Hard Drive failures

DV editing is intense on hard disk space. Accordingly I have had 5 drives at a time. In the last 1 year I have had 6 western digital drives die just outside warranty! I suspect they can not handle the sustained data transfer.
Who else out there has had multiple hard drive failures?
Lets make a poll of the WORST hard drives

I've been using the same 2 WD hard drives for over 2-1/2 years. I've edited thousands of hours of video with them and they show no signs of failing yet.

I suspect that if you've had 6 failed just outside of warranty then it's not just DV editing that's causing it.

I've used Maxtor, WD, Seagate, Samsung, IBM, Quantum and Conner Drives.
IMHO, drive reliability is more dependent on a particular model/family/technology than on a particular manufacturer.
I've had good and bad drives from various manufacturers.

Maxtors, mainly because I use them a lot. Cooling the HDs makes a big difference in their lifespan. I always use a case where I can put the intake fan in front of the HDs and have air blow over them. It drops the surface temps on them a lot. The newer SATA drives seem to run much cooler and they should have a better lifespan.

I've had maybe 5 HDs die in the last 6-7 years. Most of them within the warranty, so they were replaced for little cost.

My rule is never put anything on a HD that you can't afford to lose.

If you have that many HD failed, your computer could be too hot , check or put fans for your HD's also your power supply should be able to handle it get a power supply that is 450 watts +.
These hard drives are not designed to spin all the time , their life will get short specially if they get too hot. Hard drives that are designed to spin all the time are SCSI and these new Raptors they have a different technology but they are more expensive. Raid would be a solution to save your data but that would cost a lot need the card and 5 HD. reading from one HD and writting to another helps the stress .. as mentions by other guys heat is your main problem also movement while they are spinnig getting kicked or moved

I have 2 raptors and they do get quite hot, but with a little airflow going across them they stay cool to the touch. I have an additional 200gb maxtor where i put my video stuff and a fan that exhausts the air from all 3 of them..i leave a decent amount of space between them so the fan creates a kind of wind tunnel between the drives. it works very well.

I've had hard drives fail on shipment. Hard drives fail after two weeks. Hard drives fail after a few months. I've also had hard drives fail after the first year of service. It doesn't seem to matter who the manufacturer is. If I had to pick one, I'd say Western Digital is the one I've had the worst luck with, but I've got two WD drives that are several years old and have yet to give me problems. Like everything, sometimes you just get a bad egg and sometimes that bad egg is produced as a bad batch.

Of the 5 of mine that failed:

One had been pulled from an older computer. Unknown hours on it.
Two were Maxtor 40G, both ran incredibly hot. Their replacements were a different model and ran much cooler. They are still running.
One was a 80G Maxtor, I likely destroyed it myself during a botched reformat and power loss.
One was a 80G Maxtor that started to get random errors.

I usually run S.M.A.R.T. from BIOS now. It seems to catch some failures before the drive quits completely.

Out of the 20 or so drives I've installed in the last 3 years, no failures. I think some models have problems from the factory. Keeping them cool really helps, as does not buying drives that run overly hot.

Maxtor, at least, had a good replacement system. Usually took only 3-4 days to get the new drive. I've heard that has changed, though.

When I bought my last couple of hard drives lately, I went with Seagate because they automatically came with a 5 year warranty.

Western Digital, on the other hand, had dropped their warranty from 3 years to just 1 year, with the option to purchase (at additional cost) a 3 year warranty enclosed in the box. Seems Western Digital has lost faith in the reliability of their drives.

Originally Posted by INFRATOM

Raid would be a solution to save your data but that would cost a lot need the card and 5 HD.

FYI RAID 5 requires three hard drives at a minimum. Not five. The number designating the RAID level has nothing to do with the number of drives involved.

Western Digital has become more than a little misleading in their warranties.

They promote that their drives come with 3 or 5 year warranties. What they don't say is that the retail box versions only come with a one year warranties. What's more that one-year warrany starts from the date of manufacture -- not the time of purchase.

As you might guess, I've got a noisy, unreliable 160Gb WD that is just out of warranty.

I used to be a supporter of WD but not anymore. When they changed their warrany period one their VP's made a statement along the lines that "reliability was more important to their customers than the warrany period."
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=19571

I'll buy Seagate's with their 5 year warranty from now on.

Four of my five failures have been with the same model of WD drive
the WD1600 Caviar
In the previous 18 years no hard drive failures, I have 5 fans and a CPU fan on my system, Intel temp runs around 46 deg C in the system, CPU runs around 62

Three (or Four) Failed harddrives in the last four year:

2002 60-GB PATA Maxtor (Under Warranty < 1year) #1
2003 60-GB PATA Maxtor Replacement Drive (< 1 year later) (Never worked well ... probably a refurb one) (Still Under Warranty ... never sent back) #2?
2004 45-GB PATA IBM (4 Years Old) #2
2005 160-GB SATA Seagate (1.5 years old ... out of warranty). #3

I don't really know who to go with now ... I'm not happy with Maxtor. I was happy with Seagate SATA until a couple of weeks ago ... I was running a pair Seagate in RAID-0 and lost one. I used for them for video work and the data loss was recoverable ... Now I have one slot available for a SATA drive ... I just don't know who to go with now ...

The only hard drive failure I've had so far is a 200 gb MAXTOR that was only 3 months old. I was having problems with it so I ran the power max test only to find out the drive was slowly dying. Luckily I didn't have anything important on there that I needed to keep. MAXTOR customer support was great! In 2 weeks I received a refurbished 250 gb hard drive as a replacement. 50gbs free is fine for me!

On one of my computers I have a 200 gb MAXTOR SATA hard drive with a VANTEC fan to keep it cool. I have extra PCI SLOT fans in my computers as well as case fans. I have some internal hard drives that are in aluminium external cases which also have fans to help keep them cool.

At the rate of failures with any hard drive manufacturer I just buy what's on sale/cheap. Although I would never buy a HITACHI DEATHSTAR! Oops! I mean DESKSTAR.

Originally Posted by Suds-N-Spuds

Western Digital has become more than a little misleading in their warranties.

They promote that their drives come with 3 or 5 year warranties. What they don't say is that the retail box versions only come with a one year warranties. What's more that one-year warrany starts from the date of manufacture -- not the time of purchase.

This is false. I returned a WD Caviar earlier this year which was well over a year old (manufacture date), yet the purchase was made less than 6 months before it died. WD not only reimbursed my return shipping, but sent me a replacement. Their SATA drives are also the coolest and quietest drives I've installed.

Never had a hard drive fail. One computer has 4 WD hard drives. Another has two, and one more has one. Some of the drives are several years old and still working like new.

Steve

I have a pile of dead WD drives at work. Most were used 24/7 as video production devices.

Constant use and consequent heat speeds up the failure rate of hard drives. You can monitor the temperature of your drive(s) with the tiny and excellent DTEMP app. http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/DTemp/DTemp.zip

Maxtors only. My WDs (4 of them) are great.

Right now I use 3 Maxtor 160GB 7200rpm drives with a fan blowing across them. One drive for windows and programs. Other two for video. In the past I had both Maxtor and WD. Never had any drives fail. In my closet, sits an old 20MB WD (yes, MB). It is a 5-1/4" size drive with it's own power supply and enclosure. I believe it is MFM/RLL drive. I tried it about a year ago on my old computer, and it still worked!!!

About two years ago I had a Maxtor 7200rpm that made a high-pitched sound, new out of the box. Very high-pitched and loud, almost outside my range of hearing. It was annoying so I contacted Maxtor and they replaced it with the same model. It too made that high pitched noise. The 3rd time they replaced it with a different model which was fine. That was the only time I had to do warranty work.

At work we have several brands of hard drives in our servers that we test. I can tell you that Western Digital drives have a failure rate that is just as high as Maxtor or any other brand. WD is not that great quality anymore. Maxtor quality has actually improved over the past few years.