2TB horror stories

[Eugene86]

I've got six 2tb WD caviar green, one 1.5tb WD caviar green, and one 1tb WD caviar green running in my server for just over a year now and everything is fine, knock on wood. I'm probably gonna replace the 1.5tb and the 1tb with two 2tb greens soon for more storage. I only stick with WD cuz I've never had an issue with their hard drives and they also have awesome customer service when I called with some questions.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

All of the reports of poor packaging from Newegg & Amazon baffle me. I've ordered close to 100 disks from the two vendors (combined) in the last year and have never had anything packaged poorly. Newegg even started double-boxing their disks a few months ago. Bare drive wrapped in a layer of bubble wrapping inside a smaller box, which is then surrounded by either crumpled paper or packing peanuts. If I order multiple drives, each drive is boxed separately. Amazon uses the box with black plastic mounts inside another a box that's cushioned with air packets.

I've never had a hard drive die on me in a decade of system building, sans lightning strike/electrical storm incidents that took out the whole system. I really have to wonder whether people who have multiple drives die on them are victims of shitty products or if they're stuffing their drives into a poorly ventilated case with some shit PSU plugged directly into a wall outlet that's supplying dirty power...

 

[a123456]

All of the reports of poor packaging from Newegg & Amazon baffle me. I've ordered close to 100 disks from the two vendors (combined) in the last year and have never had anything packaged poorly. Newegg even started double-boxing their disks a few months ago. Bare drive wrapped in a layer of bubble wrapping inside a smaller box, which is then surrounded by either crumpled paper or packing peanuts. If I order multiple drives, each drive is boxed separately. Amazon uses the box with black plastic mounts inside another a box that's cushioned with air packets.

I've never had a hard drive die on me in a decade of system building, sans lightning strike/electrical storm incidents that took out the whole system. I really have to wonder whether people who have multiple drives die on them are victims of shitty products or if they're stuffing their drives into a poorly ventilated case with some shit PSU plugged directly into a wall outlet that's supplying dirty power...

I'm in a similar camp. I haven't had a hard drive completely die on me with actual data loss. There have been a couple drives where I was getting wary and just did a replacement preemptively. One was something like a 7 year old 80GB Maxtor and another was the horrid 1.5TB 7200.11 things where I just didn't want to take the chance.

None of the hard drives that I've gotten from Newegg or Amazon have been badly packed either. Could just be I keep getting the responsible packer, but I'm not complaining.

 

[Eugene86]

All of the reports of poor packaging from Newegg & Amazon baffle me. I've ordered close to 100 disks from the two vendors (combined) in the last year and have never had anything packaged poorly. Newegg even started double-boxing their disks a few months ago. Bare drive wrapped in a layer of bubble wrapping inside a smaller box, which is then surrounded by either crumpled paper or packing peanuts. If I order multiple drives, each drive is boxed separately. Amazon uses the box with black plastic mounts inside another a box that's cushioned with air packets.

I've never had a hard drive die on me in a decade of system building, sans lightning strike/electrical storm incidents that took out the whole system. I really have to wonder whether people who have multiple drives die on them are victims of shitty products or if they're stuffing their drives into a poorly ventilated case with some shit PSU plugged directly into a wall outlet that's supplying dirty power...

Exactly, which is why I have a feeling that a lot of the people who have these issues are actually having them not because of faulty hardware, but because of improper use, cooling, etc. It boggles my mind how some people use various hard drives of different brands and have so many of them failing. I've been building computers for at least 10 years now and I've never had a drive fail on me. I have friends who build their computers as well and know how to properly care for them and they've never had drives failing on them either.
I just think its mostly user error instead of hardware failure in a lot of situations.

 

[Soundmanred]

I've only had one HD go bad, and it was an external that dropped on the floor when my daughter tripped on the cord.
I have multiple high capacity drives by Samsung, WD, Seagate, and Hitachi and they are all running great.

 

[ronbo613]

Being a photographer and videographer, I have a ton of hard drives. I've gone through all the brands; to me the bottom line is you have to buy best drive available at the time, no matter which brand.
I bought a lot of 1TB Seagate 7200rpm drives until they started having problems, then I went to WD Blacks, which are excellent drives. Needing more storage, I wanted 2TB drives, but was put off by all the bad reviews. The Samsung F4 HD204UI seemed to have the best reviews and pricing, so I got one. It's been working fine now for about six months, so I just got another one. Yes, updating the firmware is a pain in the butt and I always run a full surface scan on a new drive, the Samsung takes about six hours to do this, but for the price, I guess it's worth it. I use the drives for storage, it appears that 5400rpm 2TB drives have less issues than 7200rpm drives. I use an SSD boot drive, a few 7200rpm 1TB "work" drives and the two 5400rpm 2TB storage drives, trying to stay within safe working capacities of all the drives.
I am hoping the drives don't fail because I believe that Samsung customer service will not be nearly as good as a company like Western Digital, I just hope they will RMA a defective drive if needed.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

^ Watch out for the faulty Spinpoint F4 firmware. I haven't encountered any data corruption because of it though (ask me how I know - MD5 checking 12TB of files is painful )

Also, at least one full sector scan is mandatory for all new / unknown drives (multiples are better to try to induce infant mortality). Sure, it's a PITA, but you can rest easy knowing that you have significantly reduced the likelihood of the drive borking just after you've finished transferring your files to it and wiped the old one

 

[beginner99]

I have 2 2TB WD Greens. One is almost full, one half full. No RAID or any other fancy stuff.
No issues so far. Never hear a sound from them. Actually pretty strange.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Exactly, which is why I have a feeling that a lot of the people who have these issues are actually having them not because of faulty hardware, but because of improper use, cooling, etc. It boggles my mind how some people use various hard drives of different brands and have so many of them failing. I've been building computers for at least 10 years now and I've never had a drive fail on me. I have friends who build their computers as well and know how to properly care for them and they've never had drives failing on them either.
I just think its mostly user error instead of hardware failure in a lot of situations.

The part you are missing is that some drives can take abuse better than others.

In fact before I put any drive in my Unraid server it spends a month in my desktop hackintosh. That system is pure hell for an HD- poor cooling, a non-complaint OS, and I make it my slush drive so tons of activity. If a drive can survive that it goes in the array.

 

[C1]

Ya, my experience is pretty much everyone else's. Ive really had only one 120GB WD fail in the last ten years (with one exception which Ill get to) plus I have almost thirty other drives (mostly old discards which I picked up) which I use for image backup.

The one exception is that I bought an external Hitachi 2TB (SimpleTech version) from Frys that failed three days into evaluation/stress testing. I dont think the drive per se failed, but instead the enclosure electronics.

It's probably true that many HDDs are simply mishandled. The 3.5" drives when in an external enclosure are vulnerable to shock (such as when flopping over on the side while running or even rough handling/moving about too much while in operation).

 

[taltamir]

Newegg even started double-boxing their disks a few months ago. Bare drive wrapped in a layer of bubble wrapping inside a smaller box, which is then surrounded by either crumpled paper or packing peanuts.

That is really REALLY bad boxing for a HDD.

Amazon uses the box with black plastic mounts inside another a box that's cushioned with air packets

That is good boxing for a HDD.

I've never had a hard drive die on me in a decade of system building, sans lightning strike/electrical storm incidents that took out the whole system.

In decades of system buildings you never heard of a surge protector? really?

I really have to wonder whether people who have multiple drives die on them are victims of shitty products or if they're stuffing their drives into a poorly ventilated case with some shit PSU plugged directly into a wall outlet that's supplying dirty power...

Google did a massive study and found that heat actually is rather irrelevant to HDD longevity. Common wisdom was "heat kills drives" for years but once it was actually scientifically studied it was refuted.
And the assertion that only thing that kills a HDD is "dirty power" or a "lightening strike" is laughable.

I flat out don't believe you when you say that you have never seen a drive, out of HUNDREDS that died from anything other than a lightening strike.

 

[ronbo613]

Watch out for the faulty Spinpoint F4 firmware. I haven't encountered any data corruption because of it though (ask me how I know - MD5 checking 12TB of files is painful )

I got the firmware right off the Samsung website but I would be the first to say that a big company like Samsung should be able to afford someone to write better firmware and a more convenient upgrade package.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Fry's has the Hitachi 2TB 5400RPM drives on sale for $69. They're SATA3 apparently. After seeing this discussion I may just grab one. Anyone have experience with them?

 

[Gigantopithecus]

That is really REALLY bad boxing for a HDD.

I disagree.

In decades of system buildings you never heard of a surge protector? really?

I can't control whether or not my friends and customers follow my advice. But your goofy assumption is duly noted.

Google did a massive study and found that heat actually is rather irrelevant to HDD longevity. Common wisdom was "heat kills drives" for years but once it was actually scientifically studied it was refuted.

First, Google's study was absolutely not scientific. Is it better than anecdotes from system builders? Sure, but don't ascribe a large sample size the authority of a legitimate scientific study. Second, Google doesn't have filthy datacenters. Some of my friends and customers on the other hand...

And the assertion that only thing that kills a HDD is "dirty power" or a "lightening strike" is laughable.

No shit, Sherlock; that's not what I said.

I flat out don't believe you when you say that you have never seen a drive, out of HUNDREDS that died from anything other than a lightening strike.

LOL.

 

[lsv]

This is the first I have heard of 2TB drives being unreliable.

I lold.

 

[Voo]

First, Google's study was absolutely not scientific.

And if you'd like to qualify that statement, we're all ears.

 

[smitbret]

I've had a few HDDs go bad, but I've never had a sudden failure that I couldn't attribute to abuse or misuse.

Two 80gb Seagates about 10 years ago died slowly on me, over the course of about a week and I was able to salvage all the data on them.

I had sudden drive death on two WD 250gb Caviar drives a couple of years ago and it was my fault. I was repeatedly moving them in and out of external enclosures, while sitting on carpeted floors. Guess where I would lay them down, circuit board down of course..... yep, right on the static filled carpet. They both put up with it for awhile, but in the end, stupid practice will get you bad results.

I've had, probably 30 HDDs in the last 10 years and those are the four that failed, ~13% failure rate. Take away my stupidity and it's a ~6% failure rate and all data was salvageable before total drive death. All the rest (Maxtor, Seagate, IBM (even the Deathstars), Western Digital, Fujitsu, etc.) all lived out their useable life cycle until they got put on a shelf and then sold on eBay or something.

HDD tech is frickin' amazing if you ask me. They are doing for storage what single core CPU speeds were doing 6-7 years ago. At some point you've just gotta wonder where the ceiling is.

I'm looking forward to my first 6tb HDD. It'll probably cost $90, get wrapped by NewEgg in bubble wrap and show up on my door in a box full of green styrofoam peanuts that is 10x too big. I'll stick it in my tower and it'll run for 3 years without a hitch.

I don't get why people complain about this stuff. If it's that big a deal, spend $70 and get a 2nd one. Run RAID 1 from ANY modern motherboard and if it dies, replace it under warranty, slap it back in the system and keep on plugging away.

 

[randomrogue]

I've had a few HDDs go bad, but I've never had a sudden failure that I couldn't attribute to abuse or misuse.

Two 80gb Seagates about 10 years ago died slowly on me, over the course of about a week and I was able to salvage all the data on them.

I had sudden drive death on two WD 250gb Caviar drives a couple of years ago and it was my fault. I was repeatedly moving them in and out of external enclosures, while sitting on carpeted floors. Guess where I would lay them down, circuit board down of course..... yep, right on the static filled carpet. They both put up with it for awhile, but in the end, stupid practice will get you bad results.

I've had, probably 30 HDDs in the last 10 years and those are the four that failed, ~13% failure rate. Take away my stupidity and it's a ~6% failure rate and all data was salvageable before total drive death. All the rest (Maxtor, Seagate, IBM (even the Deathstars), Western Digital, Fujitsu, etc.) all lived out their useable life cycle until they got put on a shelf and then sold on eBay or something.

HDD tech is frickin' amazing if you ask me. They are doing for storage what single core CPU speeds were doing 6-7 years ago. At some point you've just gotta wonder where the ceiling is.

I'm looking forward to my first 6tb HDD. It'll probably cost $90, get wrapped by NewEgg in bubble wrap and show up on my door in a box full of green styrofoam peanuts that is 10x too big. I'll stick it in my tower and it'll run for 3 years without a hitch.

I don't get why people complain about this stuff. If it's that big a deal, spend $70 and get a 2nd one. Run RAID 1 from ANY modern motherboard and if it dies, replace it under warranty, slap it back in the system and keep on plugging away.

I have a number of hard drives that are 7 years old and running fine. All Western Digital. With that said though I should point out that of all the hard drive failures I've had they've been relatively early on. The Deathstar, that POS Vertex2 60GB SSD drive, and a few others. They all died within the first month and generally speaking within the first couple weeks. My suggestion for any hard drive is to never move all your data over to a new hard drive without a backup. It's just asking for trouble. Hard drives that have died on me have all been instant and complete with the exception of one that clicked itself to death but I can't remember which one it was.

I need to pick up a low noise 2 TB drive. Still trying to figure out which one. I have a 1 TB Hitachi and I find it annoyingly noisy.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I've had a few HDDs go bad, but I've never had a sudden failure that I couldn't attribute to abuse or misuse.

I'm looking forward to my first 6tb HDD. It'll probably cost $90, get wrapped by NewEgg in bubble wrap and show up on my door in a box full of green styrofoam peanuts that is 10x too big. I'll stick it in my tower and it'll run for 3 years without a hitch.

I don't get why people complain about this stuff. If it's that big a deal, spend $70 and get a 2nd one. Run RAID 1 from ANY modern motherboard and if it dies, replace it under warranty, slap it back in the system and keep on plugging away.

+1

I've had really good luck the last several years, and the only drives that have ever failed are a 250G and a 500G that were both stupidly dropped.

 

[Emulex]

hi i'm still stress testing 8 RE4 2TB (the 2002 and 2003 mixed) and at 40% duty cycle (basically writing to them all night long and reading all day long) they are not flinching. not even recal's or hiccups. nothing. Quite worth it. savvio 600gb cost $300 (dp sas 6gb 2.5FF ) or cheetah 350 3.5" 15K so this is far cheaper. i'm definitely punishing them since they are D2D2D in VMware and simultaneous vmotion's which were impossible with only 2 drives