasant on the phone, but I've now had two of their My Passport backup drives fail - both of them under warranty and they're sending a replacement, but it's still a PITA having to spend 72 hours copying all my samples over.
> 
> Is this just the gods punishing me for being a bad person, or is my suspicion that they're failing more often real? It's not like drives never used to fail, but it was pretty rare.



Seagates mistake was to go consumer after their 15k SCSI Cheetah success run.
They went for profit using the cheapest parts.
A good CEO would have taken 15k Cheetahs and simply SATA-tized them.
They choose to go consumer, Raptors stole market share and Seagates only really good drives were Momentus Hybrids for PC and laptops.
I recently secure erased a 500GB 8 year old Momentus.
Forget about it’s smart cache, so was pissed at how long loads took.
After about 25 boots it can load STEAM samples as fast as my Samsung Pro 850s.

But their Barracudas were the worst products they ever made.


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Oct 18, 2017)

I've also had Seagate drives fail right after the warranty expired. Now I only get WD and haven't had any failures. They're all quite a few years old and seem to be fine. The only exception is that I use Seagate's slim portable drives for some backups and my laptop. That was just because there are often big discounts on them.

I've never considered Glyph since it seems like a normal Seagate-type drive being sold for far too expensive.

Edit: Who wants to bet that now that I've said this, all of my WD drives are gonna fail?


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 18, 2017)

chim, I have to qualify what I wrote earlier today about high-binned components. Spinning hard drives do have a habit of failing after their warranty runs out, as Gerhard says.


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## charlieclouser (Oct 18, 2017)

The only brand I have had zero failures with is the DeskStar line from IBM / Hitachi / HGST. I've been with them since the days of 75gb IBM DeskStar drives all the way through to today's HGST UltraStar helium-filled 10tb (!) drives, of which I have six. Zero failures. Ancient drives that I pull out of the garage and stick into a drive dock boot right up.

I've had catastrophic failure / bricked drives from Western Digital and especially Seagate - back in the SCSI days we had racks and racks of Seagate drives - Cheetah, hi-rpm, all sorts of flavors. No variant was safe.

I've been quite happy with the HGST drives, even though I think the company is now actually owned by Western Digital, the HGST reputation is still the only unsullied one in my house. (knock wood)


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 19, 2017)

Helium-filled 10TB. Who knew!


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## Lannister (Oct 19, 2017)

Just write it all down on paper, no need for backups!


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## Symfoniq (Oct 20, 2017)

According to BackBlaze's extensive stats, HGST does indeed make the most reliable spinning disks. Anecdotally, I've been using HGST hard drives in numerous servers and NAS devices for a few years now without a single failure. Also anecdotally, I've had pretty good luck with Western Digital.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I was a Seagate fan, but was eventually burned one too many times.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 20, 2017)

The thing is, my approach used to be to use all of them, trust none of them - i.e. make good backups.

So I'd buy whatever Fry's had on sale that had at least a 3-year warranty, and it almost always lasted until that drive became laughably obsolete (because drives with multiples of its capacity were far less expensive).

Once every few years - literally! - a drive would fail. But I've never seen the same frequency, nor multiple drives from different manufacturing runs go bad.

I think chim is right that they've become too cheap. SSD prices have gone up 25% since a year ago due to a shortage of flash memory, but spinning drives keep getting cheaper.

And it seems that $120 or so for a portable USB-powered, 5200RPM 4TB drive is just not enough money.


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## babylonwaves (Oct 20, 2017)

Symfoniq said:


> Also anecdotally, I've had pretty good luck with Western Digital.
> 
> Once upon a time, many years ago, I was a Seagate fan, but was eventually burned one too many times.



same here


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## Brian2112 (Oct 21, 2017)

Hey Nick (The Ape)
Sorry you are having troubles. I've had a lot of WD backup drives over the years (Mybooks) and so on. 7 of 11 of them have failed. I don't know if it's bad luck, but it certainly exceeds a failure rate I would have expected over about a six year span. Some of it just may have been on my end (bad power or whatever). I know no drives last forever, but it does seem like internal drives last me a lot longer.
I started using Touro S drives as backups in 1 TB clumps. I think WD bought out whoever makes the Touro drives. Breaking up my files and spreading them out over drives that are not constantly plugged in is my plan now. Also I bought one giant 6tb WD black drive (internal) just for another backup set.
Backups of backups is the game unfortunately, for me at least.
WD has been solid for my internal drives but it does seem that the external backup drives they sell for cheap are iffy.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 22, 2017)

Yeah, I have Time Machine alternating between an internal drive and one attached to my router. It's the third one, the SuperDuper image on a My Passport drive, that failed.

So I didn't lose any data when I had to revert to Sierra last week, but I wasted several hours that I wouldn't have lost if the image backup had worked.


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## chimuelo (Oct 22, 2017)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> chim, I have to qualify what I wrote earlier today about high-binned components. Spinning hard drives do have a habit of failing after their warranty runs out, as Gerhard says.



I never experienced failures except once when my diagnostics reported my OS Drive was funky.
Popped in a Spare that made the gig miserable as I hadn’t updated it for months.
Any mechanical drives I have now are 4TB Back ups from WD.
Never use them except for data transfer in case my Acronis Cloud can’t be accessed.

Each SSD has a clone.
Then the WD Spinners, then the Cloud.

Why take a chance...


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## careyford (Oct 24, 2017)

Anybody using the cloud? I'm not backing up my laptop and MacPro via Carbonite. Considering doing Google Drive for music data (notation, logic, pro tools files) so not that much storage needed.


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## chimuelo (Oct 31, 2017)

Karnak has spoken.
Seagate is tripping about their Awards and front page picture.






https://www.eteknix.com/backblaze-reveals-q3-2017-hard-drive-failure-stats/


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 31, 2017)

I don't care, not buying any more of their products. They were nasty to me on the phone - repeatedly.


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## chimuelo (Nov 2, 2017)

Well the ad is for being the worst, I thought somebody would read the intro.

They got the worst HDD Award.
Figured you’d like it....


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## heisenberg (Nov 2, 2017)

Seagate are still doing badly on the Backblaze reports and HGST take the crown. This has been the story for a number of years now. WD have had some bad drives in the past as well.


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## Blakus (Nov 2, 2017)

I literally just lost my main backup HDD yesterday 
I swear every Seagate I've had for as long as I can remember, has died after a couple years. Time for a NAS, with more spinning drives... :D


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## heisenberg (Nov 2, 2017)

The failure rate graphs you see on hard drives, have failures going up precipitously after the 3rd year of use, that is for drives that see a lot of use. I have seen these graphs in these Backblaze HD failure articles that they publish a couple of times a year.


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## Morning Coffee (Nov 2, 2017)

I posted about hard drives recently, I don't think the quality is as good any more (Hello Seagate!). I still have IDE hard drives that start every time, just like old, well built, made to last, low technology cars!


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## Nick Batzdorf (Nov 3, 2017)

So it's not just me, Morning Coffee!



heisenberg said:


> failures going up precipitously after the 3rd year of use, that is for drives that see a lot of use. I



I've also had that with drives that don't see much use, i.e. that only see use when I need them to work so I can get back my data!


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