"In the past six months," writes Paul, "I have had to return eight Seagate drives for refurbishment. One was a 2.5, 80G drive, five were 500GB, and two were 750GB. One of these last is going back for to be refurbished for the second time in less than three months." All of Paul's drives were still under warranty, which is a good thing, but replacing hard drives after they have been installed and used to store data is no laughing matter. And isn't this an awfully high rate of failure? Is this just one man with very bad luck or some sort of trend?
"Until this year," says Paul, "I haven't only had to return maybe three hard drives over the course of five years." These were all Seagate drives. "I have used Seagate exclusively for the past 10 to 15 years," he says, "with good results after a rash of Western Digital drive deaths. Maybe the Maxtor purchase has resulted in high failure rate?"
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I contacted Seagate to see if there is an explanation for Paul's bad luck -- perhaps it was a known problem like the one with the high-capacity Barracuda line earlier this year. Though I exchanged several e-mails with a representative there, I could get no official response in time for this post.
Paul's bad luck was not limited to Seagate drives, either. "I was so disappointed with Seagate," he says. "That I decided to try Western Digital again. In the past two months I purchased eight WD 750 Raid drives. Three of them were dead on arrival. My supplier is, of course, very sorry. But even though they have decent buying power, they do not seem to be inclined to hold either company accountable for supplying faulty hard drives. My customers, of course, expect me to repair, replace, and rebuild their systems when hard drives in them fail. But the manufacturer can send relabeled broken drives out as warranty service."
Without some sort of in-depth study (such as the one Google did in its own server farms a couple of years ago, which did find a high rate of mortality in hard drives), it's difficult to determine if this is a trend or simply one man who somehow inadvertently offended the god that watches over data storage.
"My supplier tells me they don't see a pattern that would indicate a problem," says Paul. "I must just be unlucky."
Is this just Paul hitting a patch of bad luck? Are others in the same boat? Have any of you seen a pattern of increased drive failure? Please let us know in the comments. (Comments on hard drives that exceed expectations are also welcome.) Not only will Paul's misery love to know it has company, but we might be able to identify a trend.
Got gripes? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.
This story, "Have hard drives become less reliable?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com.
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Download now »One systemic factor that reduces reliability in large drives is that the bit-error rates tend to be decreasing more slowly (if at all) than the capacity in bytes increases.
I have a 1994 Seagate Hawk 1.2 GB drive with a non-recoverable BER of 1 in 10^14 (according to page 17 of its product manual. A service period reading the equivalent of the entire disk 100 times reads about 10^12 bits -- 2 orders of magnitude below this threshold. The odds are rather small odds of even a single problem occurring during this period.
By contrast, a brand-new ST31000528AS 1TB drive (3 orders of magnitude more bits) has the same NBER, 1 in 10^14, according to this blogged review. Reading the entire disk only 10 times actually reaches this threshold, so the odds of getting at least one non-recoverable error are probably quite near 100% in such a service period. (I don't have the formula handy, but if this sounds odd, note that probability here is a combinatorial problem, not simple division.)
If we were still using these new disks for ancient applications, this might not be a problem. But with video collections, monster databases, and bloated, do-all operating systems, one can expect to use newer drives enough to practically guarantee errors within a ordinary service period. Non-recoverable bit-error rates are no longer comfortably infinitesimal relative to disk capacity.
After a total set of disasters with many Maxtor products, especially Maxtor HDDs, they were "banned from the building" at my company. By extension (after absorbing Maxtor), and after a few bad experiences with Seagate Seagate was similarly exiled.
Since then, we have migrated to mainly Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Toshiba. We have since experienced such a drop in HDD failures we don't know what to say.
We have had mixed results with some computers that have WD HDDs installed, but not enough to suspect that the problems are with the HDD alone.
The HDD business is tough, and I don't know how long the various companies can keep shooting holes in the bottom of the HDD boat before something gives. HDD technology progresses at a rate comparable to (and sometimes exceeding) that predicted by Moore's law, but HDDs are mechanical in nature.
I would not be surprised that the HDDs are eventually replaced with solid-state devices, like the SSD drives. In fact, many of the new laptops have them, and many people are replacing the factory HDDs with SSDs for speed and G-force resistance.
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