News Hitachi tops hard drive reliability report

Nice to read that my long held belief of Seagate drives being unreliable has been shown to be more than just my personal belief, i was in mourning for weeks when Seagate acquired Samsung's HDD business.

 

Didn't Hitachi 3.5" business unit get transferred to Toshiba a year and a half ago? Is Toshiba still selling the drives under the Hitachi name?

 

....but according to the report the older drives are fine it's the newer ones that are causing an issue or have I read that wrong.

As for samsung I've had 3 of their drives fail on me and they are the only drives I've ever had fail. Just recently my wifes 500gb samsung was throwing up errors, had to rma and got a seagate back so if that's an newer model then GULP>>>

 

I've lost a couple seagate 2Tb drives over the last 12 months so concur about them being unreliable ! Also I've read some bad stuff about seagate not honoring warranties in the EU.

Sadly my main media drive is still a seagate (almost 6 months old!) because they do tend to be the cheapest available just now.

 

Before everyone starts bashing Seagate, keep in mind what they are doing with the drives.

These drives are under heavy load, and not just normal load, it is write loads. While this alone could heavily skew the results, they are also stored in a high vibration environment (which they were warned about before they did this). How does this compare to home and office use? It doesn't. These Seagates may just not like that environment and duty cycle and could outperform the rest in other situations.

From what I have seen from others regarding the Hitachi, it doesn't surprise me they did well in that instance due to their spindle design being better at handling vibration.


And yes, I do prefer them, I replace far too many WD's to trust them (except the Raptor and Black line, which are awesome). I haven't had a lot of experience with Hitachi, but when I did it was mixed results.

 

Not to sure about reading it wrong as im awful when trying to interpreter stats But Gareth does mention in the article...

So my interpretation on that is buying Samsung's HDD business has made Seagate's bigger (newer) drives more reliable.

And at the end Gareth quotes Beach as saying "Historically, Seagate drives have performed well at first, and then had higher failure rates later. Along with a chart on the blog post linked in the article showing %13 of all Seagate drives fail within one year.

 

True, but the same reliability they speak of, could turn up in new Toshiba 3.5" drives, since they now own those factories and have the same patents. WD is unlikely to use the knowledge from Hitachi, since they already have designs and manufacturing processes that are cheaper and good enough in terms of reliability. Had Hitachi been able to produce their drives just as cheap as WD, they wouldn't be in a position to be bought.

 

I would have thought that the sale of Samsung's HDD division to Seagate would have seen them improve. Obviously not. I think I'll be going with WD in future as I have had personal negative experiences with Hitachi.
Damn I miss Samsung's HDD's, they really knew what they were doing and it shows at the success of their SSD's now.

 

I knew it! I've been saying for YEARS how crap Seagate were. I've had so many failures vs any other drive.