I've been around for a while, so I understand that the quality of each manufacturer rises and falls over time. Hell, I used to be a big quantum fireball fan, but the quality of those plummeted in the eight months previous to them being bought out.

So, I was wondering what criteria that people who deal in DR use when they are buying 3.5" mechanical hard drives for themselves?

What I have been doing the last couple of years (due to the production disruption due to the floods and whatnot) is to use newegg reviews for the last two weeks because I noticed trends in the reviews where even highly reviewed models would have strings of bad ratings for DOA or extremely short lives - from which I inferred that this indicates production problems.

So far I have yet to get a DOA or weak drive using this technique - but then I am not a volume purchaser, I may buy 50 or so in a given year.

Generally my first priority (shared by most, I'm sure) is for maximum reliability and long life, but the second priority for me would be NOT purchasing a drive that is known to be particularly difficult to recover data from.

So, given all of that - what say you?

I would dearly love to have the RMA/failure statistics that places like newegg have access to!

Backblaze Storage Pod 2.0: a 135-terabyte, 4U server for $7,384:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/pe ... e-secrets/

"We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully."

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

My favorite brand is two. Two of whatever drives of your choice. Back up to both.

The Hitachis work well until they don't. Recovery can be a challenge on these new ATM models.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Jono, "IS" , not "can be" .

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Yup.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I thought that the Toshiba option may have been a trick question but ...

Toshiba Reveals First 3.5" Hard Disk Drives in Years [08/08/2012 11:23 PM]:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/di ... Years.html

However, is it really a Toshiba drive?

"Toshiba is making this possible with a new product line-up that includes 3.5" drives with up to 3TB capacity and technologies Toshiba inherited from WD and Hitachi GST."

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

All these questions are pointless as long as people want 10 TB drives to store mainly porn and warez, they use them like a freesbee and run it 24/7 at 100 °C on enclosures or so-called PC case.
Icing on the cake, they want it cost 10 $ and power it with crap power supply.
Guess what happens ?

Yes, but what drives do you use and / or recommend? Clearly most users are serial hard drive abusers - but at least they lie about it. You know, because that is helpful for repair purposes.

Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia (August 13, 2010):
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd ... ,2681.html

"Hitachi manufacturers the safest and most reliable hard drives, according to the Storelab study. Of the more than 200 Hitachi hard drives received, not a single one had failed due to manufacturing or design errors. All failures were due to physical impacts caused by the users. Adding the highest average lifespans and the best relationship between failures and market share, Hitachi can be regarded as the winner here."

I'd like to have access to Google's current HDD reliability data:

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (2007):
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I use EVERYTHING from old Maxtor 6Y / 6V / 6B / 6G and even old N40P (yes!) to - currently on this PC , already refurbished 3 times and on since 2006 : SAMSUNG , to WDs to Hitachi (from old AVER to newest). No 2,5" as I don't use laptops. The biggest disk I have in service is 400 GB (have lots of 1TB for temporary storage / clone but they are not under continuous service).

On RAID I have 250GB Seagate SATA (Enterprise) and 300 GB SCSI on servers (raid10) . Till now the 250GB are all fine (on since 2007) , the 300GB only 1 out of 5 has been replaced for "degradation" despite it was re-formatted and is operational but no longer reliable (too long to explain).

BUT : everything is under double-conversion UPS so the load is always separated and powered by UPS, and disks are always cooled at 20-25 deg. C . Servers are with redundant power and disk load is balanced. On PCs, I replace (and then refurb for further re-use) the power supply every 2 year or so regardless of functionality. Maybe this is the reason of almost no failure except normal wear and tear ?

And (most important) : I am able to refurb AND recover them all so I don't worry at all.

On datacenters everything is different.

We bought a LaCie RAID with (4) 1 TB Hitachi drives. So far -- with minimal usage (less than 100 hours) two of the drives have failed (bad sectors). I know that's a single data point, but I'm not impressed thus far.

LaCie has a dumb policy that we have to send the whole RAID back to them to get a single drive replacement! Imagine if we were an end-used vs. a data recovery firm . . . what a huge inconvenience.

Jono

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Depending on the exact requirements and situation - For the small time single-user system & home user looking for a reliable backup drive destined to hold "mission critical" info, I tend to recommend Western Digital. And then to complement it with another different mfg.

2 drives by 2 separate companies.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.