What are the top 10 'dodgy' hard drives at the moment

[pcrecovery]

To me, a good indicator of "worst" and "bad" drives would be given by those drives with the smallest market share AND highest failure rates.

It is far worse to see many failures on fairly new drives that have small market share IMHO.

[guru]

agree 100% pcrec.......

[Disklabs]

Having chatted to our engineers, we get approximately the following in:


35% 2.5"/3.5" Western Digital

25% Hitachi Travelstar

15 % Hitachi Deskstar

10% Seagates (all models)

10 % Toshiba

2 % Samsung

2 % Fujitsu

1 % other

I must stress though, we get calls from Western Digital customers directly from Western Digital, therefore, WD is proportionately probably about 15%

[hddguy]

Surely you would recieve more seagates that hitachi? I suppose to have a perfect idea we would need to know all disks recieved by all DR firms and this is not possible. But WD and Seagate are definately the most common for me. As far as 2.5" disks go, I have to agree that a large proportion of them I recieve would be travelstars. We also recieve quite a lot of Samsungs, most likely more samsungs that toshibas.

there can never enough toshibas as far as I am concerned!

[HDD Spaz]

there can never enough toshibas as far as I am concerned!

You wouldn't be saying that if you was working on the GSX I have been trying to fix for the past 2 days.

[pcimage]

Or the MK2035GSS with the cooked MCU I've got in.

I'm coming to the conclusion I'm gonna fail with this one

[CK]

Spaz, those GSX's are quicking turning Toshiba into my most hated drive recently. Having lots of MCU issues with them too. I wish they'd ship a new batch of 3021GAS's

[pcimage]

or 4025's ....... $$$$$$$$$$$$!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[jono-ats]

We're seeing a lot of WD Royal drives, e.g. 5000AAKS. But our daily fare is mostly Seagate Momentus (Venus 5400.3 with head crashes - didn't Seagate learn anything from the 7.01 WU series??) and Hitachi J9SA00s.

[hddguy]

there can never enough toshibas as far as I am concerned!

You wouldn't be saying that if you was working on the GSX I have been trying to fix for the past 2 days.

Maybe Im just lucky

[joshAU]

My two cents

Not a data recovery expert by a long way, but getting there slowly

In the last couple of months I have seen heaps of dead Seagate 1000gb SATA drives.
My wholesaler had close to 50% failure rate of these TB drives (40+ out of 100).
I would have suspected a bad batch, but I have seen many more seagate 1TB drives that were in external enclosures that have also died.
I assumed they died in the enclosures from the excess heat that is generated.

( the worst was one I sold a customer so they could backup their laptop, wipe and reinstall.
Well, they backed up, reinstalled their os, plugged the drive back in and it was dead......
disassembled unit and tested drive on my datarecovery pc - dead, not powering up, not a happy customer.)

(in future i should tell a customer that once they have finished their backup to then backup the backup, before wiping the original....but what a PITA.)

Historically I seem to see way too many Western digital drives, esp their 80GB IDE drives, clunking, clicking, bad heads, etc

I used to prefer Seagate and Hitachi drives, but that is probably based on fairly old drives.

JoshAU

[scratchy]

DR company should be able to fix the Seagate with customer's backup. There are a few in Aus that post here.

[Zorb]

Since I am more on the management/operations side now, I can tell you based on our statistics what my company sees.

We like to note the hardware brands and models on computers we service for trending reasons. Based on this, we can tell approximately who uses what parts, how many use what parts, how many of each part will fail (percentage) in totality and by environment.
Per percentage installed, I see by far the highest rate of failures with:
- Seagate notebook drives.
- Toshiba notebook drives.
- Western Digital desktop drives, though the failure mode has shifted with recent models, quality has not improved.
- Fujitsu notebook drives (though this may be because we see a lot of HP notebooks [garbage] with the cheapest fujitsu they can get)
- Maxtor (pre seagate takeover).
- Travelstar
- Seagate desktop drives
- Samsung Desktop drives
- WD Raptor
- Deskstar (recent models, remember!)

Now.... This isn't conclusive. I have never seen a WD notebook drive fail, but I can only find records of half a dozen ever being seen in service by my company. I've never seen a Fujitsu desktop drive in a contemporary machine, I don't think they make them at all anymore. I've never seen a modern computer with a Samsung notebook drive. The last Samsung 2.5 I can find record of was a 6GB model which was working. I've never seen a Hitachi SCSI drive fail. I'm limiting this to the last 5 years worth of models. Because the Deskstar 75GXP was garbage has no connection the the E7K1000 for example. Again, this is limited by what we see, working or otherwise.

[joshAU]

Those drives have a firmware bug, easy to fix with terminal with no data loss.
Search this forum

Thanks for the info Spildit.

Fortunately (for me) the customer decided that they didnt really care that much about the data. Of course the data was mission critical prior to me telling them it may get expensive.... ).

I would have liked to look at it, but as I run a computer repair shop, I dont have the time to fix things customers don't want to pay for.

I haven't had any experience communicating with a hdd via terminal.
Probably can't be much harder than setting up one of those annoying Cisco routers via a terminal.... (err....the lack of manufacturer's codes aside )

I used to play around a lot with data recovery.
I even managed to unlock ATA hard disk passwords from old 3.2gb and 4.3GB IBM and Toshiba notebook drives (with data recovery), not using software however.

Actually, I did use software for one bit of the proceedure - MHDD!, believe it or not.

My technique was a bit rough, and doesnt seem to work on newer drives (gave up around the 6-10GB vintages).

Thanks again.

JoshAU