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Are Western Digital Drives reliable?

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  • Jul 15th, 2009 9:30 am
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Mar 15, 2004
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Are Western Digital Drives reliable?

Have been a maxtor and seagate user since I've known computers but with the warranty cut down to 3 years by seagate, tried moving to WD drives. Bought a Blue Caviar last March ( 2009 ) and set it to raid 0 along with a seagate drive. Last night, my pc won't start because the drive started having bad sectors. Tracked the culprit to be the 4-month old WD drive. Lost quite a lot of pron :cry: stored on my raid which I haven't trasferred to my server yet. Been considering about 4 WD Green for my Unraid server but if they're not as reliable, might stick with seagate after all. As I just found out, warranty is just second to reliability of the drives. Yes they will probably replace it but the lost data and the hassle of waiting and setting up your pc again really sucks.
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Jun 27, 2004
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Finding good statics about HD reliability is not going to be easy and listening to peoples horror and success stories isn't really going to help you either.

HDs IMO are just luck of the draw and running in RAID 0 you're asking for trouble. I don't think at this point any drive is more reliable than any other (baring Seagates firmware problems).

When I purchased 4 WD 640GB drive's last year for my RAID 5 array, one drive dead almost right away, after replacing it I haven't had any trouble and don't suspect I will for as long as I own the drives.

I would base your HD purchase on the requirements of your project, weather it be power usage, speed, etc. Pick the drive that matches your requirements best and leave the reliability to luck, becuase really any drive you buy has the same chance of dieing as the next one.
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You should always have a backup regardless of how reliable you think the drive is. Hard drives can die at a moments notice without symptoms.

Also you probably wouldn't have lost that data if you weren't running RAID-0. Don't store anything on a RAID-0 array you can't afford to lose.
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You might be right about luck in reliability but for a person who got a lemon on the first try it's a bit hard to accept even factoring in the firmware fiasco from the seagate drives ( where non of my drives were affected ). I even have one of the deathstar drives from hitachi ( courtesy of rfd and iomega ) which is still alive and kicking. You were actually lucky in getting a drive which is DOA as you still haven't put anything in it unlike me.

As for the raid 0, I've been using it since the first day I learned about raid and never had a problem running it till now. Lots of people says there is no benefit in using it but I beg to disagree. The only mistake I made is that I didn't transfer the important files right after downloading them.

I wonder though what is the SMART feature of a drive is for if it cannot help in predicting when a drive is going to fail as in the case of my WD drive below. SMART status says it PASS when there's a lot of bad sectors developed already.

[IMG]http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/7490/drives.jpg[/IMG]
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Amourek wrote: You should always have a backup regardless of how reliable you think the drive is. Hard drives can die at a moments notice without symptoms.

Also you probably wouldn't have lost that data if you weren't running RAID-0. Don't store anything on a RAID-0 array you can't afford to lose.
Yes, another lesson learned the hard way. But this is my gaming pc where I don't store important stuff ( like documents ) just the HD movies I'm downloading to transfer to my server. I lost about 80 Gigs ( about 10 movies ) in the disaster plus my saved game files and will have to set it up again when I get the drive back. I can download the movies again but it'll take days to finish.
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It's a question with no answer because no one releases their statistics on reliability and even if they did it would be meaningless. All drive manufacturers have a certain degree of failure. This can be better or worse at various times for various reasons. Instead of wasting time worrying about whether or not a particular manufacturer is better than another you should be spending your time assuming the worst and putting in place foolproof backup.

As far as SMART goes, I read somewhere that it is only capable of predicting about 50% of drive failures ahead of time. Again, instead of relying on this you should be assuming the worst and putting in place foolproof backup.
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I always try to buy WD hard drives instead of something else. However, I cannot claim that WD drives are any more reliable than Seagate or Hitachi drives. This is hit or miss. It's mathematical probability. You may buy 2 drives in a row that are DOA and then have all perfect drives for the next 10 years. It's a lottery.

When a drive does go bad, I think that WD's warranty is the best. It's very fast, they send out a drive to you first and they never put you through stupid troubleshooting questions or tips (at least not me). Like they can ask me what's wrong with the drive? I tell them it's too hot or the access times are too high, and that's it - they just want to know my address where to send a new one to.
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Oversized Rooster wrote: I always try to buy WD hard drives instead of something else. However, I cannot claim that WD drives are any more reliable than Seagate or Hitachi drives. This is hit or miss. It's mathematical probability. You may buy 2 drives in a row that are DOA and then have all perfect drives for the next 10 years. It's a lottery.

When a drive does go bad, I think that WD's warranty is the best. It's very fast, they send out a drive to you first and they never put you through stupid troubleshooting questions or tips (at least not me). Like they can ask me what's wrong with the drive? I tell them it's too hot or the access times are too high, and that's it - they just want to know my address where to send a new one to.
+1 Agree

I buy WD drives not because they're more reliable then others. It's their warranty services, my friend had 2 DOA in a row, and getting them replaced was so easy compare to when my maxtor died on me.
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I do know they have very good RMA support.
I had a hard drive die on me and had to get it replaced under warranty. I had alot of problems but the customer service was great.
They sent me a new HD right away after I called them.

They Sent it UPS if I remember right and a couple days later it said that it was delivered even tho I never got it. Notes said that they left the package with a little boy. No little boy here that is old enough to answer the door. Called up UPS and they said that they made a mistake and shipped it the Kingston, California. How the hell do they make that mistake. lol Anyways, called up Western Digital and explained the situation and they sent me another HD without hesitation at no extra cost.

I had to send them my dead one within 30days or Id be charged for it. Sent it Canada post. 30days go by they never get it, they extend the date for me, another bit goes by and they extend it again. End up this one got lost in the mail too. WD never received it and the tracking showed that it never left the post office. The guy on the phone at WD said that I'd be charged 160us for a 500gb hd because they never received it. Thats their price. In the stores its only worth like $60 at most Id say. I spoke to his supervisor and explained all the problems Ive went through over this and he said don't worry about it he will mark it as received and I won't be charged

Went through post office claims and got a check for $120 cuz they admitted they lost the package. Good thing I insured it. A month later my first HD they sent finally arrived via UPS. lol

So I was lucky, got 2 brand new Hard drives and $120cash for a dead Hard drive. They didnt have to send me the extra drive when UPS delivered it to the wrong place, and they didnt have to mark my dead one as received. Of course its pennys to them but most would just say sorry deal with it they did thier part.

I always buy WD now. If something goes wrong I know they will do whatever they can to fix the problem. Their Warranty is worth it.
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It's a bit of a comfort to know that I won't have a hard time having them replace the drive ( I only have to claim 1 dead hard drive anyways and that was more than 7 years ago and it's a maxtor and no problem ). As for backing up the drive, that is the point of expanding my unraid server. This pc is mainly gaming and downloading stuff off the net to transfer to my server and not for backing data.

Some people are the same as me when this didn't happen yet, that warranty is the most important. But now I believe it's the other way around ( at least in my case ) lost data, time and money is more important than warranty. I don't care if the drive has no warranty if it can give me enough warning that it's about to die so I can transfer my data to another drive.
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well, I got about 10 hdds from WD, and the oldest one is a 20gb IDE from 10 years ago and they're all still in working condition. I still use the 20gb in my mom's pc.

Rather, my old 10gb seagate and 60gb maxtor didn't last as long and died over time.
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Brewmeanie wrote: well, I got about 10 hdds from WD, and the oldest one is a 20gb IDE from 10 years ago and they're all still in working condition. I still use the 20gb in my mom's pc.

Rather, my old 10gb seagate and 60gb maxtor didn't last as long and died over time.
+1

I used to buy Maxtor and WD drives. FS always had the Maxtor's on sale but every single Maxtor I've owned had SMART failure. However, all of the WDs I have had for over 10 years are still working great. I only buy WD drives now.
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i find that WD make more clicking noise when writing than seagate and it seems normal because i've tried 5 brand new WDs and they are all the same
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Brewmeanie wrote: well, I got about 10 hdds from WD, and the oldest one is a 20gb IDE from 10 years ago and they're all still in working condition. I still use the 20gb in my mom's pc.

Rather, my old 10gb seagate and 60gb maxtor didn't last as long and died over time.
rofl I still got a 20 gig ide working in a old compuer I've bought WD for years never had a problem

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