Poll: Poll: What was your first Hard Drive Failure?

What was your first Hard Drive Failure?

  • Maxtor

    Votes: 212 38.4%
  • Seagate

    Votes: 55 10.0%
  • Hitachi

    Votes: 14 2.5%
  • IBM

    Votes: 127 23.0%
  • Western Digital

    Votes: 73 13.2%
  • Fujitsu-Siemens

    Votes: 22 4.0%
  • Samsung

    Votes: 24 4.3%
  • Other - Please state

    Votes: 25 4.5%

  • Total voters
    552
Soldato
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The two obvious front-runners so far being the Maxtors and IBM's (no surprises on my part! :p).

Summary so far:

Given that Seagate have been in the business for such a long time, I might have expected more, but no, Seagates seem to be as reliable as ever. Hitachi and Samsung are newish comparatively to the industry and this shows in their results. Western Digital are doing ok - seemingly about average in age/failure performance stakes. Don't know a great deal about Fujistu, so I can't comment there.

Keep the results coming people!!!

To all those asking for a 'no failure' option - I did ask but didn't get one. However, I suppose the poll makes more sense if we just stick to actual failures, else we might unbalance the table in terms of statistics.
 
Soldato
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b0rn2sk8 said:
All the drives iv bought have died and RMA'd for replacement at some point....

40Gig Maxtor, Click of Death, died after about 4 years.

120Gig Western Digital 7200 8mb etc. (IDE), Instant death, Still using replacement

80Gig seagate 7200.7 SATA, Click of Death. Out of warrenty.

160Gig Maxtor 7200 8mb etc. (IDE) Kept loosing its partitions. Still using replacement.


Funny really i bought the Maxtor to replace the WD when it died but the maxtor died and the Seagate died before i recieved the replacement from WD so i was stuck without a PC for a week or two

Remind me never to let you near one of my HDDs... you have bad karma, maaan!

:p

SiriusB
 
Soldato
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mine was a maxtor 160gb diamondmax 9 i think. Not really sure what failed, just started refusing to boot one day.

advanced rma was painless though.
 
Soldato
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DanMc07 said:
Make: Seagate
Model: Barracuda 7200.8 NCQ 250GB
Dead on Arrival: Yes.
I see you got a new one still. They are great drives. Mine is a storage drive back-up to my Raptor 150GB :D.

Anyway, keep the results coming in people - the table looks good from here with 74 votes. Let's see how long we can keep this going!

Dead on arrival isn't so bad, it's failures that are really bad tbh.
 
Soldato
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smids said:
I see you got a new one still. They are great drives. Mine is a storage drive back-up to my Raptor 150GB :D.

Anyway, keep the results coming in people - the table looks good from here with 74 votes. Let's see how long we can keep this going!

Dead on arrival isn't so bad, it's failures that are really bad tbh.

No not too bad that it was dead on arival. But it would have been if I was going to build my rig on xmas day, which I was going to.
Waiting so long for a decent pc then wham bam, u try and get it up and running and it dont work! lol.
Glad I got it built b4 xmas as I could return it and get a replacement. I wouldnt have been too pleased if I built my rig on xmas day, as the store wouldnt have been open, then I would have been pee'vd off :o
Though this is a quality HDD and I am nothing but imprest with it so far. All I need to do now is get my self a raptor and set my self up some good partition combinations, as atm eveything is on the full 250 :)
 
Soldato
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IBM DeathStar 75GXP. Got the click of death after a few months

Replaced under warranty by a 60GXP which failed, along with all subsequent drives (about 4 over the year)

Every PC I built at the time with an IBM hard drive has failed. It also failed in my brother's PC along with every replacement

They really are horrendous drives for reliability - fast but not reliable.

I voted them as they have been by far the worst. I've had a few Maxtor go and one Western Digital that was DOA
 
Associate
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my first drive failure was in fact a 250gb maxtor diamond max 9 that was about a month ago

this was due to the drive not even spinning up when i looked onto the molex connector the power connections were knackers they were all split in half so i just took it back to shop i bought it from
 
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From experience in fixing PCs over the past ten years.....

Had numerous Western Digital drives that died in the first week of use. Would never buy one out of choice.

Seen many of the Fujitsu's that were in the dodgy batch of millions that failed due to a chip on the circuit board. These were the drives that made Fujitsu give up the hard disk business back in 2000. These drives were in many Tiny, Time, Compaq and HP PCs.

And Maxtors always seem "cheap" to me. Have seen too many of these fail.


Personally, when I can choose the brand of hard disk, I go for Seagate or Hitachi. Never had a problem with these. (Though many people remember the IBM Deathstars where a certain new batch of drives clicked to death.... this seems to be the one bad time for IBM which is when they off-loaded the business to Hitachi)

I have also been impressed with Samsung drives lately....


Some of my old Seagate SCSIs are now over ten years old... and still going strong. :)
 
Soldato
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Ive got a 10gig Maxtor thats been dieing over a number of years - I keep having to partition out dead sectors.

But my first proper dead HD was my Raptor... Just compleaty died one day - lost everything.
 
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smids said:
The two obvious front-runners so far being the Maxtors and IBM's (no surprises on my part! :p).

Summary so far:

Given that Seagate have been in the business for such a long time, I might have expected more, but no, Seagates seem to be as reliable as ever. Hitachi and Samsung are newish comparatively to the industry and this shows in their results. Western Digital are doing ok - seemingly about average in age/failure performance stakes. Don't know a great deal about Fujistu, so I can't comment there.

Keep the results coming people!!!

To all those asking for a 'no failure' option - I did ask but didn't get one. However, I suppose the poll makes more sense if we just stick to actual failures, else we might unbalance the table in terms of statistics.
If you ignore the infamous Deathstars (60GXP and 75GXPs IIRC) which were attributed to a major design flaw youll find that IBM (why isnt Hitachi included in this option since they bought out IBMs HD division?, other than avoiding tarring them with the same brush - especially considering theres little point in gathering data on a provider that effectively doesnt exist or make consumer grade HDs, if you differentate between Hitachi and IBM) actually do pretty well - I agree its not data to be ignored, but it puts quite a negative skew on your initial conclusion, especially if you want to produce a 'valuable' reliability chart...

Considering they were made about 5years ago and no one has mentioned another IBM(Hitachi?!?) model - it would be nice for those who voted IBM to clarify if it was one of the Deathstars or not - I would be surprised if we get many replies in line with your thread that didnt have a Deathstar fail...

Back to the point Ive only had a 30GB 60GXP die on me - for the fact it was on RAID0 for 2.5yrs before I changed it amazes me ;)

P.S. Smids, you know me mate, Im just picky :p

ps3ud0 :cool:
 
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Soldato
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ps3ud0 said:
If you ignore the infamous Deathstars (60GXP and 75GXPs IIRC) which were attributed to a major design flaw youll find that IBM (why isnt Hitachi included in this option since they bought out IBMs HD division?, other than avoiding tarring them with the same brush - especially considering theres little point in gathering data on a provider that effectively doesnt exist or make consumer grade HDs, if you differentate between Hitachi and IBM) actually do pretty well - I agree its not data to be ignored, but it puts quite a negative skew on your initial conclusion, especially if you want to produce a 'valuable' reliability chart...

Considering they were made about 5years ago and no one has mentioned another IBM(Hitachi?!?) model - it would be nice for those who voted IBM to clarify if it was one of the Deathstars or not - I would be surprised if we get many replies in line with your thread that didnt have a Deathstar fail...

Back to the point Ive only had a 30GB 60GXP die on me - for the fact it was on RAID0 for 2.5yrs before I changed it amazes me ;)

P.S. Smids, you know me mate, Im just picky :p

ps3ud0 :cool:
Hey pseudo :)

I purposely separated them because Hitachi now are great and I wanted to make sure nothing unfairly fell on their name. IBM, yes it is unfair on them but they no longer exist as a manufacturer so it makes little difference. I know exactly what you are getting at. In fact, I have two laptops (my sisters and my dads) here with IBM travelstars which run flawlessly (except both laptops have died for various motherboard reasons). I do ask for model of each drive polled though, so I tried to account for this. As you can see from the table though, Hitachi's have a very low score which wouldn't be seen if they were placed together.
 
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Soldato
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My first failure was a 160GB Maxtor, my second failure was its replacement (DOA) and my 3rd failure was the replacement for the DOA... yet another DOA! :D The 4th worked fine and is still in my system to this day... not sure why though! Managed to lose about 100GBs worth of music because of it:(

Ive still got an old working deathstar... it sits in my server, been working for a good 5 years i think!
 
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