Hard Drives are becoming LESS reliable

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Thu May 29, 2003 5:30 pm

Hard Drives are becoming less reliable

It has been said wisely in one of the threads in the Z, that we are using HDs in a much intense way than ever before. Not denying this is true, the reliability of the drives is becoming weaker than it used to be, statistics are showing this.

Yesterday I went to talk with somebody who is a representative of Maxtor here in Chile, among other trademarks. He told me that unfortunately, an average of 75% of Maxtor 40GBs 5200 sold last year in Chile, have been defective drives… This is really serious… It’s not just how expensive drives are… but your work, which is under the threat of being lost as well as your system as a whole.

The reason he gave me were that companies are constantly joining other companies, as this is a very fast process. The matter is that “trademark” today means less than it has ever meant. One tough example is IBM DeskStar drives, there are many of those being defective.

I said: “What can I do so, if drives are not reliable, what should I buy”. The answer was: “You should always buy after having reading a lot about, reviews, people experiences, etc., and NEVER buy a product not being older than 6 months, because problems always appear about 6 months later of the drives have been put into the shops”.

Curiously, many shops have had serious and massive problems selling Western Digital and Seagete 5200RPM drives as well, because lots and lots of drives were defective. It’s suprising to me cos we are talking about the perhaps best three HD creators: Maxtor, Western Digital and Seagate.

To me, this is simple… 5 years ago, the market demand was several times less stressful than today is, and the PC market has grown very rapidly to a real international multimillion dollars market, really! There are tens of thousands of HDs being sold every day… Drives are cheaper in price but they are also cheaper in quality and reliability. This is what I think.

Everything going so FAST, no time to check them carefully like they used to do long ago, there is no time for such tests or drives would be double the price and the market would collapse. It’s happening the same that happened more than 50 years ago with TV sets. I already know TV sets that are standing there… being used, from long ago, back and white of course, but they still work very well. TVs today are no longer like the older ones… Cars, kitchen implements, vacuum cleaners that burns so easily, etc., etc., and now the PC is going into this as well.

What do you think and how to protect ourselves?

helldriver · Post by **helldriver** » Thu May 29, 2003 7:04 pm

i think that it is not only economic competition (except the the computer industry in which technological progress is to fast).

many firms are calculating that facts. they want us to buy their products constantly as they also want to promote their good name.
if you imagine when you buy a cd player which is build rock solid you don´t have to buy a new one in the next 15 years.
that would be good for the costumers but not for sales. and the sales are eminent for all firms.
it´s sad but true. capitalism is fucking prodigal.
i think, one opportunity customers have is to invest into quality products even if they´re more expenive. im most cases they´re more reliable.

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Thu May 29, 2003 8:46 pm

15 years of use is just impossible... just cos you need to constantly update your system. But let's say... a fair 5 years of use this is all most costumers ask for... So do I.

helldriver · Post by **helldriver** » Fri May 30, 2003 4:24 am

my example was related to cd players and even for computers 15 isn´t unrealistic. think of c64 commodore. many of them are functioning today.

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Fri May 30, 2003 6:18 pm

That's true... You can still find quite a few Pentium 70GHs running well... And with the same hard drivers

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Fri May 30, 2003 6:46 pm

And to those of you, who did not already:

Go register at http://www.storagereview.com and join the hard drive reliability survey. Your info (not your personal info OC) will be part of a huge database, wich you get acces to in the same go.

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Sat May 31, 2003 8:10 am

It's indeed very useful, I already did and have read about the "reliability stuff" and there I could see that Drives are becoming less reliable all the time...

Post by **garyb** » Sat May 31, 2003 1:06 pm

yeah,but then they can sell more!and they keep getting bigger/faster so who wants to keep them!(only a little sarcasm)

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat May 31, 2003 1:43 pm

2 years is about the max I give any drive... some work for 3, some 5... but they do get shakey I think. (cuz I leave my machine on alot) And that's about the cycle for new and bigger drives to come out, so I just migrate my entire disk to a new one. Works for me at the moment.

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Sat May 31, 2003 2:52 pm

As far as I'm concerned, a hard drive is only as reliable as your backup system. I've lost enough HDs that I now have an External USB/Firewire drive for every hard drive that holds important data (and I keep all my data on separate HDs from the OS/program drives, with the exception, of course, of a few configuration files, but with the appropriate software, those aren't hard to make consistent backups of either).

Until drive companies start including data-mining services in their warranties, there's no use in fretting over whose drive is guaranteed up to 3 years or 6 days, as the data will be hosed, and all you'll get from them is the same damn HD that screwed you in the first place.

My general criteria for drive buying is, how long has it been on the market, how loud is it, & what's the access time?

I'm hopeful about SATA drives, and there are some kewl looking dark horses on the horizon, but I'm about to put my audio stuff on a laptop and switch my desktop over to Linux, so I can't imagine that SATA's going to be a good investment for the moment. But it definately has potential for us Hard-disk recording types here in music land.

My $.02
Sam

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Sat May 31, 2003 3:17 pm

Oh, so YOU are the one, who proted SFP to Linux

What about your Creamware gear - you DO have creamware gear right?

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Sun Jun 01, 2003 6:20 am

I wish... though I can't imagine SFP would run so good on Linux. Not immediately anyway. Though I'd be real happy even with a buggy constantly crapping out version of SFP for Linux right now. There's a very interesting grassroots open source music community growing right now. There's already functional SoundForge-like editors, some not so rudimentary sequencers (tho no VST support yet). The only thing holding me back from trying it out is that I can't use my Creamware stuff with it.

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya (pardon my phoenetic spelling): "I hate waiting."

Sam