Hard Drive Manuf...quality control or quality of parts?

[Moontrash]

I was reading through Newegg recently, seeing if there were any hard drives on sale and a few questions about hard drives came to mind. First off, is the difference in a WD blue and black drive parts quality? or quality control. I guess the same goes for seagate to. I can see a seagate 1tb drive and 2 different models and 1 is usually $20 difference in price. Some reviews on these drives are horrid and I wondered, if these drives are this bad, are they using sub standard parts or is the quality control just no good?

[nic2k4]

The difference between WD blue and black drives is performance and warranty. As for Seagate having horrid reviews, believe it. I was a Seagate fan since the early 90's when WD was making problem drives. Back then there were many manufacturers to choose from and I must have bought drives from all of them. In the last 10 years the number of manufacturers has dwindled and now we're left with 3. Now, the tables have turned and Seagate is making bad drives, their drives have had firmware issues and bearing issues.

Seagate had a better warranty, so I figured I'd be covered, instead I got burned. I have a 7200.11 drive which needed the firmware update and on top of that the bearing started acting up after only 450 hours (from the S.M.A.R.T. info). No problem, it's still under warranty; not quite, they made sure few people would be able to claim it.

Look at the picture, the SATA connector has been made so incredibly thin and flimsy it takes very little to break it (in a way that doesn't affect function). My drive couldn't be replaced just because the little key tab on the power connector was cracked, yet the problem is with the bearing (a special tool was built to fix it).

On the other hand WD isn't so picky and they will even give warranty if you have a drive that didn't come from an authorized dealer!

[fritzi93]

I can see a seagate 1tb drive and 2 different models and 1 is usually $20 difference in price.

I've sometimes wondered about that too, when the specs show no obvious differences. But with NewEgg you have to remember they don't keep much inventory. So if, for instance, Seagate introduces a new model and wants to cut the price a bit on older ones to clear them out, you can be certain NewEgg's price will reflect that immediately. But that's just my surmise.

As to reviews, you gotta sort the wheat from the chaff. I got a Seagate 2 TB "Green" drive just as the news came out of the Thailand floods. There were a helluva lot of bad reviews to be sure. Reading closely, many reviewers were on XP and made no mention of properly aligning this AFD drive, which made me think operator error was a factor for at least some of those users. So I took the plunge and all has been okay, so far.

Just a couple weeks ago, I got a Samsung 2 TB. Apparently it's actually a China Seagate drive. Hard to avoid the made in China ones any more.

In regard to which hard drive manufacturer to recommend, I have no idea. It seems every year or so it changes, this year WD has some crap drives, next year it's Seagate. Anyway, I've had many of each and almost all of them have given good service.

I'd be interested in reading others' opinions on this subject and hope the thread continues.

[edDV]

The WD Black is the top of line consumer performance drive but there are also the higher speed 2.5" Raptors, and a full line of Enterprise drives above those.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/enterprise/

Seagate also has a line of Enterprise drives
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/

[fritzi93]

Here's a link on returns to retailers, a year old though:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-6/components-returns-rates.html

I guess the infamous Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 with the buggered firmware was no longer being sold when the list was compiled. Wonder what the return rate was on those? Interesting that the 2 TB Barracuda LP (green) had a 3.7% return rate.

[Moontrash]

thanks for the input so far. It seems like Seagate is an iffy typa brand. The kind where you "get lucky" if you get one that can last. I personally have never owned one. The only brands I have owned are WD,Hitachi and Maxtor. Since 2003 maybe, I've had 4 or 5 WD's die on me under 2 yrs of use. Maybe it was overuse or just quality. I'm not sure. I do have 1 Hitachi 80gb from around 2002 (came from inside an Iomega external case)..that still works good. I also have an old 160gb Maxtor from 2003 or 2005 that still works fine. I will say the WD's I use still work but have hiccups. I have 1 WD 320 i grabbed in feb. 2009 that still goes but towards the last half of the drive the read/transfer rates drop down to 2mb's in quite a few spots. It's dying but I'm not terribly surprised. I haven't had the best of luck with WD but I guess they're not suppose to last forever.

The link for the return rates is really an interesting read. It will surely help in choosing a brand that will last. I have 2 WD black drives, 1 thats 3 years old and 1 thats about 7 months and they still work but these days, with all the horror stories of the Thailand Flood, Wd seems to have a lot of complaints on bad drives coming from there since the flood. I"m a tad standoffish to include even a Black drive in my selection. Some of these warranties have dropped also. A 1 year warrany on some of these drives doesn't make me feel like ordering one of those.

[jman98]

ALL drives have people who hate them and love them. Some swear that brand X is always crap and Y is always good. Others say the opposite. I've used just about every brand there is. I used to have weird problems only on home PCs where Windows would refuse to boot and could not be repaired. It took a brand new install to fix the issue. This happened to me every few years on EVERY PC I owned. I used to blame "crap Windows" for this but then I started to blame the hard drives and figured I just got crap drives. Finally I came to the conclusion that it was actually my fault. See I live in an area subjected to frequent brownouts and I foolishly was too cheap to use a UPS at home. Now that I've started using UPS devices I've not had a disk drive problem. Some people just get bad drives and that is just luck of the draw. In a manufacturing run 100% of devices will not be perfect. But I have come to believe that as most consumers do not use UPS devices at home that probably a lot of "bad disk drive" issues are actually power related. It's a defect of the software, but Windows just behaves abominably if a live system loses power. The chance of disaster is shockingly high. You shouldn't do it deliberately, but if you yank power on a Mac, Linux or Unix system, as long as doing so did not physically damage and hardware you should be able to recover sensibly from it. Just a few weeks ago my best friend brought me a drive running XP from a work PC (he owns his own business) and the PC accidentally lost power due to an inadvertent pull of its power cord. I was able to recover all the data he wanted from the drive with no problems, but the stupid thing wouldn't boot any more. This kind of thing would be regarded as a "bad drive" by a lot of people when in fact the drive seemed fine to me and the issue was that Windows is a POS and it corrupted itself to where it couldn't boot. But the underlying problem was a sudden loss of power that Windows failed to handle gracefully.

[fritzi93]

Interesting point about the effect of power outages.

I live in a heavily wooded area with a transformer 50 yds from my house. Every couple months--BOOM!. Another goddamn squirrel gets fried and the single-throw switch lever on the transformer is hanging down. By and by the lineman comes and gets out his telescoping fiberglass pole to push it back in place. I've asked the power company to put a cage on it, but they don't seem to think it's necessary.

That's never caused any real problems with my computers, just inconvenience; and BTW I do have surge protectors on all sensitive electronics. But the SSD (OCZ Vertex) in my newest-built computer (same as in my computer details) sure doesn't like it. I usually have to do a startup repair, and sometimes clear the CMOS as well to get it to boot. Then run system file checker to be sure system files are not corrupted, never have been so far. Oddly, the office computer has an OCZ Agility 3 SSD and isn't affected. I guess I'll have to break down and get a UPS.

Anyway, the most recent really bad drive I can remember reading about in Tom's Hardware is the afore-mentioned Seagate 7200.11 with the bad firmware. I don't think one should rush to the conclusion that all Seagate drives are terrible. Return rates don't bear that out, although WD has a better record in that regard. Mind you, Seagate drives tend to be cheaper, and having used a good many of them, they've given me good value.

Good luck whatever you get.

[Moontrash]

i live in a rural area and also have power outages. I can hear the transformer go when the winds get real high here but i've never seen any ill affects with this scenario. I have no UPS', just surge protectors. Since my WD 320gb is showing it's early signs of dying, I just wanna get a 500gb sumthin when it goes on sale for a reasonable price. I will say none of what's on my hdd's is terribly important but the hassle of those floods really has put a crimp on prices and I just won't pay $70 to $80 for a 500gb drive. I'll limp along with what I have and hopefully, prices will go down.

[fritzi93]

I just got an email today from NewEgg, the WD Blue 1 TB is going for $90 bucks w/promo code EMCNEHE59, time limited, ends 5/28. Free shipping.

The Samsung 2 TB I got recently was $100 bucks w/promo.

It sounds like you do NEED a hard drive. Aren't you over-thinking this? The WD Blue has a really low return rate, since you're concerned about that.

[EDIT] Hmnn, my email says $89.99, the website says $99.99:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136767

[Moontrash]

that article about return rates was very interesting but you have to look at the date it was published...well before the floods...look at the reviews of that 1tb drive since the flood...they're dreadful...i'd pay an extra few bucks for the black drive instead

not over-thinking...just cost conscious

[jagabo]

[EDIT] Hmnn, my email says $89.99, the website says $99.99:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136767

You have to add the drive to your shopping cart then add the promo code during checkout.

Our local Fry's has 1 TB WD Green drives for $90 this weekend. Online too:
http://www.frys.com/product/5528610

Before the flood 2 TB drives were going for about that price. 3 TB drives hit a low of $120.

[hello_hello]

I've bought quite a few different brand/sizes of hard drives over the last five years. Eight of them are pretty much five years old and still going strong with heavy usage (WD, Samsung, Seagate). Even the noisy Hitachi 2TB drive has run 24/7 for well over a year without missing a beat. I've also got several WD Green drives which I use for external storage and haven't has any issues. The only drive I've had die on me in the last 5 years is the Samsung the cat knocked off the desk while it was running.... well except for those notorious Seagate Barracudas. I bought a pair of them almost exactly five years ago (2 other smaller, Seagate drives I bought around the same time are still going strong).

The problem I have there is I returned the Seagate drives which they promptly replaced with refurbished drives (same model). Within a few months both were dead so I returned them again, and then again. Those drives had a five year warranty at the time, and I returned them again for replacement only a week ago, just as the warranty expired. In 5 years I've probably had 5 months use out of those drives, mainly because I only ever used them as temporary storage (simply don't trust them) and because there were periods of 6 months or longer where they sat dead on my desk before I got around to returning them again. It'll be interesting to see how long the next replacements last when I get them. Part of the reason I left it a while to return the drives for the third time was in the hope all the crap drives might finally be out of circulation and this time they'll be replaced with something decent.

I've got no problem with Seagate in one respect..... every time I've returned the drives they've promptly replaced them.... but I do have a problem with them replacing them with junk which didn't last. It makes the warranty fairly meaningless. Because of that, I'm probably off Seagate for life.
I was under the impression Seagate now manufacture Samsung drives, or bought their hard drive division? If that's the case, while the four Samsung drives I bought five years ago are still going strong, I think that'll take Samsung off the list of hard drive brands I'll buy also.