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Any Recourse for Failed Drives?
mijoe asks: "I have been using various HDDs in my boxes with the exception of Western Digitals since I had some problems with them in the past. My recent issue was with a pair of Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120s. I had both drives fail in about a 2 month span. One of them is 14 months old, and is out of warranty. The logic board is bad (I swapped with a good one and recovered my data), but Maxtor was very short with me when I asked where I could buy replacement boards. Since then, I've switched to Seagate drives for the 5 yr warranty and quiet performance. Is there any place I can buy parts? It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order. What can I do when drives break down? Should I just switch to another manufacturer until I suffer a rash of failures again and then move to the next company?"
It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order.
It is a waste. the vast majority drives die when their platters or head goes - very few actually lose a logic board. As such, there are LOTS of dead drives with good logic boards floating around. Just fleabay/Craigslist for your drive model along with the word 'parts' or 'repair'. Pick up a drive with bad surfaces and cannibalize the still-good logicboard . . . Win/Win.
I think without a warranty you're pretty much screwed. For future purchases, my advice is to get disks with 5+ year warranties. I even recommend you go with SCSI disks, since they always seem to last longer and perform better, the extra money is well worth it.
Free will is just an illusion
Western Digital (back in the Caviar days) were the WORST drives ever. Back then the only drives I used were Quantum fireballs - fast as hell, and reliable (I still have a 20GB FB Plus LM in use today). But overnight, on a new manufacturing process, Western Digital stole the performance crown, and their "Special Edition" "J" series drives have been rock solid and stable. If I had stuck with my hatred of WD through the "Caviar" drives, I'd have missed out on these great drives, and their even-greater 10K RPM "Raptor" drives as well.
And before Quantum? All I used were Seagate, and Micropolis (remember them?) In every case, something changed, and they weren't the performance leader anymore. I changed, and for the better each time.
When you lose a drive, how do you know its bad manufacturing? And (with the exception of incidents like the IBM Deskstars) - I haven't seen any evidence that a particular modern-day drive is more "prone" to failures than any other - and I can't honestly believe that one person or entity can purchase enough drives to create an empirical sample-set.
But that's just me. YMMV, but I wouldn't blacklist a company because they "used" to make bad drives. I mean, who do you end up hurting but yourself?
I got a server from Dell with two 250gb Maxtor MaxLine II drives. Within 9 months, one of the drives failed. The next week, the other drive failed. This was in the middle of winter so I doubt heat was an issue.
I searched online, and found that _everyone_ has been having trouble with this model of drive, with it often failing like clockwork within the first year, though it had a 3 year warranty.
Since it was under warranty, I quickly got two replacement drives from Dell, this time from Western Digital.
During my troubles, I found a nice website called storagereview.com. Though you need to register an account to reach it, they have a survey of every major model of hard disk with thousands of reviews and percentile ratings for each model. The Maxtor MaxLine II drives I had were rated in the 3rd percentile (making them nearly the worst drives every created). Your model scores in the 23rd percentile, still pretty awful. Looking at the storagereview reliability ratings, just about every manufacturer ships at least a few lemon models, not just WD or Maxtor.
You'd probably do well to consider scsi for servers, if only because it seems that many sata drives marketed for server use are really of desktop quality. Also be sure that you keep your servers adequately cooled with good airflow reaching the drives, as it seems that the models of drives that fail most often tend to do so because they run hotter than other models. And when possible, favor older models of hard disks with a high reliability track record on storagereview or similar sites.
Seagate has done the right thing by instituting a 5-year warranty. If you care about preserving your data first, and performance second, Seagate wins. Seagates are also eerily silent; I had to make sure one of them was on by feeling for heat/vibration the first time i installed one.
Western Digitals tend to have slightly better transfer rates, but unless you get OEM drives (3-year warranty), you are stuck with a 1 year warranty. You can extend the warranty to 3 years for $15, so factor that into the price if thats what you plan on doing.
Maxtor seems to have had a bad couple of years. Bad enough that I no longer trust their drives. Their 1-year warranty does nothing to inspire confidence. OEM Maxtors have a 3 year warranty, but they are harder to find that oem WD's.
Short warranty terms really only protect you from horrendous, data-murdering drives, i.e., the absolute worst of the worst. There has to be something VERY VERY WRONG with a drive for it to fail within a year. There is almost no reason to consider a drive with only a 1 year warranty.
Historically there have only been enough top-notch HDD design engineers to make about one and a half design teams. The rest are decent enough engineers but they're not "gurus". So every hard-drive manufacturer tries to steal and keep the good guys with one degree of success or another.
The sudden increases and decreases in drive quality seen in every manufacturer over the last couple of decades is a direct result of these guys getting poached.
And then there's the whole assembly line QC problem which I won't go into here.
The short version of this is that Seagate has the best assembly lines right now (good article on it in Business 2.0 recently) and the best team.
The other good guys are scattered around the other mfg which is why other drives are mediocre at best. (I don't think Maxtor has anybody good right now at all which is why they are crap at the moment.)
But Seagate has a good retention plan for their guys going forward so I'd stick with Seagate for at least the next few years after which other mfg will either be out of business or have caught up to what Seagate's doing right now whereupon who knows...?
1) They won't sell you the logic boards. Ever. Or the connectors. Or any other parts other than a complete drive. As someone further up stated, each batch has slight firmware revisions between them that could make a board from batch A not work on a drive from batch B. The other part of this equation is that before leaving the factory, each drive/board pair is individually tuned when the servo control data is written on the platters (I'd draw you a diagram but it's a bit difficult in text).
When this happens the entire platter surface is scanned and any imperfections are mapped out and stored in the servo control chip. Every drive out there ships with a small amount of imperfections on the surface of the platters and this is how they are accounted for. When you swap boards from drive to drive, even with the same firmware, you could run into the problem that essential data from one drive is stored in an area marked as a unusable sector on the other drive.
2) Asking about this and pressing the question is a really quick way to get your account on their call tracking system flagged that you void your drives' warranties and make any future dealings with them VERY difficult. Trust me, the techs don't like to talk to people with account warnings on, and they can and will skim your old calls when you call in.
This is from the perspective of someone who worked support for a major HD manufacturer for quite a while. If you care about the data on your failed drive at ALL, send it out for professional data recovery. Otherwise, be willing to accept the risk that you yourself may destroy all of your data. The other thing I would say to do is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make either daily backups or mirror your most important data. Getting an external backup drive like one of the Maxtor external HD's that do autobackups or setting up a simple RAID 0 is not that expensive compared to losing your data.
Anywya that's my $.02 on the subject. If you want the full $1.00, email me (and make the subject stand out so I can easily sort it out of the spam).
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"