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When Will Your Hard Drive Fail?
jfruh writes: Tech writer Andy Patrizio suffered his most catastrophic hard drive failure in 25 years of computing recently, which prompted him to delve into the questions of which hard drives fail and when. One intriguing theory behind some failure rates involve a crisis in the industry that arose from the massive 2011 floods in Thailand, home to the global hard drive industry.
This is why I use RAID-1 on all my machines (except laptops which unfortunately don't usually have space for two drives) and why I use automated backups to both on-site and off-site targets so I don't need to remember to do anything.
I know RAID won't protect you from user errors, software bugs or maliciousness, but the number of times I've had a disk fail and not had to worry about lost data is worth the price of admission.
True. But then again, is there such a thing as a convenient hard drive failure?
While interesting, the devil is in the details, and these are more less all generalizations. So yeah, don't go out and buy a Seagate built with those specific specs. That said, usually you can't tell wtf you are buying until you have it at home, crack the box and look at the serial numbers and such, at which point you are probably SOL anyway as it is yours now.
The analysis looks at the Hitachi drives as the best, which were acquired by WD. However they were acquired by Hitachi from IBM before that. IBM had it's own scandal for anyone that cares to remember for 1) The "DeathStar" class of drives that had an industry worst failure rate once upon a time for whatever reason, and 2) leaked documents about warranties and planned obsolesce, in that an approximate 3 year failure rate was more less built into drives for commercial reasons (i.e. to sell more hard drives). They were designed for 3 year lifespans, though they didn't intentionally fail after that.
Anyway it all depends. Certain drives, made at certain times, made by certain manufactures, *may* have higher or lower failure rates... This is why this topic is so hard to pin down...
I liken it to back in the golden age of OC CPU, people would be very particular to get lots or batches of certain CPU that would perform much better than their counterparts. However it had the same issue. You buy it, usually without knowing that kind of detail, roll the dice, and hope when you open the box it is the right serial number, etc...
Though where the similarity is really close it is by regional manufacturing. I vaguely recall some Intel CPU being make in Thailand, and others being made in Malaysia, and one being better than the other back in the day for a certain spec... I doubt it is much of a causality leap to infer that the drives made in China may be of lesser quality than those made in Thailand during that period of time...
One other thing to remember with computer electronic is binning. Usually in *any* electronics manufacturing process there will be binning where after QA testing, a product could pass, it could fail, or it could marginally pass and be classified as another product. As you may recall, after the whole Thailand flood, either for real or imaginary (for profit), there was a shortage of drives, and the prices doubled, then tripled. It would be VERY hard for any company to not cheat a bit in the binning process when the profit is triple what they used to make. So perhaps usually drives that might otherwise be binned as marginal or failiure, were making it to market simply because the drive you used to pay 70$ for is now selling for 300$ and that is too good to pass up (particularly for short term CEO getting quarterly bonuses not overly concerned with long term implications of branding).