Joe Videtto asks:
I am looking to buy a new hard drive and I am wondering if anyone knows which would be more reliable – a 2TB or a 3TB drive? And are certain brands more reliable than others?
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System: Windows
Tagged: buy hardware, compare hardware, hardware tips, internal drive
System: Windows
Tagged: buy hardware, compare hardware, hardware tips, internal drive
15 Answers -
DalSan Mack
June 30, 2012Many of the “which is better brand” discussions around are really anecdotal, but from what most have said are Samsung and Western Digital hard drives, although for external use, the views are different. Many have said Western Digital drives fail rather quickly for external harddrives, though they would go with Western Digital for internal drives. Seagate seems to have had many issues and troubles in recent years, and Hitachi has been in the mixed in the reviews. There have not been any real performance tests done to harddrives that can tell which brand will last longer, but that would also be almost impossible to do with the amount of harddrives out, along with coming out, and even though harddrives are made the same from the same factory, not all will perform exactly the same. Size doesn’t generally make much difference, either.
i have to dissagree about the external Western Digital hard drives, i have a 5 year old 1 tb wd external disk, that i have used alot over the last 5 years, as a data hub on a network, GBs of data is allways beeing dll or uploaded to the drive, and it still works like a charm, no bugs or errors on the drive either…
September 22, 2012It doesn’t work like that. I have a Maxtor harddisk from the late 90ies where most of the batch failed within a year or two, but one sample still works. While this is an extreme case, other people who bought them at the same time, same place, were less lucky and wouldn’t be thankful for a suggestion of that kind. Unless you run a datacenter with hundreds of disks, or sell large number of disks and get to process returns, you cannot recommend a disk based on personal experience. Furthermore considering generally low failure rate, even a multitude of anecdotal experiences will not add up to a sufficiently complete picture.
Back 10 years ago, my sources said about 2% of the drives from any major brand would fail within 1-2 years. Right now, these figures appear to be slightly better, with hard to quantify, not very significant difference between manufacturers.
To get a view of general orders of magnitude of numbers, it’s recommended to see hardware.fr reports on hardware returns by brand and model, however it is to be kept in mind that the data is only collected from one (large-ish) retailer and thus contains impossible to quantify bias for a variety of well-known reasons.
October 19, 2012Laga Mahesa
June 30, 2012I prioritize Samsung Spinpoint drives. They have less platters and are, in my view, more reliable as a result. Less moving parts.
Aside from that, I would advise against buying the biggest. Get the previous generation where the bugs have been ironed out with the latest firmware already in place.
Vipul Jain
June 30, 2012The size doesnt matter in reliability. A bigger storage capacity doesnt mean an inverse relation to quality..
You just need to choose the right brand.
Seagate used to have the upper hand but now WD(Western Digital) is rising with equal quality at lower rates.
Alan Wade
June 30, 2012Western International keeps coming through as a reliable drive regardless of size. Other alternatives are Seagate and Toshiba which have stood the test of time.
Western International huh? Don’t forget Maxstur and IBN Darkstar drives.
August 6, 2012FIDELIS
June 30, 2012Hello, in my personal experience I have had good results when using either Western Digital or Seagate drives.
With regards to whether a bigger drive is more reliable, no one could really answer that unless you do extensive testing…Buying a harddrive is like buying anything else. You can get the worst brand in it would work ok for you and you can also buy the best brand and it could give you a lot of problems….
Dave Parrack
June 30, 2012Seagate and Western Digital appear to be the favored brands. As for size, I don’t see any reason why it would make any difference to reliability. I’d recommend getting the size that you need, giving you room for all your files and a little more in case.
Kannon Y
June 30, 2012Hey Joe!
This is pretty much one of most common, yet difficult, question that technicians get asked.
In my opinion, in general, the best indicator of hard drive reliability is the length of warranty, which varies by the line of hard drive and by the manufacturer. For example, Western Digital on average offers the longest period of warranty, ranging from three years (Caviar Green) to five years (Caviar Black). One of the worst is Seagate, which offers one to two years warranty on most of their drives.
Unfortunately, it’s commonly known that Hitachi (rebranded as HGST to get away from their horrible reputation) is the worst drive manufacturer and they have recently begun offering a three year warranty on many of their drives. Three years seems to be the average warranty for most hard drives, but HGST offering this kinda breaks the warranty as an indicator of reliability model.
The corporations that make these things know how reliable they are at the time of manufacture. Or, at least, they know better than consumers do. They even go so far as to hire accountants to determine the profitability yielded by the length of warranty periods. They know that because consumers prefer drives with longer warranties, they’ll sell better. However, there’s a fine balance between reliability and warranty period.
Another theory is that complex drives tend to fail at a higher rate than less complex drives. Larger hard drives oftentimes have multiple platters and as many eyes (head assemblies) as there are platters.
Most hard drives have between two and four platters. Supposedly drives with four platters (larger drives usually) are more likely to fail than two platters. However, I’m a little skeptical of this theory, although it does sound logical.
Oron
June 30, 2012Let me give you the short answer first. Neither make nor capacity are important to determine reliability. If you need a reliable drive, and are willing to pay for it, get a good MODEL (all makers offer drives at different price levels for different markets, and often with different warranties). Getting 2 drives in RAID 1 mode (disc mirroring) will substantially decrease the chance of catastrophic failure. Now for the longer answer…
It’s very difficult to compare the reliability of different makes. There are only six manufacturers, and all put equal amount of effort into producing discs at a particular price point. On the other hand, there are hundreds (or thousands?) of models using different technologies and designed at different times. Most drives are rated at 1/2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures), so on paper, there’s no difference, and mechanically, this is generally true. However, all six manufacturers have had problems at one time or another resulting with design faults, usually either with the electronics or with the firmware. In recent times, there have been more high profile failure stories about Western Digital and Seagate than the others, but then, they are also the largest manufacturers by a large margin… Personally, I really like Samsung’s Spinpoint drives. They are quiet, and I’ve never had a problem with them, but I may simply have been lucky! If you see a drive you want at an attractive price, read up some reviews on the internet, to make sure there’s no known problem with it.
Now, to the question of capacity. Again, it’s difficult to compare. Two models from the same make & series will have the same reliability if we measure time to failure. Indeed, most makes will produce each design with 1, 2 and 3 platters, so in all likelihood the 2TB and 3TB drives will be identical other than the number of platters & read/write heads!
However, you can ask the question from the point of view or “reliability per byte”, or “chances of disc failure for a disc with x bytes on it”, which changes the equation substantially. If you have 2TB of data on a disc, then there’s a certain chance of failure, but if you have 3TB on the disc, then the chances of failure are higher since there are likely to be more read/write operations on the drive! Then again, if you keep multiple copies of your file on the same drive then you are decreasing the chance of loss of individual files, which is much higher than the chance of the disc itself failing…
“if you keep multiple copies of your file on the same drive then you are decreasing the chance of loss of individual files, which is much higher than the chance of the disc itself failing”
– Now I always thought the bigger risk was the drive itself failing – what are the reasons that individual files are lost – and what are the possible recovery mechanisms (if you don’t have multiple copies) ?
Thanks for sharing : )
July 1, 2012Files can be lost in a variety of ways, but the most common causes are user error (overwriting/deleting files accidentally) and bad sectors. Bad sectors “happen” all the time. Modern drives (IDE & later) have spare clusters that are remapped automatically to compensate for any sector that goes wrong, but if you have a file and one of the sectors it’s on has become unreadable, then that file is corrupt, and no amount of remapping is going to bring it back.
July 1, 2012Sudden and complete failure of hard discs is not unknown, but it’s not as common as gradual failure (drive sometimes fails to mount, presents occasional read errors, heats up, becomes noisy or reports S.M.A.R.T errors etc). When you do have a sudden failure (with the exception of an environmental cause, such as dropping the drive or getting it fried by a lightning bolt), recovery is often possible by swapping the controller for an identical one. I’m not sure whether one could call this “reliability”, but it certainly improves the survivability of the data, which is usually what people care for more than the actual reliability of the drive itself.
Iam ever greatful to you Mr. Oron u r excellency for your great publications in this site for many viewers had got wonderful benfit but my question is that,
October 4, 2012In Seagate 2tb and 3tb both are having 3 platters.It means 2tb/3platter(low sector density) is mechanically have fail probability less than that of 3tb/3pltters(high sector density).as iam thinking isn’t it? and in both cases read/write heads are 3/3 in number.
so which is best probablely among them
Alex Downs
July 1, 2012To say one is more reliable than the other seems subjective to me. The chances of a hard drive failing unprovoked isn’t really likely, I’d worry more about if the computer itself, Board, cables, etc. Western Digital certainly is a good name if that’s what you wanted to hear. As far as reliable goes SSD is for more secure that HDD, but sacrifices the sizes for higher prices, but faster write speeds.
Homz
July 3, 2012If you’re not sure with the quality, use a HDD Raid so you can be sure that if 1 HDD fails, you still have back-ups with your file, much faster on data access too.
Just keep this in mind, the larger the memory of the HDD, the more it takes to access the file when your HDD had a lot of memory used and more prone to HDD crash. so consider capacity vs quality.
Elijah Swartz
July 28, 2012The size doesn’t matter. Drives with less platters tend to be more reliable as there are less mechanical parts that can get damaged. Research how many platters various hard drives have. Also, first and foremost, you will probably want to get a popular drive with many good reviews. If a drive has 3 stars or less I probably would not even risk it. I like Samsung Spinpoint F3 hd103sj 1TB drives and Samsung Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB drives as good price/performance and quality drives. Seagate drives used to have issues, but I think they have improved. Likewise for Hitachi and Samsung back in the day too. Don’t even make me get started on Maxtor drives
. There really isn’t one best brand as each drive is made slightly differently or possibly in an entirely different plant all together. Small differences in manufacturing may make one line or drives inferior to another line of the same brand. Buy a popular drive with lots of good reviews. Preferably with at least a 3 year warranty.
Alex W. The IT man
September 10, 2012I have been working on “big corporations” server maintenance for the last 14 years.
We always use RAID to prevent loss of data if any HDD fails. After 14 years in service
I can very confidently say – there is only 1 brand of HDDs that I 100% trust due to the
fact I never seen even 1 HDD to fail, and that is Hitachi. Highest rate of failures are
held by Samsung, next is Seagate and then Western Digital. So much so that the
company I am working for refuses to use anything else but Hitachi.
So Alex W. you have 14 years of experience with Hitachi drives and huge quantity works 100%…
October 5, 2012That’s really interesting specially considering the fact that the Hitachi bought the disastrous HDD technology from IBM in 2003 so the HDDs with Hitachi name are around for about 8 years now.
The DeskStar drives reliability is so poor that the HDDs are nicknamed as DeathStar.
DeskStar is ranked 18th in “Worst Tech Products of All Time”!!!
Hitachi was unable to fix the technology and make it reliable. Finally they gave up and to save the Hitachi brand name from bad reputation rebranded HDDs as HGST, yes because of a huge failure rate.
And please to all the commenters: don’t comment if you don’t know s**t about because you are not doing any good by misleading people: size of HDD of course DO matter. Drives larger than 1TB have failure ratio scaled exponentially compared to 1TB. 1TB WD 3.5” is what I recommend to anyone who want reliable HDD. If you need more space buy more drives.
Foyez Abdullah
October 30, 20123 TB
Hacksaw Jim Duggan
November 5, 2012Better buy portable SSD they are more reliable than HDD external drive, the platters disk inside HDD could fail if power supply outrage, head crash and not totally dumped proof. SSD would not reach 1 terabytes but still safer than having a platters disk inside of HDD. i have a bad experience using WD HDD which i’ve been using for years and now the platters disk inside starting to click and probably on its near death life span.
Hacksaw Jim Duggan
November 5, 2012I’m telling you never buy HDD WD at any size of memories or any brands they are not really reliable, better buy SSD much safer similar to one used in Ipad they can store up to 500 gb. the terrible thing about HDD is their PLATTERS disk.. search for that thing and you would understand how they fail, PLATTERS DISK should be placed only inside desktop or laptops they are not for portable use!!! TRUST ME!!! I’m have no anger with this portable devices infact i’m still using one HDD but i’m not bringing it outside just located in one place to be safe..