Members alphajerk Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 i have been noticing a higher failure rate with HDD's lately... anyone else notice this? even the big companies like western digital and seagate are starting to fail DOA or within a lower MTBF. right now i am running critical information at a 3 drive redundency plus a 4th taken offsite [per disk used]. it didnt used to be like this. last shipment i got, i had 3 out of 4 DOA. hopefully the replacement 3 none are DOA or i am going to be pissed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 Absolutely agreed. Those little tiny platters with little tiny data tracks suck. It's like 8" floppies - they NEVER failed. Then they cut out the middle 5.25" and those failed a little more often. Then the 3.5" floppies failed even more. Get used to it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members deanmass Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 Yep Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members jackpine Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 Just had a 1 year old 160 gig western fail on me.But I'd already learned my lesson, if it doesn't exist in 3 places.... it doesn't exist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Beck Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 The drive density issue I Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Super 8 Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 Just had a 1 year old 160 gig western fail on me.But I'd already learned my lesson, if it doesn't exist in 3 places.... it doesn't exist. I won't use Western Digital anymore. Their drives just don't hold up. Not for me at least. I'm using Seagate now, and they seem to be reliable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Alndln2 Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 I won't use Western Digital anymore. Their drives just don't hold up. Not for me at least. I'm using Seagate now, and they seem to be reliable. I guess it comes down to personal experience. I'm still using the same 4 WD drives in both my PC's for about 4 years now and the only 2 drives to ever crash on me were a Maxtor and Seagate(dropped gently to the floor from about 6 inches). Of course I have everything backed up on a newer USB WD and Samsung Spin(both bought last year). After seeing the new problems with new drives I am a bit nervous and hesitant about getting new drives from "any" company including WD. We'll see how things shake out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMS Author MikeRivers Posted September 8, 2007 CMS Author Share Posted September 8, 2007 Is this a problem for DAW users? I wouldn't know. In about twenty years of using things with hard disk drives in them, I think I've had two actual drive failures, both of which gave me enough warning so that I could recover everything I cared about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Magpel Posted September 8, 2007 Members Share Posted September 8, 2007 Small sample of 1, but I just expereinced my first HDD failure EVER. 'Course, now I have big USB drives and little thumbalinas all over the house... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members John Sayers Posted September 9, 2007 Members Share Posted September 9, 2007 I've only ever had one HD fail on me and it was some rare brand like toshiba - all my drives are seagate and I've had no problems so far. Just formatted a new 500gig seagate drive yesterday. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members alphajerk Posted September 9, 2007 Author Members Share Posted September 9, 2007 Is this a problem for DAW users? I wouldn't know. no, its corporate machines being built right now. just a SIMPLE components working. beck, i might say yeah, but these were 160GB drives. these werent 500gb/750gb drives. super8, we usually get seagate [at least i prefer them] but some of the WD drives have been performing better. honestly, these are the few, but i thought it odd, 3/4 drives DOA. im suspect of that fourth now, and its running in a file server machine. already imaged it, so if it fails its a quick fix... but still. craig, we used to use 5.25 floppies as frisbees... we were like the abusers of those things. see how much we could damage the disk and still have it work. i guess what bothers me is 75% didnt work. thats high, i heard the average was @ 12%. course there were 8 400GB WD drives that were perfect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members amplayer Posted September 9, 2007 Members Share Posted September 9, 2007 I used to get drive failures from time to time. Then, I made the smartest computer purchase ever: An uninteruptible power supply. If you are running your drives a lot, and you don't have a GOOD UPS, you are asking for failures. In my experience, most drives due to their internal circuitry being weakened because of power fluctuations (especially brown-outs). Power surge strips protect against power surges, but not against brown-outs and black-outs. Plus, surge strips will not protect against a really close lightning hit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jon Doe Posted September 9, 2007 Members Share Posted September 9, 2007 ....honestly, these are the few, but i thought it odd, 3/4 drives DOA. im suspect of that fourth now, and its running in a file server machine. already imaged it, so if it fails its a quick fix... but still. These numbers don't add up. I would start looking at the HD controller on the server in question. Try the drives on another (known good) machines and see if you still get errors. We sometimes forget that when a HD controller goes bad it manifests itself as a HD failure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members alphajerk Posted September 9, 2007 Author Members Share Posted September 9, 2007 no, they didnt work on several machines. the controllers are fine on all mobos. the one 160GB for system on the first server was fine. the second server cant be built until i receive the replacement drives, but these were workstation machines we were putting together. they are up and running right now on a pair of 400GB drives we will bit copy over to the 160's when i get those this week. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Paully Posted September 9, 2007 Members Share Posted September 9, 2007 Power surge strips protect against power surges, but not against brown-outs... Yup! Smartest protection investment I've ever made, and that's saying a lot being from Joisey. BaDaBing . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AudioMaverick Posted September 9, 2007 Members Share Posted September 9, 2007 Great thread, Alphajerk! Being embedded in this industry for over 25 years, I have had many experiences with hard drive failures. It does seem that there has been an amazing increase in failures in the last 3 years, or so. One of the Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members alphajerk Posted September 10, 2007 Author Members Share Posted September 10, 2007 the PSUs we put in the machines are pretty heavy duty.... they arent skimpy POSU's. and my voltage here is actually 123V since im the first off the transformer, but i also have voltage regulators and battery backs inline. this wasnt premature death, it was a still-birth. 3 out of 4 drives in that size, we also had 8 more 400gb on this order, have 4 more 160gb coming this week... and have ordered over 10TB in the past month or two of various drives from 80GB-500GB [and sizes inbetween]. these 3 are the first 3 to fail RECENTLY, but i was finding it odd so many on an order. maybe i had a bad batch they all came from, maybe the guy int he warehouse dropped the drives in packing and didnt think tehy wouldnt work, maybe UPS dropped the box [only other things in that box were 5 keyboards, 4 XP pro discs, 3 Office discs, a video card, and something else i cant remember... but not something shock will kill]. plus these were OEM drives, which are packaged horribly... a sealed antistatic bag and thats it. they are usually wrapped in bubblewrap. so maybe its not a manufacturing issue, although if they were dropped how did the 4th survive [the other 3 broke the fall?] i was just curious if others were having failure issues. i had 2 drives fail on my a little while back [i think] from overheating in an external case that didnt have proper cooling, or the HDD's just FAILED. kinda sucks because one had a video project i hadnt backed up. i still have the raw video, but all my microediting is pretty much gone on the other hand i have some 300MB drives from AGES ago which have been highly abused, thrown around, dust collected but STILL work. go figure. one even booted up windows 3.1 on this old machine i had laying around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members alphajerk Posted September 10, 2007 Author Members Share Posted September 10, 2007 anyway... i now feel the need to pretest any and all HDD's now on a system that is a fully functioning test system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Beck Posted September 11, 2007 Members Share Posted September 11, 2007 I'm looking at it from an IT angle as well. My own experience has been shorter-lived drives as gigage increases. I have ancient smaller drives that have never failed. I Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members alphajerk Posted September 11, 2007 Author Members Share Posted September 11, 2007 these were WD drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members chipmcdonald Posted September 11, 2007 Members Share Posted September 11, 2007 I've been a big WD fan, but... I just lost a 100gb drive that was nearly full (uhg...) (uhg) , but I didn't do a lot of activity on it.. Meanwhile, the same machine has two 60 gb WD drives on it that are OLD that I *have* used HEAVILY that seem to be working fine. I've been seeing a rash of people complaining about drives going down very recently, though? I'm still pro-WD, though: this is the first WD i've seen go down first hand, while I've seen a LOT of Maxtors and a good many Seagates fail. I'm not sure brand loyalty means much today, though: my take on it is that it's like the sub-$1000 guitar market these days... They're all coming out of the same few factories, and the QC is up to the contract with the brand. Which could be all over the place, so I'm kinda of the mindset now to go for price as the arbiter, actually - but would really like to run RAID 4 to be sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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