# Is Western Digital really this bad now or am I just unlucky?



## Eric_Cartman (Jun 7, 2014)

In a little over a year I've had 8 Western Digital hard drive die on me!

It all started with the WD Green 1TB I was using as the OS drive in my main rig starting to die.

I didn't really think much of it since  the drive was kind of old, it was original from a pre-built HP I had before I built my main rig.

Luckily I was able to get  everything off of it and replace it with the WD Red.

After that scare though I decided to put together a NAS with a RAID5 using 4 1TB WD Blues.

After about 1 month the first Blue drive died, the NAS warned me of a failed drive, and sure enough HDTune found bad sectors.

I RMA'd the drive, replaced it, and rebuilt the array.

A month later another Blue drive dies, bad sectors again!

Worse part, while I was waiting on the RMA, a second Blue died!

This one wouldn't even be recognized by anything I plugged it into.

The whole array gone, Awesome.

Ok, so I RMA'd both drives, rebuilt the array once again, and began re-ripping my DVDs.

This time though I also bought a WD 3TB My Book USB3.0 External which I attached to the NAS to back up the RAID.

About 2 months ago, the WD My Book died, I RMA'd it.

Now 9 months ago I bought a Refurbished HP Laptop.

A month and a half after I bought it the hard drive died, no boot disk error, and the drive wasn't recognized in the BIOS.

I popped the bottom off, and you guessed it, WD Scorpio Blue hard drive.

HP replaced the drive under warranty with a new WD Scorpio Blue.

2 months after that, the drive died again, this time bad sectors.

Since the laptop was out of warranty HP wouldn't help me, so I put one of those Seagate SSHD drives in it, this is my first Seagate drive ever.

I've always been a WD man, and avoided Seagate because everyone always says Seagate is unreliable, and I remember seeing some study a few months back that proved this.

But honestly, at this point I was starting to get a little fed up with WD.

Finally, now this morning I booted my main PC, and the SMART warning came up about the RED drive!

Running HDTune on it now, but with SMART giving a warning I'm not hopeful for a clean scan.

I'm really starting to give up on WD!

The Seagate drive in my laptop has been awesome, and it actually did make the laptop noticeably more responsive compared to the WD Scorpio Blue drive the laptop came with.

So am I just running into a string of bad luck, or is WD drives really not as good as everyone says?


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## natr0n (Jun 7, 2014)

You need to keep your drives cool preferably active cooling or they die sometimes.

That's about all I can think of in your situation.


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## Disparia (Jun 7, 2014)

You are cursed. I've had 8 drives die out of ~1000 over the last 15 years (counting all brands, not just WD)


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## Steevo (Jun 7, 2014)

natr0n said:


> You need to keep your drives cool preferably active cooling or they die sometimes.


Not at all true. In fact can cause early drive death by cooling. Think of all the laptop drives that don't die from heat, and you are propagating another myth.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...=b17kSPAcCTG-lhqsTQbWBg&bvm=bv.68445247,d.cGU

My suggestion would be to test the drives one at a time, I have used all brands, not as much as I used to, but all fail. 

Backup.


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## TRWOV (Jun 7, 2014)

I concur with you OP. In my experience, WD Blue drives are fine for less demanding stuff but not for high I/O while the comparatively priced Seagate Barracudas can handle heavier loads.

Case in point, after 5 years the 750GB Barracuda on the CCTV at work "died" (I.E. the MBR was damaged). I couldn't look at it right at the moment so I bought a 320GB WD Blue in the meantime. It worked fine and all but you couldn't have it record  and replay at the same time for some reason, it's an 8 camera system with 2 D1 streams and 6 CIF streams. If we tried to replay even one stream while it was recording, the HDD would go at a snail pace with stuttering on the replay. On the other hand the old Barracuda would happily record and replay all 8 streams without a sweat.

Funny thing is I replaced said Blue with the same old 750GB Barracuda. After recovering the files I zeroed it and ran Seagate Tools on it. It was healthy according to Cristal Disk Mark (no flags tripped).

I tested the Blue too and it also was 100% healthy, it was later deployed on another office system an has worked fine.

This is just an example but I've encountered similar experiences over the years. Blues aren't mean for heavy I/O, it that is such the case get Blacks.

WTB, a Red for a home system is just throwing money away. Reds are meant to be used with RAID cards.

Blue for everyday tasks.
Blacks for high performance
Greens for low power (these work best as a media drive)
Reds for NAS/hardware RAID


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## AsRock (Jun 7, 2014)

Steevo said:


> Not at all true. In fact can cause early drive death by cooling. Think of all the laptop drives that don't die from heat, and you are propagating another myth.
> 
> http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf&ei=_j2TU6boD8SgogTd54KQDQ&usg=AFQjCNGdAu5mMDlzXvPg0CSZPH6HavPX3g&sig2=b17kSPAcCTG-lhqsTQbWBg&bvm=bv.68445247,d.cGU
> 
> ...



Pretty much BS as i know for a fact HDD's make many more errors the hotter they get and i have actually tried it and 1st thing that will fail is a raid array were they will fall out of the array.  They only take so much and the issue's will start for sure.

I would not be raiding blues anyways, in fact are they made to run that way ?, WD make specific drives for raid usage


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 7, 2014)

i avoid wd green at all cost. and wont buy any WD unless its black.
but all drives are prone to failure. every one will have a mfr they think dies more than others, and other people will believe the opposite.

Personally if i had 8 drives die. i would look at my psu. although i do see one of them atleast was in a laptop.

and the external was 99.9999% going to have a wd green inside it. seriously the greens suck big fat hairy ones and really should never be used under any circumstance imo.
(WD greens die and they do it fast. there is no reason to waste your money on one. even unknown hdd mfrs will serve you better than a wd green.)
p.s

hard disks should be cooled. any one who says they shouldn't is crazy or trolling.
i try to keep mine at ~25c
A drive that gets hot will start messing you around with smart errors and thats just the tip of the iceberg.


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## Trompochi (Jun 7, 2014)

I bought 2 640gb WD blues a bit over 3 years ago, both are used as OS drives and no problems at all, I've had other HDDs fail ( 2 Seagate 160gb, 1 WD 120gb, 4~5 120-160gb Maxtor) but were all IDE drives. These were my first sata WD HDDs and I can't complain at all.


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## bubbleawsome (Jun 7, 2014)

I guess I'm lucky then. I've never had a single drive fail. Have an old wd from ~2002 (?) that still worked the last time I spun it up in 2009. My current drive (OEM seagate) has been at ~50c for the past 5 years and still chugs along.


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 7, 2014)

bubbleawsome said:


> I guess I'm lucky then. I've never had a single drive fail. Have an old wd from ~2002 (?) that still worked the last time I spun it up in 2009. My current drive (OEM seagate) has been at ~50c for the past 5 years and still chugs along.


an average mechanical hdd temp threshold for operating is usually 5c-55c 
your mfr will tell you the temp thresholds. along with other info like humidity lvls and stuff like that.


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## Vario (Jun 7, 2014)

Only HDD I have killed was a 3.5" Hitachi Desk Star (aka Deathstar) by overheating it in a Rosewill USB2.0/ESATA enclosure about 5 years ago.  It got really hot.


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## Frick (Jun 7, 2014)

AsRock said:


> Pretty much BS as i know for a fact HDD's make many more errors the hotter they get and i have actually tried it and 1st thing that will fail is a raid array were they will fall out of the array.  They only take so much and the issue's will start for sure.
> 
> I would not be raiding blues anyways, in fact are they made to run that way ?, WD make specific drives for raid usage



You just dismissed data gathered from more than 100 000 disks.

@OP Is it the same model?

BTW, they all seem to do pretty fine atm.


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 7, 2014)

Frick said:


> You just dismissed data gathered from more than 100 000 disks.
> 
> @OP Is it the same model?
> 
> BTW, they all seem to do pretty fine atm.



not really if you read it, the least prone to failure drives were at 30-35c
if you look at failure rates for 3 years with avarage temps you see that the 40-45> have significantly higer failure rates than than any of the lower temps. and the lower temps (15-30) seem to have a slight failure chance within the 1st 3months or so (less than 10% failure rate).
After that they are significantly less likely to fail than higher temps..
lower temp averages were at less than 5% failure rate, for most of it with a peak of less than 10%, where the 40-45c> managed a 15% failure rate..
so i don't see how any one dismissed the data.. but i do see how some may have skimmed over it and not seen that the data does infact show that temps that are to low or to high increases the probability of failure..

So i would still cool my hard disks for about the 25c mark as a low point. but not above 40c as a high point. (making 30c constant a nice ball park to aim for)


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## Eric_Cartman (Jun 7, 2014)

Shambles1980 said:


> i avoid wd green at all cost. and wont buy any WD unless its black.
> but all drives are prone to failure. every one will have a mfr they think dies more than others, and other people will believe the opposite.
> 
> Personally if i had 8 drives die. i would look at my psu. although i do see one of them atleast was in a laptop.
> ...



Ironically, the WD Green was the drive that lasted the longest for me.

It was like 3 years old.


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## FordGT90Concept (Jun 7, 2014)

Shambles1980 said:


> i avoid wd green at all cost. and wont buy any WD unless its black.


This.  The rest stink of the cheap.  Look for drives that the manufacturer claim has a 1+ million hour mean time between failures.  Those are drives that are built to run for 10+ years.  Any less than that and they are practically admitting it's a piece of crap.


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## adulaamin (Jun 7, 2014)

I'm guessing you just unlucky. I've had hdds from Seagate, WD, and Hitachi fail on me. The worst experience I've had though was with WD Caviar Blacks. I had 3 1tb hdds all fail within a year. I was able to RMA all 3 but after another 6 months, 1 of them died again. I sold the two and RMAed the other and then sold it again. I bought an SSD and a 1tb Caviar Green for storage after. You could go ahead and try Seagate. No harm in trying since they've worked great for you.


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 7, 2014)

i like seagate, but i have had plenty of those fail too..
the best drive i have had "mechanical" is from some one called exelstore tech. cant even remember where i bought it from. but its been solid for years now ~5 years of constant use.
wd greens i have had all died on me. segate external drive sata 1tb works fine. but i did rip that out of its enclosure to use it internaly. (it was cheaper than the exact same drive without a enclosure for some reason, pretty sure pc world put the wrong price on it)

maxtor used to be good solid drive but with a rediculous spin down time of like 15 seconds. they were bought out by seagate though so its kind of segate budget stuff now and probably best to avoid.

Western digital also seem to sell rma'd hard disks to companys who rebrand them re-furbish them and then sell them as new.
so if you see a "NEW" hard disk for sale by a unknown mfr. have a good look at it, check the speeds and so on and you can usually see that almost all of them are western digital green drives. "you can tell by how they look and that the speeds and power usage means they are wd green"


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## TRWOV (Jun 7, 2014)

Another thing is that you're using the drives in ways they weren't intended (Blue for RAID, Red for home use). WD has more granularity on their product line (Caviar, Blue, Black, Red, Green, Purple, Xe, Re, Se, Velociraptor, etc., etc.) so you must check what do you want the HDD for.

Seagate drives seem to perform well enough in almost every task.


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## R00kie (Jun 7, 2014)

Ive had WD drives fail on me before but that was waaaay back in 2005, and it wasnt a new one either, in fact it was probably like 6 years old back then already. It was a 20 GB WD Caviar. Other than that, I have another one running in my pc right now, its basically the fastest hard drive i ever had, and it wasnt even new when i first got it. Thats the WD Caviar Blue. The Hitachi one was very hot, so it was acting up, its spin up times are hella long, but it still is going strong as I finally found a solution on how to cool it. One of the best old school drives that I had was a Samsung Spinpoint, that bastard was the best back in the day, but Seagate bought Samsung's hard drive division, so it kinda feels that theyre continuing their legacy as being the best hard drives the money can buy.
End of rant


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## Disparia (Jun 7, 2014)

It can also be the time they were bought too. I once had a server that came with 6 Seagate ES drives which were just awful (inconsistent performance, mini-freezes, dropping from array) until a new firmware was release, then they ran silky smooth. I know that's not a dead drive story, but it could apply to perhaps a run of bad chips, solder, or something else ruining a run of drives.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 7, 2014)

Eric_Cartman said:


> In a little over a year I've had 8 Western Digital hard drive die on me!
> 
> It all started with the WD Green 1TB I was using as the OS drive in my main rig starting to die.
> 
> ...



Sounds like a recurring power problem to me. And not power in the NAS chassis, but your locations power mains. Have you had your power lines checked by your power company? It might be a good idea. Had a similar problem a few years ago after moving. At the old house, no issues, but at the new house power supplies, hard drives, a motherboard and a video card died. When the power company came out to test it, the lines were only at 101 volts instead of between 110 and 120 where they were suppose to be. Serious brown out condition. After that was fixed, everything worked fine.

Brown out conditions can be as bad a power surges! Highly suggest you test your main power with a volt meter or have the power company out to test it for you. If you are not getting at least 110[if in the USA/Canada], you have a problem at your location.

Western Digital is a high quality company and for that many failures, either you have the WORST luck in the world, or you have another problem killing the drives, even if slowly.


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## Eric_Cartman (Jun 7, 2014)

FordGT90Concept said:


> This.  The rest stink of the cheap.  Look for drives that the manufacturer claim has a 1+ million hour mean time between failures.  Those are drives that are built to run for 10+ years.  Any less than that and they are practically admitting it's a piece of crap.



But WD doesn't give MTBF numbers for any of their desktop drives, even the Black Editions don't list a MTBF.  

And the Red drive does have a MTBF of 1 Million hours and it is still dying.



TRWOV said:


> Another thing is that you're using the drives in ways they weren't intended (Blue for RAID, Red for home use). WD has more granularity on their product line (Caviar, Blue, Black, Red, Green, Purple, Xe, Re, Se, Velociraptor, etc., etc.) so you must check what do you want the HDD for.
> 
> Seagate drives seem to perform well enough in almost every task.



That doesn't explain bad sectors, totally dead drives, and SMART warnings.

From all the research I've done, using normal desktop drives in RAID just gives the possibility of false failed drives.

It won't actually cause the drives to fail.



lexluthermiester said:


> Sounds like a recurring power problem to me. And not power in the NAS chassis, but your locations power mains. Have you had your power lines checked by your power company? It might be a good idea. Had a similar problem a few years ago after moving. At the old house, no issues, but at the new house power supplies, hard drives, a motherboard and a video card died. When the power company came out to test it, the lines were only at 101 volts instead of between 110 and 120 where they were suppose to be. Serious brown out condition. After that was fixed, everything worked fine.
> 
> Brown out conditions can be as bad a power surges! Highly suggest you test your main power with a volt meter or have the power company out to test it for you. If you are not getting at least 110[if in the USA/Canada], you have a problem at your location.
> 
> Western Digital is a high quality company and for that many failures, either you have the WORST luck in the world, or you have another problem killing the drives, even if slowly.



My main PC and the NAS been connected to APC battery backups the entire time.

And power issues should never cause bad sectors.

From my understanding, bad sectors are from actual defects in the disk surface.

That isn't something a power issue would cause.


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## Deleted member 24505 (Jun 7, 2014)

I'm using a 2TB RE4 that is already a couple of years old, and has been fine, it does have a fan pointed at it though. I have also stopped it from going idle, it's a RE4 they are meant to be run all the time aren't they.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 7, 2014)

Eric_Cartman said:


> But WD doesn't give MTBF numbers for any of their desktop drives, even the Black Editions don't list a MTBF.
> 
> And the Red drive does have a MTBF of 1 Million hours and it is still dying.
> 
> ...



Brown-outs can cause a number of problems to hard drives including the development of bad sectors. How that works would take a while to explain. Have you checked your APC's voltage? And have you checked for frequency variants[power being delivered at 65hz or 45hz instead of 60]? Asking these questions because Western Digital drives don't just die like you described. Something has got to be causing it. In 23 years I've never seen more than one WD die just willy-nilly...


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## Steevo (Jun 8, 2014)

AsRock said:


> Pretty much BS as i know for a fact HDD's make many more errors the hotter they get and i have actually tried it and 1st thing that will fail is a raid array were they will fall out of the array.  They only take so much and the issue's will start for sure.
> 
> I would not be raiding blues anyways, in fact are they made to run that way ?, WD make specific drives for raid usage







Thanks, for not reading it, and for not understanding words, I know words, and they are hard, perhaps these words I am using are too hard too? So here is a picture.

What was ascertained (ascertained means logically reasoned from data presented) was that drives that showed a temperature increase in the same environment (it means where they are and have been, like their little server home) in the third year had a marked increase in failure compared to drives that did NOT (did NOT means it didn't (or Uh Uhh to some special kids)) show the same increase. We can then form an idea that something caused the temperature to rise, perhaps it was a failing bearing, which cooling will not help if its already dying, or pesky little mean guys who know when the warranty is up!!! Drink the Vodka, wear your foil hat and don't let them read your dirty thoughts!!!

This also shows cool running drives have a significantly higher chance of dying in the first three months than those running warmer, and the trend continues through year two. data is tough to read, and graphs (pictures n' stuff) is hard too, but you did good if you made it this far. If you want a cookie reply!!!!

I have a special place in my heart for little tykes like this, I love him SOOOOOO much.


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## AsRock (Jun 8, 2014)

Steevo said:


> View attachment 57172
> 
> Thanks, for not reading it, and for not understanding words, I know words, and they are hard, perhaps these words I am using are too hard too? So here is a picture.
> 
> ...



So?, that reinforces what i said as i did not say any thing about a the temps, how ever i bet average joe who goes dell,hp or who ever there HHD is typically over the 40c mark due to case design even more so with the summers America and some hot countrys have were 30c is room temp alown.

My WD's i had raided ( 6 ) which was why i got the OLD style TT Armor case kept my HDD's around 30-42c in the summer time and once i forgot to plug in the 3 front fans and the drives went crazy when the temps hit over 48c.

Then SSD's started to come to the market so jumped on that train which around 2 of them died which seems to be a mechanical issue were the other 4 are still today in use for backups.

HDD's change over the years along with quality so any chart of that kind can never be 100%.

Google lol, Yeah  don't google with the biggest spy machine around .


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## 95Viper (Jun 8, 2014)

I am not taking sides with one or the other.
Both studies are good reads.
However, both, are complete only in their own limits.

It seems to me... to be a "they said and they said" thing.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

The study Steevo is drawing the results from are a study from 2007:  Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population by Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre' Barroso
Google Inc.

And, this 2012 study differs slightly...

*Datacenter Scale Evaluation of the Impact of Temperature on Hard Disk Drive Failures  *
SRIRAM SANKAR, Microsoft Corporation 
MARK SHAW, Microsoft Corporation 
KUSHAGRA VAID, Microsoft Corporation 
SUDHANVA GURUMURTHI, University of Virginia 



Quote from above study:


> Figure 5 Failure rates at different hard disk drive temperatures
> 
> The result of our study is surprising since earlier studies [Pinheiro et al. 2007] establish that disk drive failures do not increase with increase in temperature in the field. Figure 5 shows the actual HDD temperature in increments of one degree and the corresponding AFR for our entire population. We see clearly that with increase in HDD temperature, the AFR rate increases. There are some data points at the end of the spectrum that have smaller number of samples and hence a higher skew. For the major part of the distribution (shown by PDF columns), we see that AFR steadily increases as HDD temperature increases.



Edit:
@OP:  Either, you are very un-lucky or I am very lucky; because, in all my years of using hard drives, only drive failure I have had is a Maxtor 32MB (yes, Mega) HDD.
Other, than that, I had a couple relocate a sector of two, but, they kept on ticking.


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 8, 2014)

to me both studies say the same thing lol.
keep your hard disks at 30c 24/7 if you can

but to see afr drop as the temps go above 46c is strange to me.

To me heat and bearings or anything that spins is a bad combination as heat makes everything in a mechanical hard disk expand. and they have ridiculously low tolerance levels.
so it seems quite obvious if you only look at it from a physics standpoint that it is best to keep your drives at ambient temperatures to prevent expansion and contraction..
and the only way to do that is by cooling them..


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## repman244 (Jun 8, 2014)

Shambles1980 said:


> to me both studies say the same thing lol.
> keep your hard disks at 30c 24/7 if you can
> 
> but to see afr drop as the temps go above 46c is strange to me.
> ...



The expansion is taken into account, so that the best fit is obtained at certain operating temperature. You don't design it with dimensions/tolerance levels at 0°C because that's not it's working temperature.
Same goes with your car, engine wear is higher when cold (due to oil not being at working temperature and the parts haven't expanded due to heat).


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 8, 2014)

no oil in a hdd.. But yep there are operating temperatures, mostly mfrs state 5c-55c which again puts 30c in the sweet spot.


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## 95Viper (Jun 8, 2014)

Shambles1980 said:


> to me both studies say the same thing lol.



It may help, if you would actually read the papers before commenting on them.
They don't say the same thing.




Shambles1980 said:


> no oil in a hdd



Yes, there is oil, of some type, in those HDDs.


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 8, 2014)

95Viper said:


> It may help, if you would actually read the papers before commenting on them.
> They don't say the same thing.
> 
> 
> ...



they do say the same thing lol..
30c over all over all time periods has the average lowest failure rate..

the bearings may have a small amount of oil. so il have to concede to that point.


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## Fourstaff (Jun 8, 2014)

Eric_Cartman said:


> That isn't something a power issue would cause.



Having multiple drives dying would alert most to either batch failure or environmental concerns, and we can rule out batch failure given the circumstances. 

Your APC might be having troubles, cutting off power every so often that forces the HDD to spin down and up in very short intervals. Try disconnecting it and see how it goes? 

Additionally, everyone in this thread should cool down.


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## repman244 (Jun 8, 2014)

Fourstaff said:


> Additionally, everyone in this thread should cool down.



The failure rates will go up if they do that


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## Steevo (Jun 8, 2014)

Only if they go below 30C Right around 90F is perfect for drives. 

What people may be failing to realize here, if a datacenter had 1000 of the same drive of multiple batches, the drives which experienced a running temperature increase in their third year are more likely to die. Irregardless of what operating temperature they had prior, this single datapoint cannot be ignored. Extrapolating 


95Viper said:


> I am not taking sides with one or the other.
> Both studies are good reads.
> However, both, are complete only in their own limits.
> 
> ...




Page 12 directly shows conflicting data. According to page 6 disk 5 is the hottest. Later graphs show that until 40C is breached there is no significant change in AFR attributable to temperature. 

I have the following concerns with this study, only HP servers were used, no datapoints were given as to the number of drives sampled, no analysis of different HDD mfg's.


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## Aquinus (Jun 8, 2014)

I've personally have had to send back 2 of my 4 WD blacks, however they didn't both fail at the same time and I hadn't expanded my RAID to 4 disks from 3 as I was replacing a disk and adding a disk, but two drives failed within a week of each other, so it's not unrealistic that new drives will fail more often that drives that have already been working for a couple thousand hours. What you need to do is stress test the drive and run an extended SMART test on it before adding it to a RAID to try and make sure the drive is ready to roll before potentially putting your data in jeopardy. Also, this should be a learning experience that RAID is not a replacement for a backup.


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## 95Viper (Jun 8, 2014)

95Viper said:


> However, both, are complete only in their own limits.





Steevo said:


> I have the following concerns with this study, only HP servers were used, no datapoints were given as to the number of drives sampled, no analysis of different HDD mfg's.



Quote from the study I posted earlier:


> We perform our data measurements on a population measuring thousands of servers and ten thousands of hard disk drives.



I had concerns with both studies; that is why I added that statement above in my quote of me... Neither study takes into consideration other specifics that could affect the results.  There are a lot of other forces that should be addressed to get the complete picture.

I was not trying to instigate.  I was just introducing a varying viewpoint of an alternate study.

Now, my personal opinion from observation is that I have had more hardware problems/failures from heat... as do most any temperature sensitive electronics devices/parts do.


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## Airbrushkid (Jun 14, 2014)

I would never use a WD Green drive for the OS! In fact I would use a Green drive period. I only use WD Black drives and in all the years I have had only 1 WD Black drive screw up. And I have about 40 of them. I haven't bought a drive in about 6 years and they all run 24/7


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## LiveOrDie (Jun 14, 2014)

Don't buy WD Green drives they are shit had two die on me over 2 years also these drivers are used in my books so dont buy those ether.


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## erixx (Jun 14, 2014)

I never had a WD green fail in last years (I have three) but WD Red 3TB 3 in a row!
Failure rate rising?


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## LiveOrDie (Jun 14, 2014)

both of mine WD green seemed like a PCB failure seeing i could get all my data off the drive using a linux boot disk, but window wouldn't boot with the drives plugged in also the bios had problems getting pass the hdd check.


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## erixx (Jun 14, 2014)

Yeah, I removed a PCB and it had like "salt" on one of the chips. BIOS had problems too, a USB3 Dock took ages or did not recognize it.
I didn't know Linux would let you salvage data... Thanks.


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## LiveOrDie (Jun 14, 2014)

I used Parted Magic it took awhile to bring the drive files up but it did, Then i just copied them over to another drive this worked for both drives after getting them past the bios took more than a few try's.


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## RejZoR (Jun 14, 2014)

Follow my rule. Never buy those crappy "green" drives. They are green and rubbish like 90% of "Eco" stuff. I've bought the 2TB Caviar Black which is essentially a server grade drive without RAID capability and with less thorough testing. It currently has massive number of operational hours and its still working like a champ. It's ultra fast for a traditional HDD, reliable and not that loud. It's running basically 24/7 with few hours or day or two of pause through several months time. If i'll ever have to buy one again, it will be a Caviar Black again. Or, if there will ever be one, a 2TB Velociraptor. If SSD doesn't become drastically cheaper in the meanwhile. 2TB seems to be a sweet spot for me, so i'm just sticking with that.


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## Shambles1980 (Jun 14, 2014)

been thinking of a 1tb Velociraptor my self. a decent 6gb/s 260Gb ssd is about £150 a 1tb sata 6gb velociraptor is near enough the same price.
but looking at the performances "real world and synthetic" a ssd even limited by a 3gb/s sata connector is still much much MUCH faster than a velociraptor on a 6gb/s sata connector. and thats the fastest mechanical drive there is. 
its really dissapointing. 
If the prices on the 256Gb ssd's dropped to the £50-£80 mark (what i usually pay for 1tb mechanical) It would take a lot of struggeling for me to hand over the money but i think at that price point i probably would hand over the cash. 
anything less than 256gb just is not going to cut it for my main os drive though.


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## RejZoR (Jun 14, 2014)

Then it's also practicality. 1 big drive or 4 small drives that have to be connected to form a bigger single volume drive. I hate SSD's because small drives are relatively affordable, but big SSD drives are still ridiculously expensive.


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## Eric_Cartman (Jun 29, 2014)

Just had another Blue drive die, bad sectors once again.

Lots of talk about the avoiding the Green drives, I don't get it.

My Green drive lasted me the longest.

It was the Blue and the Red drives that failed the fastes.

And no it isn't a power issue.

Everything is run on APC battery backups, the NAS and my PC are on different battery backup units as well.


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## Solaris17 (Jun 29, 2014)

Eric_Cartman said:


> In a little over a year I've had 8 Western Digital hard drive die on me!
> 
> It all started with the WD Green 1TB I was using as the OS drive in my main rig starting to die. (This happened to my friend)
> 
> ...



Personally I think this is a series of unfortunate events. but to be honest I don't think that any manufacturer is better than another. I personally like seagates and samsungs. but at the end of the day it really doesn't matter to me. test it when it comes in if its legit I put it to use. If it fails i replace it under warranty or not. I came to the conclusion we will never again have 10GB IDE quantum fireballs that run for 70 years. As technology becomes more advanced failure rates go up in most cases I find this true and unfortunately I think hard drives are one of these items.


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## Jetster (Jun 29, 2014)

I agree with Solaris. I've never had an issue like this but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I think most manufactures nowadays have the same failure rate which is low. The rumor that WD Green drives are bad is just that a rumor. 6 years ago this may have been true but not now


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## Fourstaff (Jun 29, 2014)

Eric_Cartman said:


> Lots of talk about the avoiding the Green drives, I don't get it.
> 
> My Green drive lasted me the longest.



Earlier Greens had a bad habit of spinning up and down more often than they should (to save that extra watt of power). This resulted in early deaths of many a drive, and they (Greens/Eco/things like that) developed a very bad reputation. Perfectly fine nowadays (in fact IIRC they are the same as Red with different firmware).


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## Mussels (Jun 29, 2014)

find the DOS utility WDIDLE3


lets you adjust the drives internal power-down timers.

Short version: its set super aggressively on many of their drives (7 seconds on WD greens!) so they power on and off, on and off, on and off... and simply kill themselves. tends to be worst in linux uses, such as in a NAS.

i had a lot of nightmares with WD drives suiciding on me til i discovered that - changing the timer from 7s to 120s even boosted the drives performance in benchmarks (tested on greens and blacks, all drives 1TB or smaller), the power saving was just too aggressive.


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## Aquinus (Jun 29, 2014)

Eric_Cartman said:


> Just had another Blue drive die, bad sectors once again.
> 
> Lots of talk about the avoiding the Green drives, I don't get it.
> 
> ...



Not sure what to tell you, man. Drive fail and being one of the few components with moving parts so it's not unreasonable for the HDDs to have higher than normal failure rates versus other components. I think you just got some duds unless you're machine is shutting down and spinning up drives constantly. I have to agree with @Solaris17 and @Fourstaff on this one. I should reiterate that I have 4 WD blacks and I've had I think 2 or 3 failures but the replacements have been rock solid. If you got say, some RE4 drives I'm willing to bet their QA would be a bit better because of the "enterprise" label. I've yet to see an RE4 fail at work, most solid drive WD has to offer performance and reliability wise imho but you pay for it.


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## Deleted member 24505 (Jun 30, 2014)

Aquinus said:


> Not sure what to tell you, man. Drive fail and being one of the few components with moving parts so it's not unreasonable for the HDDs to have higher than normal failure rates versus other components. I think you just got some duds unless you're machine is shutting down and spinning up drives constantly. I have to agree with @Solaris17 and @Fourstaff on this one. I should reiterate that I have 4 WD blacks and I've had I think 2 or 3 failures but the replacements have been rock solid. If you got say, some RE4 drives I'm willing to bet their QA would be a bit better because of the "enterprise" label. I've yet to see an RE4 fail at work, most solid drive WD has to offer performance and reliability wise imho but you pay for it.



I'm using a RE4 2tb, good fast drive, and only cost me £60


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## Aquinus (Jun 30, 2014)

I completely forgot to add that nothing replaces stress testing a drive before adding it to your RAID. You shouldn't assume a drive is good. Be confident before adding it to a RAID or even relying on it.


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## xrM (Jun 30, 2014)

Aquinus said:


> I completely forgot to add that nothing replaces stress testing a drive before adding it to your RAID. You shouldn't assume a drive is good. Be confident before adding it to a RAID or even relying on it.


What software do you use for stress testing a new drive?


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## Aquinus (Jun 30, 2014)

xrM said:


> What software do you use for stress testing a new drive?



dd


```
sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sd? bs=64M
```
Replace the ? with your linux drive letter.


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## Vario (Jun 30, 2014)

Steevo said:


> View attachment 57172
> 
> Thanks, for not reading it, and for not understanding words, I know words, and they are hard, perhaps these words I am using are too hard too? So here is a picture.
> 
> ...



Sadly in my Cosmos 1000 with its terrible HDD airflow, my drives still just can't get over 32*C...  Hope they don't die from the cold.


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## erixx (Jun 30, 2014)

"Sadly in my Cosmos 1000 with its terrible HDD airflow, my drives still just can't get over 32*C... Hope they don't die from the cold."

Remove all the cage boxes and mount the HDDs as if they were ODDs, and put 3 x 14 cm fans behind the front intakes...


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## Vario (Jun 30, 2014)

erixx said:


> "Sadly in my Cosmos 1000 with its terrible HDD airflow, my drives still just can't get over 32*C... Hope they don't die from the cold."
> 
> Remove all the cage boxes and mount the HDDs as if they were ODDs, and put 3 x 14 cm fans behind the front intakes...


So horizontal hdds inside the hdd area or put the hdds in the 5.25?


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## erixx (Jul 1, 2014)

I have a Cosmos S and I have the whole front area evenly stuffed with the HDDs (6, plus 1 DVD-ROM on top), horizontally and mounted with those 5,25 adapters. And 3 fans behind the slot mosquito covers. The front fan that blows towards my video card does not have any HDD in the way acting as obstacle.


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## Nordic (Jul 1, 2014)

While I was on watercooling, my WD black had no airflow while literally being velcroed to the side of my radiator and it stayed at ~30c during load. I don't get how you guys have high temperatures.


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## Fx (Jul 1, 2014)

I have only used WD drives going back 10 years. The only problems that I have had with them is when I wandered into the green territory. After 2 drives failing at the same time, I switched back to Black/RE and havent had a problem since. I typically RMA a drive every 4-5 years. So I still have 1TB, 2TB and 4TBs drives all still in use.

By the way, FreeNAS is awesome for repurposing old drives into 4-8TB vdevs.


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## grenadeh (May 20, 2015)

I know I'm necroing but...

Anyone who tells you Seagate is unreliable is a lying, ignorant tool. I have never ever had a seagate drive die in my entire life. Literally every WD i've ever owned has failed. I lost a 2tb last July, and a few minutes ago, another 2 TB WD green died on me. It had literally all my important files on it. Tax docs, employment docs, past 5 years of paystubs and W2s, insurance stuff, all my art I work on, my entire 3D runtime library, most of my movies, TV, ALL my music, and pron. Yea, you'd think after losing 2 drives in 11 months I'd learn, n ot to mention the 10 WD drives I've had fail on me in the decade beforehand....but this is the last straw.

It didn't ever show any signs of failure. I run HD monitoring tools at all times. SMART checks were always fine, drive always reported perfect health. I shut down the machine because it was running at about 54 celsius, and when I booted back up it was gone -CRC error in disk management. Won't work jacked directly into a sata, won't work through a BlacX dock, it won't even power on. It's toast.


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## Toothless (May 20, 2015)

grenadeh said:


> I know I'm necroing but...
> 
> Anyone who tells you Seagate is unreliable is a lying, ignorant tool. I have never ever had a seagate drive die in my entire life. Literally every WD i've ever owned has failed. I lost a 2tb last July, and a few minutes ago, another 2 TB WD green died on me. It had literally all my important files on it. Tax docs, employment docs, past 5 years of paystubs and W2s, insurance stuff, all my art I work on, my entire 3D runtime library, most of my movies, TV, ALL my music, and pron. Yea, you'd think after losing 2 drives in 11 months I'd learn, n ot to mention the 10 WD drives I've had fail on me in the decade beforehand....but this is the last straw.
> 
> It didn't ever show any signs of failure. I run HD monitoring tools at all times. SMART checks were always fine, drive always reported perfect health. I shut down the machine because it was running at about 54 celsius, and when I booted back up it was gone -CRC error in disk management. Won't work jacked directly into a sata, won't work through a BlacX dock, it won't even power on. It's toast.


It's a personal thing to pick brands. Insulting people because they don't like Seagate makes you the one in the wrong.


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## 95Viper (May 20, 2015)

grenadeh said:


> I know I'm necroing but...
> 
> Anyone who tells you Seagate is unreliable is a lying, ignorant tool. I have never ever had a seagate drive die in my entire life. Literally every WD i've ever owned has failed. I lost a 2tb last July, and a few minutes ago, another 2 TB WD green died on me. It had literally all my important files on it. Tax docs, employment docs, past 5 years of paystubs and W2s, insurance stuff, all my art I work on, my entire 3D runtime library, most of my movies, TV, ALL my music, and pron. Yea, you'd think after losing 2 drives in 11 months I'd learn, n ot to mention the 10 WD drives I've had fail on me in the decade beforehand....but this is the last straw.
> 
> It didn't ever show any signs of failure. I run HD monitoring tools at all times. SMART checks were always fine, drive always reported perfect health. I shut down the machine because it was running at about 54 celsius, and when I booted back up it was gone -CRC error in disk management. Won't work jacked directly into a sata, won't work through a BlacX dock, it won't even power on. It's toast.




All brands are reliable...  Until they aren't.   That is why it is a good idea to have a backup of the data you really need/want to keep. 

Any ways,  welcome to TPU...  Hope you stay around and make some good posts.


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## Fx (May 20, 2015)

grenadeh said:


> Anyone who tells you Seagate is unreliable is a lying, ignorant tool.



Negative. These guys go through drives like sweet tea and this is their experience...

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Your argument has represented that you have owned quite a few WD drives and that they have failed. You haven't given us an idea of how many Seagates you have owned or what period of time so you can't simply say that your Seagates have never failed. For all we know, that could mean that your Seagates are fairly new and have never let you down, but all 10 of your >4 year-old WD drives failed.

Since  you resorted so fast to throwing mud, I'll dip my toes into that sludge a bit too. For one, I can tell that you are lacking knowledge when it comes to best practices with storage. For example, you are complaining that you lost data so that tells me that you didn't do proper backups. That in turn leads me to speculate that you didn't utilize proper cooling for your WDs. In addition to that, chances are you didn't check the SMART attributes, and if you did, you didn't understand them well enough to know to replace your drives. You could also have simply ignored errors.

Who knows at this point, but one this is for sure is that you don't know how to best administer hard drives. That is a shame because you lose your data and then go running your mouth about things which you do not proficiently understand.


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## Static~Charge (May 20, 2015)

grenadeh said:


> Anyone who tells you Seagate is unreliable is a lying, ignorant tool.



Anyone who tells you that brand Blah-blah-blah is infallible is a lying, ignorant tool.

FTFY.

Stop by my office sometime and I'll show you a dozen two-year-old Seagate hard drives drives that have failed in the past 4 months.


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## Frick (May 20, 2015)

Fx said:


> Negative. These guys go through drives like sweet tea and this is their experience...
> 
> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/



To be fair they don't represent how your avarage consumer uses the drive. Seagate definitely has some bad eggs there that are mucking up the scores though.


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## kn00tcn (May 20, 2015)

grenadeh said:


> I know I'm necroing but...
> 
> Anyone who tells you Seagate is unreliable is a lying, ignorant tool. I have never ever had a seagate drive die in my entire life. Literally every WD i've ever owned has failed. I lost a 2tb last July, and a few minutes ago, another 2 TB WD green died on me. It had literally all my important files on it. Tax docs, employment docs, past 5 years of paystubs and W2s, insurance stuff, all my art I work on, my entire 3D runtime library, most of my movies, TV, ALL my music, and pron. Yea, you'd think after losing 2 drives in 11 months I'd learn, n ot to mention the 10 WD drives I've had fail on me in the decade beforehand....but this is the last straw.
> 
> It didn't ever show any signs of failure. I run HD monitoring tools at all times. SMART checks were always fine, drive always reported perfect health. I shut down the machine because it was running at about 54 celsius, and when I booted back up it was gone -CRC error in disk management. Won't work jacked directly into a sata, won't work through a BlacX dock, it won't even power on. It's toast.


which MODELS? do you ship to home or pick up in store? (before anyone says all drives get shipped, i say the little residential truck is a much more bumpy ride than the batches that go to stores)


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## Jetster (May 20, 2015)

Nowadays all the drive manufactures failure rates are about the same. All are fairly low compared to 10 years ago. Considering the fragile nature of hard drives I would imagine most of the failures are due to owner error.


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## Fx (May 20, 2015)

Frick said:


> To be fair they don't represent how your avarage consumer uses the drive. Seagate definitely has some bad eggs there that are mucking up the scores though.



I'd agree, but they do tend to utilize their drives much more; they also properly manage them.

Some of the big differences would be that most consumers don't properly monitor spinup/down or temperature. So while a major data storage provider would tend to demand much more usage of the HDDs, they also properly configure their drives to control the load cycle that doesn't add extra wear. They also maintain properly cooled environments to promote drive longevity. Then there is vibration and quality of power supplies...

I would venture to say that most people don't give a single thought to cooling their HDDs and slap in 7200 RPM drives and expect them to last 5+ years without ever thinking about data loss or backups.


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