# How long can a hard drive last?



## Bjornbro (Feb 19, 2000)

I know, it varies. Specifically, my MDD Dual 1.25 G4 is pushing four years old and I have used it a lot and I mean _a lot_. It's for home, but I use it for everything the Mac was designed to do, you name it. I'd say I'd average 3+ hours per day of hard workin' use, it's not just Mail and Safari. Week in, week out, it never gets shut down, just sleeps. My concern is how long can I expect to keep this up? Should I make a preemptive new hard drive upgrade, if so when? As for the rest of the components, I expect I'll just replace them as they die.

What are your thoughts?


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## CanadaRAM (Jul 24, 2005)

"You have to ask yourself, do I feel lucky?"

The smartest move is to assume that a hard drive will die, and without notice. Depending on your budget, I recommend replacing your primary hard drive on a 1 or 2 year rotation. Pick a budget that gives you a drive in the sweet spot in teh priceerformance:capacity curve, and at least a 3 year warranty.

Take your 80 Gb that came with the machine. After 2 years, for $150, replace it with a 250 Gb. Then put the 80 in a Firewire case as a backup. Set up SuperDuper or Retrospect Express or whatever to make auto backups.
Then after 2 more years, replace the 250 with whatever drive is available for $150, say, a 500 Gb. Put the 250 in the Firewire case. Retire the 80, give it away, or make it the second string backup for the kids' machine or something.

That way your primary hard drive is always under warranty, you have the lowest chance of failure and you have a bootable backup at all times - and- you have the largest, fastest technology on tap for your everyday use. Budget - $75 a year plus a couple hours labout every 2 years.


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## HowEver (Jan 11, 2005)

The 20MB hard drive in my Mac IIsi still runs. The 2GB hard drive in my PowerBook 1400c still runs. So you never know. Back up regularly and sleep better. As CanadaRAM points out, you have the luxury of easy drive swapping in the MDD. Worth taking advantage of. Sale prices for Seagate drives are so low these days, just make sure where you get one it qualifies for the 5 year warranty.

_Edit: corrected the PowerBook model number._


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## Mississauga (Oct 27, 2001)

My MDD runs 24/7 - no sleep - running [email protected] - 2 drives in a hardware RAID 0 array and 2 in a software RAID 1 - 4+ years. All data is regularly backed up to external disks and DVD in anticipation of the inevitable failure. I consider myself very lucky to have experienced the longevity. All drives are Seagate brand.


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## TheBat (Feb 11, 2005)

HD's can last a long time, but new drives occasionally fail. Spinrite will tell you how your drive is. Not sure if you have to take your drive out, and insert into an Intel based PC. Spinrite will not run on a G4, G5 platform.

Does anyone have experience running it on an intel mac?


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## Bjornbro (Feb 19, 2000)

Thanks guys, your advice is pure gold. :clap: 



CanadaRAM said:


> Take your 80 Gb that came with the machine.


For the record, my G4 was of the last generation of dualies which did not include FW800 and thus came with a stock 120 Gb hard drive, not that it matters in terms of design/installation, I just wanted to be accurate.

Myself, not knowing one drive from another, what specifications do I need to be aware of in choosing a new/current replacement hard drive to fit my Mac? Would I need to buy an ATA controller to get bigger/faster? I'll probably use Seagate as the consensus is generally positive regarding their products.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

SmartReporter is invaluable but no automatic checker can test for bad blocks.

Drives should be retired to non critical duty after 3 years.


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

My experience has been different, in that I have never had a HD fail and I know of only one friend who has; in his case a 4 month old drive.

Certainly I must agree that backups and an attitude that "it can happen anytime, perhaps right now" is the right approach.

I use my QuickSilver harder than your G4 and all drives are happy.

I used my 5215 Performa for 6 years, again often running 10+ hours per day, and the drive there still spins up and does what it's supposed to do. The power supply is getting weak, but the drive is strong. The older versions of TechTool Pro can read the number of hours a computer has; this one reads 14,000+.

The drive in my SE/30 works as well as the day it was new.

I also have a 180c laptop; the batteries are useless but the drive is perfectly fine.

Having said all that, there is no reason to tempt fate; data is more valuable than the hardware it's created on. I would be wary of trusting a new drive. IDE drives are better than SCSI as far as the amount of semiconductors it needs to live, but like all electronics 90+ % of failure will be in the first 30 days; most of them in the first 24 hours or so.

In contrast to much of what goes into a computer, there are quite a few purely mechanical parts in a HD, they can break anytime but again if it lasts a few months the chances are much better that it will last years without problems.

CanadaRam's strategy actually works well with the typical failure modes; a one or two year old drive is quite likely to be robust, free of premature failure issues, and most likely to break by simply wearing out, hopefully years later. Thus, it makes a good backup drive; it's already been "burned in", which is what manufacturers do when high reliability is in the spec.

IBM has an excellent explanation of MTBF and what it means. Essentially, they say that drives wear out, and normal wear is not considered "failure" in the MTBF specification, so don't misread what it is supposed to convey.

They suggest that if you replace drives at the manufacturer's specified life expectancy (eg 5 years, if that's what the manufacturer says it should last) you can expect to have a good chance (slightly better than 50/50) of having your drives last as long as the MTBF specification without a failure.

There are just under 9,000 hours in a year, and modern drives have MTBF in the six and seven figures. Assuming we do what IBM says we should (and assuming they are right and we are lucky) you should never experience a drive failure in your lifetime.

But, backup often, and if you can backup to multiple drives or disks, that's even better. Even if only one drive fails in all of Canada this year, it could be yours. Or mine.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Lucky boy tho I suspect you may have a few bad blocks you have so far dodged.

The only drive I'd personally had fail is a Raptor 36 gig -supposedly one of the most reliable designs. Part of an array and it was the motherboard that blew ( I had a spare ).
I was fully backed up but it was nice to get it all.

The real problem drives occurred maybe 5 years ago before the new Seagate arrived and just when IBM bailed.
DeathStar era with one year warranties. Drives got bigger and hotter and poorly made compared to earlier scsi models.

Lately we see far fewer 3.5" failures and the the warranty periods reflect that.
A critical data strategy is if you have several drives of similar size - buy them in identical sets so that the logic boards are interchangeable - or buy a spare drive.
I have a drive waiting for recovery - have to chase down a matching logic board 

2.5" however are problematic and any 20-60 gig in the 3 year range needs caution. Best practice is use SmartReporter if supported and clone a backup regularly.
Boot off the the clone and do a write zeroes on the internal drive every 3-6 months to pick up any bad blocks or buy Drive Genius and do a surface scan.

Drives are too cheap and data too much a hassle to recreate not to have multiple levels of redundancy.
Newer drives with big caches are also a treat as far as speed goes.


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## CanadaRAM (Jul 24, 2005)

It's a Bell curve. Some will die early, most will last 2 - 4 years, and some will last longer than 5 years. The early failures and the Methuselah drives are the exceptions.

We have certainly seen plenty of desktop drive failures in the 6 month to 2 year range. It is not true of hard drives that 'if it lasts a month it will last 5 years' as is sometimes said of solid state electronics. A drive is a physical device and subject to wear, heat, type of use, and environmental happenings (power fluctuation, impact, cold, heat, etc).

Keep in mind that a 5 year warranty from Seagate does not mean they guarantee with certainty that your drive will last 5 years... it means your drive WILL die at some point, and if it does so within 5 years, they have budgeted for replacing it under warranty.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

We have seen more logic board failures than actual mechanical failures -likely 2:1 maybe even 3:1.
Logicboard there is at least a decent chance of full recovery.

Mechanical or motor iffy.

Bad blocks if not horrid we can usually deal with but they can be wicked problems.

ANY sign of drive failure, odd noises, heavy beach balling, very slow starts 
Back up right away and have it checked - don't wait and see if get worse.
I've had clients come in using drives that sounded like a Model T with bad bearings and had been using then for months.  then wonder why I can't recover their data. 

Don;t take chances, backup daily and act quickly when any signs of problems occur especially on older machines.


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## Apple101 (Jan 22, 2006)

Good topic! To be quite honest and truthful it depends on how many start/stop cycles the drive goes through. Usually drives that are left running 24/7 last quite a bit longer then drives that shut down every 15 minutes like ive seen setup on some peoples Macs.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Yes that's my experience as well - 24/7 is good and I never let the drives spin down. Either off or running and I prefer running.


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

Same here; I have never set preferences so that a drive will spin down. Heat cycling alone is a perfectly good reason to avoid it; throw in power demand surges and right there you have the two major causes of failure, and there you are playing with them. You may as well be poking a cornered gremlin with a stick.


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## smellybook (Aug 31, 2006)

*The 2 GB drive in my 1st computer as a teenager stills runs,*

I actually took it out a couple days ago to check the brand because I was shocked it stills works, it's a seagate.

But I bought a 250 gb maxtor a while back and it failed after 4 days.


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## Apple101 (Jan 22, 2006)

smellybook said:


> But I bought a 250 gb maxtor a while back and it failed after 4 days.


That can happen to any drive. Ive seen brand new Seagates go up in smoke, quite literally.

For any one who is looking for a drive the brands you definitely want to check out are:

1) Seagate
2) Samsung
3) Maxtor
4) Hitachi


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

THE brand you definitely DO NOT want to check out is Maxtor.

ONLY their 24/7 server drives are decent in our experience.

Western Digital run hot but are fast and few failures.


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## Apple101 (Jan 22, 2006)

MacDoc said:


> THE brand you definitely DO NOT want to check out is Maxtor.
> 
> ONLY their 24/7 server drives are decent in our experience.
> 
> Western Digital run hot but are fast and few failures.


There is absolutely nothing wrong with Maxtor. Maxtor is the world pioneer for innovation. They are recognized throughout the industry as making some of the finest storage solutions in the world. 

So you should pretty much say to everyone here that they should stay away from Seagate as well since Maxtors are Seagate's with the Maxtor name on them. 
Maxtor was doing pretty dam good without Seagate they only reason why there was an acquisition was because Seagate wanted Maxtors technology and resources.

I can say from personal experience and from working with IT professionals Western Digitals are the ones that have reliability issues.


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## Fox (Oct 4, 2002)

I have probably had 15 Macs since I started buying them in 1987 and I have yet to have a hard drive fail me. The closest I had was a Samsung Spinpoint show a few bad sectors in its third year of life. It was under warranty, so I chose to replace it rather than gamble on a failure. Like However, I still have a IIsi with a functional HD; bought in 1989 though I have rarely used it in the last 10 years. I'm sure that MacDoc and CanadaRAM are giving sage advice about the probabilities of failure, but I have never replaced a drive for reasons of age and I wouldn't do so unless I had some other reason to replace it (e.g., to upgrade the speed or capacity of the drive). However, I'm the most religious backer-upper I know. Every new file I create is moved from home Mac to office Mac or vice versa and sometimes even to a third Mac in my house. One top of this I do regular clones of both main drives on external backup drives. So should the odds finally catch up with me, I'm unlikely to lose any data unless a bomb or a tornado takes out a large chunk of Peterborough.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Oh bull...Seagate bought Maxtor this year.

Seagate has been the leading innovator for the last 3 years and most of it's long existence. It accelerated away from the rest after being taken private in 2000.



> Seagate Research is the company's research and development wing. It was established in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in August 1998. *On September 11, 2006, Seagate won the Technology Design Award for its "Hard-disk recording technology that dramatically increases the amount of information that can be stored on a single disk".[1*
> 
> In 1992, Seagate introduced the Barracuda, the industry's first hard drive with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. They followed this with the Cheetah (the first 10,000 RPM drive) in 1996 and the X15 (15,000 RPM) in 2000. They also introduced the Medalist Pro 7200 range, the first ATA drives with a 7200 RPM spindle, in 1997. As of 2005, Seagate started an innovation called the "pocket hard drive". Seagate has the highest areal density (number of bits stored per square inch) in the industry and it leverages off this technological edge to make faster disk drives.
> 
> On December 21, 2005, Seagate confirmed the acquisition of rival HDD firm Maxtor. The all-stock deal is worth $1.9 billion. The firms said the combination will be 10-20% accretive on a cash EPS basis after the first full year of combined operations. The combined company will save around $300 million in operating expenses after the first full year of integration, Seagate said. The transaction was completed in May of 2006.[1p


Western Digitals do run hot and unless you provide adequate cooling will fail but not as frequently as Maxtors.

Seagates run cooler and Samsungs are built like tanks.

Maxtor ( now Seagate ) COULD build good drives .....they just didn't.

Wnat a hint



> *Seagate Technology said Tuesday that it has increased its warranty on its internal Maxtor retail drives from one year to three years.*
> The new three-year limited warranty applies retroactively to all Maxtor branded Internal Hard Drive Kits in retail channel inventory, or purchased by consumers on or after October 1, 2006, Seagate


Seagates are 5 year warranties....tell ya somethin' just maybe??

As I said the Maxtor enterprise 24/7 drives are excellent - too bad they didn't apply it to the rest of the line.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Dr. Fox you are not far off the truth and as a result we've modified some of our backup advice.

I had a client who got hit badly with n electrical surge that blew his G5 power supply, a processor, both internal drives AND his external backup.

Now luckily we revived the backup but we have since encouraged clients to have at the very least a once a month archive not hooked up to the main system.


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## macsackbut (Dec 15, 2004)

So what about the 1.8 inch drives in iPods? Should they last longer or die sooner than other drives (I'm thinking about the constant spinning up and powering down they undergo)?


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Don;t have any first hand knowledge but you bring up and interesting point - I think current drives get pretty beat up with media use and OSX.

Bring on the solid state for iPods....and maybe partially for laptops.
Might cut down on the stress.

I have no idea of the failure rate on 1.8s.


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## Apple101 (Jan 22, 2006)

MacDoc said:


> Oh bull...Seagate bought Maxtor this year.
> 
> Seagate has been the leading innovator for the last 3 years and most of it's long existence. It accelerated away from the rest after being taken private in 2000.
> 
> ...



Warranties are not a clear indication of a products overall quality. For example thats just like saying the north american car companies now build superior cars because they have increased their warranties, yet for reliability they still don't even come close to the european cars with terms of reliability and quality. 

Also do you have any statistical data that suggests that Maxtors are one of the most failure prone hard drives in the industry? 

Seagate may be a world leader for drive capacity but for core technologies Maxtor comes out on top. For example Maxtor was the first to develop a servo calibration method that utilizes a data frame journaling table via an SCM. This technology makes it possible for faster read/write operations.


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## Aero (Mar 2, 2006)

My 5 year old hard drive is still kicking, its on 24/7. The longest it stopped working was 3 days, the great summer blackout of 2003 

But it really depends, I know someone whose hard drive broke after a year. So its just pure luck, be sure to backup.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Of course warranties are an indicator.
Here's one long time computer tech's rant



> Then...Lo-and-behold 2 years ago, Maxtor came out with what They called their new generation of Super-drives. Sounded great until we found out that the great 3-year warranty went straight down to Hell with ONLY a 1-year warranty. But the Rhetoric about the New-drives sounded good so we bought them.
> 
> NOW...
> 
> ...





> I swore off Maxtor drives about 4 years ago. Set up a ~40 PC school lab with a single lot of Maxtor HDDs and was embarrased, ashamed and reputationally dishonored when 15 of them failed within 2 months :grenade:. I'll never install anything but WD drives again.





> At my office, I pretty much bought only Maxtor drives up until about 1-2years ago when EVERY SINGLE ONE (their DiamondMax) started to fail. I have HAD to replace EVERY SINGLE MAXTOR! I now buy only Seagate because of their 5 year warranty. So far, not one has failed either.


and a long litany here..it's one reason we''ve seen problems with LaCie drives. too many Maxtors in them and only one year warranty.

http://www.binaryfeed.org/blog/2003/12/01/maxtor-sucks/

a couple of hilights



> What a fool I was to buy a Maxtor product. The constand crashes, the non-existent support, and now when they can’t make the piece of garbage they sold me work, they drop all support for it.
> 
> There is a reason Maxton stock fell 70% last year. I will never buy a Maxtor product again. Hard drives, storage, whatever.
> 
> ...





> Over the last five years, I have installed eight Maxtor HDD’s in computers I either built or repaired. The drives ranged anywhere from 30GB to 160 GB and all were ATA 133/7200 rpm. My luck with these drives was identical in each case. They ALL succumbed to a catastrophic failure in under two years. All but one drive did so without any warning whatsoever. I’ve switched to Western Digital and have zero complaints about the drive or bundled software (I have yet to need their support).
> 
> Comment by Randy — January 27, 2006 @ 5:54 am
> Between my home and church, I manage about 12 PCs with various configurations. In the past 2 years I have had 6 Maxtors fail (including BOTH mirrored RAID drives on our server!). Four of the six drives were less than a year old and the other 2 were less than 3 years old. The only other Hard Drive I’ve had fail in the last 5 years is a very old IBM Deskstar (big surprise there). Rather than replace the Maxtors under warranty, I decided to cut my losses and replace them with Western Digitals… I have several of these over 5 years old still running strong!
> ...


heard enough??

lots more here

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=18811

Still think warranty length is not indicative??

We buy/sell and see thousands of drives every year. Maxtor far and away are the most problematic even tho we don't buy them.

Often their prices are substantiallys lower.....you get what you pay for.


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## Apple101 (Jan 22, 2006)

MacDoc said:


> Of course warranties are an indicator.
> Here's one long time computer tech's rant
> 
> 
> ...



As REQUESTED where IS the statistical data that PROVES Maxtor drives are more failure prone then any other drive? What industry RECOGNIZED source has suggested this?

Any one can go onto forums and copy and paste information that discusses so "called" user experiences. Out of all of the Macintosh systems that I have seen, and out of all the severs, and client systems that I have worked with that use Maxtor drives none of them have had problems. 

Look I can copy and paste too!!!!

watch this...

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1274576&page=7

http://reviews.cnet.com/Seagate_Bar...&messageSiteID=9&messageID=912946&cval=912946


http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/000177.html

heard enough??


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Oh come on......spare me the futile defence.
With one year warranties they hit the garbage before they show up as "failed in warranty".

The longer warranty Maxtor enterprise 24/7 drives will have good stats - the failed "everybody else" Maxtors drives will not show up as they are in the landfills.

Just like IBM Maxtor bailed when they could not compete on quality and price. Now with Seagate in charge maybe things will change ...or Maxtor will disappear as a brand.

Seagate and Samsung recently went nose to nose - looks like Samsung blinked....was fun for a while....good prices.

••••

2004 - ONE reviewer and the other referred to scsi Cheetahs- also in 2004 and not the class of drives we are discussing at all. Pretty thin.

Count yourself very fortunate if you've not had a Maxtor fail....you will if they are not *server level drives*....which you admit to being in your use base.

As I said - they CAN build a reliable drive with a 5 year warranty .....they just didn't.


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## jdurston (Jan 28, 2005)

I have 3 drives fail on me in the last 4 years. They were all Maxtors. This was out of approximately equal share of Seagates, Maxtors and IBM. We have had several Maxtors fail at work in the last two years, with no other brand failing us. It didn't hurt because of proper backups but is still enough to make me seriously question Maxtor as a quality alternative.

It may not be statistically significant but I like how cool and quite the Seagates run and have yet to have a problem with one.


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## CanadaRAM (Jul 24, 2005)

The problem is the evidence is mostly anecdotal and with small sample sizes. Also, in different years, various INDIVIDUAL designs of drives were more or less prone to breakdown, irrespective of the brand. 

The IBM "Deathstar" problems were local to one product line, and have no relation to the current line of Hitachi Deskstar drives. 

Samsung 40 Gb and 80 Gb Spinpoints were dying left and right 5 years ago, but today's Samsungs have a good rep.

Maxtor has made some great drives and some trouble-prone drives, we too have seen a distressing number of DiamondMax and OneTouch drives fail on customers, mostly within warranty. 

HOWEVER: the suggestion from the unnamed source that the Major Distributor of Seagate drives says there have been zero returns (implying that nobody countrywide has had a Seagate fail) is way misleading, because Seagates fail too. 

The catch is: the 'Major Distributor' that we deal with REFUSES to take any Seagate returns, even if they are a DOA right out of the box. (So of course they have zero returns, those twunts). We have to ship the defective, brand new Seagates to Seagate at our expense, then, they send us back a drive labelled "Certified Repaired Drive". That's right, we send in a New one-day old Seagate drive, and get back, after $15 or $20 shipping cost and two weeks, a refurb that we can't sell as new. Now we have to do something with the refurb, 'cause in the meantime we have had to supply the customer another new one.

Then... Seagate has recently developed a nasty habit of building in and turning on by default, some cutting edge technology on their drives that break the Mac's drivers/disk controllers. So the installer has to be on their toes to disable the features before the drives are installed in Macs.

So its not all roses in Seagate land either. I estimate the Seagate first year failure rate at about half of the Maxtor rate.


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## Nick (Aug 24, 2002)

The only hard drive I have had personally fail is a Maxtor.
The 40gb that came with my G4. Failed about 4 years of heavy use.
Started dropping sectors. Disk Repaired it quite a few times, then got a new drive.

At work, we have had 1 Maxtors fail.
1 newer (250gb) about 1.5 years old.
Failed suddenly one day.

1 (250gb) back up drive (IBM) (failed while downloading data onto new drive)
1 40gb (IBM) back up drive a few years ago.

We sent back about 4 IBM drives at work a few years ago. They were crap. We no longer buy IBM drives. Personally, I like seagate.

Cheers,
Nick


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## Apple101 (Jan 22, 2006)

MacDoc said:


> Oh come on......spare me the futile defence.
> With one year warranties they hit the garbage before they show up as "failed in warranty".
> 
> The longer warranty Maxtor enterprise 24/7 drives will have good stats - the failed "everybody else" Maxtors drives will not show up as they are in the landfills.
> ...



Oh spare me with all of your crap. IBM sold their consumer line of hard drives because they wanted to focus more of their attention to enterprise and corporate needs. Similar to IBM selling their consumer line of desktops to Lenovo. Also we are discussing overall brand reliability, however you started going on with a childish rant by copying and pasting garbage from a forum and posting it here. You have failed to answer any of my questions properly as you STILL HAVE NOT proven with ACTUAL statistical data from an industry RECOGINIZED source that suggests that Maxtors are more failure prone then any other drive in the industry. 

To be quite honest I think the reason why this school lost respect for you was because of your stuck up and snotty “I think I know it all” attitude. Wake up and smell reality, no matter what, drives do and will fail, and as mentioned from a previous poster Seagate’s are not all necessary that great. Please wake me up when you are ready to actually have a constructive argument, because it is pretty clear are unwilling to prove what you are actually trying to argue.

Also another thing to consider when dealing with a hard drive failure would be the environment that the equipment is exposed to. That’s why some of the posts in these forums in which you have _uselessly_ provided can be illegitimate. 

Also I have been using Maxtors both consumer and enterprise grade for years and never had any problems. In fact one of my red hat systems has a Maxtor drive that is 7 almost 8 years old and it is still going strong. But you see I actually maintain my equipment properly. 

I guess you must think that Apples are giant pieces of junk too because there are forums that discuss allot the problems that people have had with their products.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Clients pay me to protect their interests. YOUR attitude flies entirely in the face of our experience and that of thousands of others online.
You want to call that snotty be my guest - we see thousands of drives every year.
We'll stand by our advice and it's borne out by others.
Your opinion is not.

The failure rate of IBMs Deskstars, aka Deathstars was unbelievable and now you are discounting that.
Did this escape your attention



> IBM hit with hard drive class action suit
> Glass platter 75GXP HDD is giving pain
> By James Watson ? More by this author
> Published Tuesday 23rd October 2001 10:45 GMT
> ...


Maxtor's failure rate is nowhere near that level.....it's more than it should be....it's more than it can be given the reliability of it's enterprise drives.

Despite that - a class action suit is brewing



> The national law firm of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, is investigating consumer complaints concerning Maxtor brand hard disk drives (HDD). The complaints include allegations that the hard drives prematurely fail after less than two years of use. We are reviewing complaints concerning several models of the Maxtor hard disk drive, including the following:
> External Hard Drives
> Maxtor One Touch III Family - 200, 300, and 500GB
> Maxtor One Touch III Turbo Edition - 600GB
> ...


http://www.lieffcabraser.com/maxtor-drives.htm

•••

Things change, at one time Seagate scsi drives were
a) fast
b) failure prone

Seagate leads right now in reliability tho I suspect Samsung may well outgun them in the long term as the Sammie drives are exceedingly well constructed. Very akin the 10k Raptors in build sturdiness.

That said I think Seagate is and will continue to edge out others in storage technology. We will continue to recommend them to clients.


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

I've owned more Maxtor drives than other brands (Seagate is #2) and all have worked without incident. The oldest Maxtor, used daily, will be 5 years old in a few months.

My QuickSilver came with an Apple OEM Maxtor 60GB/2MB cache DiamondMax 8 and although it was replaced with a larger drive, Gerry bought it and it was working fine right up to the day he died.

MacDoc hates Maxtor drives and he's certainly entitled to his opinion; I'm sure he has his reasons. I can remember spates of failure amongst batches of Connor, Seagate and Western Digital drives in the 90's, IBMs around 2000 and I'm sure there are others. I don't remember any incidents with Maxtor, come to think of it, but there proabably were; drives fail, it's as simple as that.

I'm more neutral about the brand; in my own opinion hard drives are inherently high demand items that carry a certain risk of failure, and if you expect and prevent disaster you won't be bit if and when it arrives. I also know he shares that belief.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

oh heavens - Connor's  - I had blocked them from my consciousness.

1/2 height Seagate scsi's had their share of woes then too. So hot you could literally fry an egg.

It's really the period 2002-2005 where Maxtor's had far too high a failure rate - they were not a alone - most had short warranties and too many failures.

The hottest drive I ever came across was an IBM 10k attempt to catch the Cheetah.

Then about 2 years ago Seagate began to extend the warranties again, their drives were noticeably cooler ( we like WDs but only inside machines where cooling is good ) and not as prone to failure.

Right now - with Seagate management maybe Maxtor is getting out of it's hole but the lawsuit won't help and I'll stick to Seagate, Samsung and WD.

I hear the Hitachi are good but they are having a hellish time shaking off the Deathstar episode.

We see hundreds of working perfectly Maxtor drives - Apple tends to favour them as they are cheap - so does LaCie.
It's not a matter of hate - it's a matter of risk.

We see too many failed out of those.


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## Cole Slaw (Aug 26, 2005)

In the last 5 years I've built quite a few PCs. I've always bought Seagates or Western Digital hard drives and can honestly say I've never had a problem; I suppose I've been lucky.
A couple of months ago I upgraded my Macbook from the 80 gig Seagate I bought it with to a 160 gig Hitachi. I would have actually gone with a Seagate 160 but it was quite a bit pricier than the Hitachi.
All is well with it but I have to admit I was a little apprehensive about buying Hitachi because of the high failure rate reputation IBM drives had before Hitachi bought them out.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Yeah we've steered clear as well but I suspect it's not justified - I'm sure they're QC is over the top given the rep they inherited.
Maybe we'll try a few on the service bench - always a way to brutalize a drive.


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## CanadaRAM (Jul 24, 2005)

Cole Slaw said:


> I was a little apprehensive about buying Hitachi because of the high failure rate reputation IBM drives had before Hitachi bought them out.





Doc said:


> I hear the Hitachi are good but they are having a hellish time shaking off the Deathstar episode


Yeah, that's what I was saying: the IBM experience is 5 years old and affected one specific product design only, which has long since been superceded. But still people say "I won't buy a {xxx} becasue of the {failures - lawsuits - stiction - overheating - noise}" when the data they are basing it on is completely out of date.


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## Cliffy (Apr 18, 2005)

I have a few older drives in the less than 4GB size that are still going strong.

A couple of years ago I had a couple drives die at work, the first was a Hitachi Travelstar. That was an easy RMA. Try to get a replacement drive with a Seagate SCSI drive out of an out of warranty (by maybe 6 months past the 1 yr waranty) Sun server. Seagate says "sorry, an OEM drive, talk to them". Sun says "not our problem any more".


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Yeah OEMs are a trap for the unwary - caught our supplier ( I'm quite sure it was accidental ) shipping us some OEM Seagates


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## CanadaRAM (Jul 24, 2005)

Cliffy said:


> Try to get a replacement drive with a Seagate SCSI drive out of an out of warranty (by maybe 6 months past the 1 yr waranty) Sun server. Seagate says "sorry, an OEM drive, talk to them". Sun says "not our problem any more".


Yeah - that's because Sun paid a lower price to Seagate for the drive to purchase it without warranty. The $20 lower price you paid for the sun server came at the cost of losing the remaining years of Seagate's retail warranty.


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## Fox (Oct 4, 2002)

Please explain the OEM bit. I always thought that OEM simply referred to the drive coming without cables, screws and other little stuff I never need. I also like OEM for environmental reasons because of less packaging.


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## Fox (Oct 4, 2002)

MacDoc said:


> Dr. Fox you are not far off the truth and as a result we've modified some of our backup advice.
> 
> I had a client who got hit badly with n electrical surge that blew his G5 power supply, a processor, both internal drives AND his external backup.
> 
> Now luckily we revived the backup but we have since encouraged clients to have at the very least a once a month archive not hooked up to the main system.


I actually have a paper copy story that reinforces this, dating back to the early 80's before most of us were using personal computers. I was a small-c consultant then and was doing a project for the National Capital Commission in Ottawa. I kept all my files at home and had a report nearly completed for a 6 month project. I don't know what prompted me to do it, but I took my draft and raw data into the NCC office, made a backup copy and left it there. About two weeks later, the basement of the apartment building I was living had an electrical fire and was totally destroyed. Very little of what I owned survived that fire and none of my NCC project notes did. I don't know what I would have done had I not made a backup. That contract was most of what I earned that year and I don't know how they could have paid me without a product.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

OEM indeed are better that way BUT some may have zero warranty while others even better warranties than the "retail" boxes which sometimes only have one year.

Given equal warranties OEM drives indeed have an ecology advantage but "read the fine print".


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## Fox (Oct 4, 2002)

Now that you mention it, I remember that the Samsung I had replaced for the bad sectors was OEM. It had a 3 year warranty and the bad sectors showed up with 6 months warranty left. (Samsung honoured the warranty and replaced the drive.) If I remember correctly, 3 years is the standard Samsung warranty. But I will pay attention to that from now on with OEM drives.


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## Fox (Oct 4, 2002)

MacDoc said:


> Seagate and Samsung recently went nose to nose - looks like Samsung blinked....was fun for a while....good prices.


I was curious about that comment, MacDoc, since those are the only brands I have been buying. Is this a price war you are talking about, or something related to how the drives are built. I have noticed that recently, standard 3.5" Seagate drives of 120-400 gb are being discounted everywhere. I assumed that this was to clear them out in favour of newer models; is that correct?

One of the main features I look for in a drive is noise level, and that's what "drives me" to Samsung and Seagate. But I got a shock a few months ago when I bought a new iMac core 2 duo and was given a core duo by accident. The 250 gb drive was so quiet I couldn't hear it and when checking it out on System Profiler, I was shocked to learn it was a Maxtor. I wasn't aware of any failure issues for that brand (until now), but they sure had a reputation for making noisy drives. Maybe that's something Seagate fixed when they took Maxtor over.


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## kwmike (Oct 25, 2006)

I once had a hard drive fail on me, it was a huge 850 MB, cost me $250. I crunched the circuit board in two places with srews when I mounted it in the computer


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## Heart (Jan 16, 2001)

kwmike said:


> I once had a hard drive fail on me, it was a huge 850 MB, cost me $250. I crunched the circuit board in two places with srews when I mounted it in the computer


Wait a minute...
User Error....


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## Apple101 (Jan 22, 2006)

MacDoc said:


> Clients pay me to protect their interests. YOUR attitude flies entirely in the face of our experience and that of thousands of others online.
> You want to call that snotty be my guest - we see thousands of drives every year.
> We'll stand by our advice and it's borne out by others.
> Your opinion is not.
> ...



I too get paid for dealing with customers issues involving both hardware and software. My advice is derived from statistical data, and extensive product research. I do also base some of my advice on personal experiences, like you do as well. 

Obviously it is evident that you stand by your advice and your opinions and I completely respect that, and I have no intention or reason for changing that nor should anyone. However, there is still no solid evidence that suggests Maxtors are the most failure prone drives in the industry.

Every drive manufacture has had their problems or "episodes". Because I have never had any problems with the Maxtor brand, nor has anyone that I have dealt with had any problems with that brand I shall still continue to recommend the product to customers if they prefer an alternative to the Seagate brand. 

Now I was fully aware of the problems that IBM was having with their hard drives, but I must say since Hitachi bought IBM's drive business the quality and reliability is just astounding. Their drives have won countless awards, you should seriously check it out! I am going to recommend a word of caution with some of the Western Digital drives though, as I have heard numerous complaints about their reliability from not only customers, but also quite a few IT administrators as well. 

I would also like to apologize for my rudeness and I hope that no one has been offended or appalled by this, if so then I would like to extend my sincere apologies to those people as well  

To MacDoc and everyone on ehMac have a great day!


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

I might agree with you on the WDs lately - I just noticed an abundance of 160s in the Apple branded pile tho the HawkA used in the MacPros seems a level up in build quality.

Have to check out Hitachi as the drives have been getting good reviews. Of course Murphy's law the FIRST Hitachi I've come across is an 80 gig 2.5" now undergoing a horrendously difficult recovery.
Looks to be a 3 day event just for the scan alone let alone the recovery....and this on a 3 month old drive 

Family photos, no backup. 

It's one of those frustrating recoveries where the drive actually mounts but there are so many slow read blocks doing anything with it is painful and time consuming.

Anyone else with a Hitachi in their Mac?= this was clearly a replaced unit as it's PATA.
I wonder if heat played a role - maybe in a iBook - we didn't do the drive extraction.


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## The Doug (Jun 14, 2003)

Interesting & informative thread. To veer the topic slightly...

Been thinking about a back-up solution recently. Was considering an external Firewire drive, but it (finally) occurred to me that since I've got a vacant 2nd HD bay in my G5, I should just plop a second HD in there. Much less expensive & straightforward that way, with no desktop clutter. I can get a nice capacious Seagate (my preferred brand) at the computer store at work dirt cheap.

Dumb question though - what's the difference between *SATA* and *SATA II*? Would a SATA II drive work without issues in my Rev A G5, or should I just look for a plain ol' SATA?

Re: Maxtor - despite there being "no solid evidence that suggests Maxtors are the most failure prone drives in the industry", over the past five years I have had two fairly new Maxtor drives at the office go belly-up without warning. One disc had some recoverable data (painful process) and the other did not (even more painful). The HD in my brother's old Snow iMac failed a while back, and it was a Maxtor - years of his photos, music, & personal stuff gone. That's solid enough evidence for me, and even with Seagate having acquired Maxtor, it'll be a while before the taint wears off the Maxtor brand for yers truly.


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

" ...
Dumb question though - what's the difference between SATA and SATA II? Would a SATA II drive work without issues in my Rev A G5, or should I just look for a plain ol' SATA?
..."

Not so dumb, and not your fault that you feel dumb. The Tech industry is busy trying to deliberately confuse you in order to suck money from your pockets with needless anxiety. Nothing new there, but you can relax.

SATA and SATA II are just referring to the bodies that defined the standard. There is a lot of confusion (what? what a surprise) over it because some vendors, eager to either appear better than everyone else, or afraid of losing sales because of the perception they are "not as good", even if it's based on pure gibberish, are starting to imply that it means 3Gb/s data transfer.

It doesn't.

SATA II is the former name of the group that defined the standards; the hightest standard they defined was a 3Gb/s data transfer standard.

They changed their name to SATA IO; they adopted the same standards as before.

The SATA II standard can be either 1.5 or 3 Gb/s, and can support (or not) a bunch of optional features or capabilities.

The SATA IO group is currently, and without much success, trying to get vendors to stop using SATA II as a synonym for 3Gb/s data transfer support. I wish them luck.

But, beware; SATA II can mean supporting 1.5Gb/s as well. Not that it matters, the drives themselves are too slow to get near either data rate at this time. That will change some day.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

There were some reported issues with 750 gig SATA II Seagates but since we avoid that drives we have not seen any issues. ( only for cost benefit do we avoid them for now ).

We've seen no issues with Samsung and Seagate SATA II in very high speed setups..
Best inside a box is over 450 megs per second sustained on 6 drives in a MacPro.

As GG states that's a far cry from the theory of 3 gBs per bus.

HOWEVER with 16 meg caches that might be the biggest advantage.
I'm never sure how caches work in arrays.

But I can tell you just doing day to day stuff on a machine with 450 megs per second sustained ( that's discounting the caches ) is truly an eye popper tho I suspect it's the 100 megs or so of high speed cache that provides that "snap".

GG do you know or can you explain how X optimizes i/o.?


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