HDD/SSD Discussion

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

Keep this liberal, please...

 

Why are some companies getting bad reps? For both HDD and SSD? Like Seagate vs WD, OCZ vs Samsung?

 

What is it that people stay away from it? I used both of the said drives, and some died, but I don't hate them.

 

This was brought up in a FB group. Some people hate A, some say it's a peice of crap. B is better! Like a cat fight...

 

WHY is this hardware going hateful? Is it just how they make the drives, or? IMO all SSD's are made the same, right?

 

Or is this something else completely? DISCUSS!

 

Edit: Same thing on other hardware, too....

[techbeck]

Depends how many issues I have with a certain company.  For a while, Seagate and Western Digital were going back and forth on who was the most reliable.  Easier these days to tell considering there are lots of reviews for products out there.

 

So, If I bought 30 WD drives for my company and they have a high failure rate, I will choose another company and wait a few before I try WD again.

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

1 minute ago, techbeck said:

So, If I bought 30 WD drives for my company and they have a high failure rate, I will choose another company and wait a few before I try WD again.

Yet, it can go the same way with Seagate. You buy 30 Seagate drives and they all fail...

[Yogurth]

Backblaze have a yearly analysis, Seagate has been leading the unreliability pack for ~decade. and thus the hall of shame ownership.

 

 

 

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

[Brandon H Supervisor]

Seagate vs WD has been interesting over the years

 

In my experiences Seagate has amazing External Drives but their Internals have been known to have higher failure rates over the years. WD is the exact opposite, their Internal drives are rock solid but their Externals have been a bit flaky.

 

 

OCZ has a bad rep because of their early days. Their earlier SSDs were failure prone, part of this was firmware issues but mostly the NAND was failure prone (again this was during the early days of consumer SSDs) they've sense become just as solid as any other SSD. Samsung has always had fairly stable SSDs so they're considered better (plus their PRO and EVO series have always been pretty solid)

[techbeck]

Just now, Yogurth said:

Backblaze have a yearly analysis, Seagate has been leading the unreliability pack for ~decade.  

 

 

 

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

yea, have not bought a Seagate in I dont know how long.  Used to be all I bought. But years ago one year, WD was good and SG bad, next year it seemed it was reverse.  But I have not even ordered a WD in some time.  I order Samsung Evos which I never had a problem with....so far.

 

Mechanical drives are more prone to failure as well over SSDs.

[Mando]

i base mine on personal experience, not only with the device but with the company. And watching reliability info.

 

But could be because im corp IT as well as a tech lover? Probably. 

2 minutes ago, Brandon H said:

Seagate vs WD has been interesting over the years

 

In my experiences Seagate has amazing External Drives but their Internals have been known to have higher failure rates over the years. WD is the exact opposite, their Internal drives are rock solid but their Externals have been a bit flaky.

 

 

OCZ has a bad rep because of their early days. Their earlier SSDs were failure prone, part of this was firmware issues but mostly the NAND was failure prone (again this was during the early days of consumer SSDs) they've sense become just as solid as any other SSD. Samsung has always had fairly stable SSDs so they're considered better (plus their PRO and EVO series have always been pretty solid)

Yer OCZ now toshiba right? Barely anything is left of OCZ, heck i have a Vertex 3 60Gbr still going strong in an old laptop with my dad. 

 

I stick to Samsung personally in work and at home for my SSDs. 840 and 850 Evos atm (6)

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

2 minutes ago, Mando said:

i base mine on personal experience, not only with the device but with the company. And watching reliability info.

 

But could be because im corp IT as well as a tech lover? Probably. 

Well, in corp IT, you would see a lot of drives...

[Brandon H Supervisor]

2 minutes ago, Mando said:

Yer OCZ now toshiba right? Barely anything is left of OCZ, heck i have a Vertex 3 60Gbr still going strong in an old laptop with my dad. 

Yeah I believe Toshiba owns them now. I have a 120gb Vertex 4 running the OS on my gaming tower myself, been running beautifully for ~4 years now

[Mando]

7 minutes ago, Mindovermaster said:

Well, in corp IT, you would see a lot of drives...

nah youd be surprised bud, i see them as complete systems, just know what the dells come with endpoint sites. Dell use Seagate and WDs platters usually and if one has failed, its usually Seagate tbh, Ive found personally WD internals pretty robust and used them personally until i went solely SSD, cept SSDs Hynix is still common.

 

Servers, Seagate Cheetahs 15k SATAS are common and so robust, thats the wierd thing, their enterprise server stuff is A1

 

IBM (lenovo badged but still IBM built)  X Server Series drives are firmware flashed cheetahs  

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

1 minute ago, Mando said:

nah youd be surprised bud, i see them as complete systems, just know what the dells come with endpoint sites. 

Fair enough

[DevTech]

23 minutes ago, Yogurth said:

Backblaze have a yearly analysis, Seagate has been leading the unreliability pack for ~decade. and thus the hall of shame ownership.

 

 

 

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

Full points for introducing the only reliable source of real world reliability information available to Humanity.

 

Sad that commercial interests dominate so much that on all of Planet Earth there is only ONE decent source of hard drive reliability data. Imagine if Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud released their reliability data?

 

It is extra sad that people generally ignore or forget the Backblaze dataset and prefer various personal anecdotes and user experiences on the internet thus replacing Science with social noise and leading to exactly the problem posed by the OP.

 

For hard drives, the Backblaze data would indicate you buy a Hitachi drive.

 

My personal anecdotal experience says buy a Samsung 850 EVO, Samsung 850 Pro, Samsung 960 EVO or Samsung 960 Pro. They are far enough in front of the pack that there is simply no need to spend more than a millisecond to select from one of those 4 drives to fit your needs and just ignore everything else.

 

 

 

[Circaflex]

For me, part of it is personal experience the rest is experience by others and/or backblaze. I've had my fair share of problems with Seagate mechanical drives, to the point I would never purchase another one or recommend their brand to anyone. When it comes to SSDs, it isn't necessarily the company, but rather the controller being used. I haven't purchased any SSDs other than Intels for my last three builds, mainly because I get a massive discount, however when making recommendations to family or friends I tend to research what controllers are being used and if there have been any catastrophes with the firmware.

 

49 minutes ago, Mindovermaster said:

Well, in corp IT, you would see a lot of drives...

Not really, well you do see a lot of drives but not necessarily many manufacturers. I know at the hospital I work at, they have a contract with specific companies so we only see that one brand.

[techbeck]

Anyone remember deskstar hard drives? Used to call them death star. Maxtor was good for a little while

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

2 minutes ago, techbeck said:

Anyone remember deskstar hard drives? Used to call them death star. Maxtor was good for a little while

Yeah, they were short lived, though...

[Jim K Global Moderator]

1 hour ago, Brandon H said:

Yeah I believe Toshiba owns them now. I have a 120gb Vertex 4 running the OS on my gaming tower myself, been running beautifully for ~4 years now

I have the 256GB Vertex 4 (purchased in 2012) which used to be the main OS SSD before I got a larger 850 Pro and moved the OS over to it.  The Vertex 4, in my case, has performed flawless.  I just use it as a game drive now.

2 hours ago, Mindovermaster said:

Keep this liberal, please...

 

Why are some companies getting bad reps? For both HDD and SSD? Like Seagate vs WD, OCZ vs Samsung?

 

What is it that people stay away from it? I used both of the said drives, and some died, but I don't hate them.

 

This was brought up in a FB group. Some people hate A, some say it's a peice of crap. B is better! Like a cat fight...

 

WHY is this hardware going hateful? Is it just how they make the drives, or? IMO all SSD's are made the same, right?

 

Or is this something else completely? DISCUSS!

 

Edit: Same thing on other hardware, too....

You get that with every x manufacture or y product....and it has been that way for awhile (in other words it isn't "going hateful")  People just like to troll.  Granted, you have the particular cases like the Deskstar ... but that is no different than the Ford Pinto (well...the Deskstar didn't blow up and kill people).  Speaking of the Deskstar, I had the 60GB version and I retired it long before the click of death.  The only drives I've had fail was a WD 1.5TB Green and a Seagate notebook drive  (forgot the model).  Every other drive I've owned has been retired/collecting dust.

 

Anyway, at the end of the day ... backup!  Electronics fail.

[LaP]

1 hour ago, Mando said:

Yer OCZ now toshiba right? Barely anything is left of OCZ, heck i have a Vertex 3 60Gbr still going strong in an old laptop with my dad. 

 

I stick to Samsung personally in work and at home for my SSDs. 840 and 850 Evos atm (6)

Still rocking a vertex 2 extended (256GB) and a Vertex 3 (128GB). Served me very well so far. Of course like everything i did not buy them day one i waited for both models to be a couple months old and updated the firmware. I do the same with MB. I buy them when they are a couple months old and update the bios.

[300z]

A couple of years ago I had 3 Seagate hdd's fail with no warning in the span of 6 months right after each of them went out of warranty, I lost wedding pictures, family pictures , tons of racing pictures and videos and lots of other important stuff, Seagate never again.

[Tantawi]

On 12/20/2017 at 11:31 PM, 300z said:

A couple of years ago I had 3 Seagate hdd's fail with no warning in the span of 6 months right after each of them went out of warranty, I lost wedding pictures, family pictures , tons of racing pictures and videos and lots of other important stuff, Seagate never again.

Ouch, your focus now should be a reliable backup strategy to an external drive and/or cloud service. As every HDD/SSD will fail eventually.

[+BudMan MVC]

On 12/20/2017 at 4:31 PM, 300z said:

tons of racing pictures and videos and lots of other important stuff, Seagate never again.

With tantawi here - every hdd or ssd will fail at some point.. Just a matter of time or circumstance.. What if there is a house fire, what if tornado takes you house to oz?  What happens if you spill your beer on your computer?

 

You need to work on backup and disaster recovery.. Yes your irreplaceable data needs to be in multiple places - not auto synced.. A virus could wipe out all your copies if they auto sync, etc.  You should have them on multiple types of media in different locations away from your geographic area - the tornado, hurricane, wild fire scenarios..

 

I have my home video and pictures on 2 different systems in my home on multiple disks in a pool (not a raid - raids fail and are not a backup).  For that copy to fail all 3 disks in the pool would have to fail.  Also there is copy on mdiscs and normal buray that are in my son's home over 40 miles away.  I also have them in the cloud on multiple services.  There is my amazon glacier archive along with crashplan and copy on my webhost nextcloud instance I run there, etc.

 

I also have them on a ssd external that is easy to grab on my desk in computer room which hopefully I could grab in case of a fire or need to evacuate the house in a hurry.

 

For me to loose such data would mean either the zombie apocalypse has happened or complete crash of major companies infrastructure along with nuke taking out chicagoland or something.

 

Yes hdd and ssd fail!!  You can never get those pictures and video of your grandkids first bday party back.. You need to make sure they can not be lost.  You do not need to back up your media library of the x-files episodes.. Those can always be recovered unless of course there is a zombie apocalypse   But home video and pictures are priceless..

[JustGeorge]

On 12/20/2017 at 4:45 PM, techbeck said:

Anyone remember deskstar hard drives? Used to call them death star. Maxtor was good for a little while

Every Maxtor I owned failed and if memory serves, Seagate's quality took a dip a while after buying them.

 

The WD Blue drive in my main PC occasionally throws an event id 51 and its a little over a year old with barely any use. 

 

 

 

Edited December 23, 2017 by slamfire92

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

On 12/20/2017 at 3:45 PM, techbeck said:

Anyone remember deskstar hard drives? Used to call them death star. Maxtor was good for a little while

I have an old 80GB Maxtor, still works.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Maxtor-4D080H4-80GB-Hard-Drive/dp/B0077U31FM

[300z]

2 hours ago, Tantawi said:

Ouch, your focus now should be a reliable backup strategy to an external drive and/or cloud service. As every HDD/SSD will fail eventually.

I used all 3 of them as external backup drives. 

I have been using computers since the mid nineties and these Seagate drives are the only ones that ever failed me, I have a Maxtor driver that is approaching 20 years old in an ancient home build computer that still works.

[JustGeorge]

3 minutes ago, 300z said:

I used all 3 of them as external backup drives. 

I have been using computers since the mid nineties and these Seagate drives are the only ones that ever failed me, I have a Maxtor driver that is approaching 20 years old in an ancient home build computer that still works.

If you were using them as backup drives, how did you lose your stuff? Shouldn't the source data still be on the PC?

[Anibal P]

7 hours ago, slamfire92 said:

If you were using them as backup drives, how did you lose your stuff? Shouldn't the source data still be on the PC?

Stop bringing logic into the hatefest 

I've always used cheap drives, even my Crucial SSD is cheap and still going strong 4 years later, some people have bad luck and blame the brands