Are consumer hard drives still durable enough these days compared to 10 years ago ?

[CruNcher]

For sure we saw a massive Price falldown since the last 10 years but do we also experience the same Quality falldown @ the same time?
Is hard drive durability/reliability gone down over the last 10 years (like the price) in the industry, do you think SSD are gonna change that, tell your story,feeling and vote :)

[Blue_MiSfit]

I haven't had a drive die on me (personally) in several years. I've seen scads of laptop drives die, and plenty of desktop drives - but that's because I do computer consulting in my free time.

I would say that reliability (from my perspective) hasn't changed much over the last few years.

Temperature is much less of a factor than people make it out to be. Google did a huge test of consumer grade hard drives (since they use them for their storage needs, as does my company), and determined that heat wasn't really a huge issue, as long as you keep them at reasonable temperatures (no 75c egg frying pls thx) :)

Will SSDs change anything? Probably. They have their own issues, and I imagine that their long-term reliability will be in question for some time. Mechanical storage is very robust, and has been around for decades now. People know how to do it right, and how to recover data when things go wrong (except in the most catastrophic circumstances). The same principles do not apply to SSDs. I see them becoming quite popular on laptops in a few years, and as density / speed / price / proven reliability continue to improve we'll start to see them as standard equipment in data centers and desktop PCs.

I think it's going to be a long time before they replace the massive quantity of 1TB drives I work with every day :) Especially at under $150 for said drives!!

~MiSfit

[Shinigami-Sama]

laptop drivers still volatile, just because they dropped and bumped and what not

most of the problems I see with desktops though, are just overheating and bad power conditioning

so I wouldn't worry about it to much

[CruNcher]

i had severall hard drives die the last years My WD Ebook (500 GB) Died recently in the Guarantee time but it isn't suprising if you see how it's build with that plastic case and no cooling i used it primarily for Video editing over Esata :( it got so freaking hot. Then 2 Samsung HDDs died (wich should be better tough seeing they are more energy efficient and do less heat i never exceeed 40°C) the nicest experience over the last 10 years with durability i made with Seagate sure they cost a little more and are louder most of the times but i find them really reliable my old 80 GB Seagate IDE Barracuda is still working.
And the funny thing with all these issues is SMART doesn't help 1 bit the hard drives die mechanicaly these days more often SMART most of the times even doesn't know it's dieng. But this is just my Personal Experience also im heavily out of the 8h ruling.

After the IBM disaster i moved to Seagate (i was very happy) then i moved to WD and Samsung because of Price and Ratings (it was horrific 1 die after the other) now im about moving back to Seagate again and hopeing they still as reliable as in the past :)

[Blue_MiSfit]

We use Seagate and Western Digital 1TB drives. They've both been excellent in terms of failure rates. I only know of a few that have truly failed. We don't thoroughly check each one, so there's probably some minor corruption here and there :)

[CruNcher]

Yeah i might give WD another try seeing it's damn fast Speeds the WD was really good for Video editing tough how they build that case for it pure plastic with some holes in it made me really think about WD, but i guess they dont expect crazy guys to push it over the limits with masive io usage and runtime :P.
But for Samsung im gonna wait some time before trying them again sure their are serial problems in the production all the time but 2 drives died over 2 years and i really belived in them seing their lower Power Consumption of the parts and the really competetive Price, i guess my extreme usage behaviour makes them useless for me.

[burfadel]

Some WD parts are also not that reliable, avoid at all cost the older generation 1TB drives! Only get the latest 3 platter drives. WD also has a new drive rating system now, the more expensive 32mb drive versions with the dual onboard processors are supposed to be the best reliability wise :) (and yes they're non enterprise drives, just high performance & reliability mainstream drives).

[check]

Hard drive error rates per GB are the same as they were 20 years ago. So you can answer this two ways:
"yes, hard drives are equally reliable as they were 10 years ago because the error rate hasn't increased"
"no, hard drives are less reliable because the capacity has increased but the error rate has not"

So we still have one unrecoverable error per __gb read/written, but with larger hard drives and more disk activity we run into this problem more.

[linyx]

I am gonna go with older drives were better. I got plenty of HDDs from at least 8-10 years ago that still work, while several from 3-4 years ago have already died.:mad:

[dat720]

I have hordes of harddrives in my study, like 15 or 20 ranging in size from 10gb to 250gb no longer being used, (i recently threw out everything under 10gb) none of them have ever had any issues, except the ones that died due to physical damage, blame that on my clumsiness!!!!!!!!

[Dr.Khron]

I think the current generation of native SATA drives has been a lot more reliable then the final generation of IDE drives (right before the transition). I bought a batch of four 40GB IDE drives when they went on sale at Newegg three years ago, and there is only ONE left in operation.

(The most recent death was the System disk in my living room PC, it died three days ago. Thank god for Acronis images!)

[dat720]

Agree Acronis rocks but from what i've seen more hdd's fail from physical damage and or electircal damage (storms and such) rather than their time being simply up!

[kempodragon]

I've used WD hard drives almost exclusively for years now, simply because they have stood up to the abuse that I've dished out and kept right on going. My home's wiring is old and subject to power outages whenever there's either too much current draw or even when the weather's too damp. Each time the circuit breaker trips, I merely reset it, turn back on my system and go right back to work, with no loss of data on my drives.

[Dr.Khron]

******, dude, BUY A UPS!

I live in an old house with crappy WW2 wiring, so a UPS was one of the first things I bought.

Every time your breaker pops, you are rolling the dice with ALL of your equipment, not just the hard disks. My folks live in rural New England, and thier power is full mini-outages and voltage issues. When I bought my UPS I got one for them too. Its saved them a TON of hassle.

[kempodragon]

The problem is my outlets are 2 prong, and a UPS is 3 prong. I've got a few 3 prong outlets, but when they were tested, the neutral was either dead or tied into the lead, not a separate wire. I don't know if a 2 prong adapter will let a UPS work or if it needs a full 3 prong circuit. Like you, my house's wiring is old knob and tube and to boot, when they changed over to a circuit breaker setup, they put almost of all of the house's outlets on one circuit breaker!!! Still, my current system is six years old and is still going strong so I must have the luck o' the Irish and the devil's own luck combined.

[Sharktooth]

i have a really old PC with 2 drives: 40GB and 10GB. they still work and have no problems.
another, newer, PC with newer drives: 160, 2x250, 2x500GB drives... they ALL failed and got replaced one or more times....