Western Digital = Crappy Harddisk

[Chrislineham]

I have two WD Caviar SE's, five years and still going strong...
As previously mentioned, different manufacturers have their ups and downs, alternatively it could be luck of the draw.
I wouldn't draw the line with WD just because of that, but then again, I'm not saying other brands aren't any good...

[R3k]

Funny, if you go read the reviews on Newegg or such, it gives the impression that you have more chance of your drive failing than not...def gets you paranoid.

All those years back when IBM had its drives dying- around the time they sold or changed the name to Hitachi, that was the most amount of failed hard drives Ive come across, the only time it made sense to avoid a brand. Since then, been running Hitachi's / Western Digital, and a bunch of Samsung's, some Seagate's, etc.

Very little failure, and I really dont think one brand has much of a margin more failures than the other. Generally I've found that if its going to die hardcore, it usually happens in the 1st few hours of use.

Yep, redundancy is a must, multiple backups, something offsite as well if possible. Archives shifted to fresh drives every 5 years of so.

Funnily, I bought an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD (my 3rd) that just died on me after 3 months of use.. Twas the OSX system disk. No corruption, just dead, no computer could see it. So one dead out of 3 I own. Still, I will be buying more in the future…I'm optimistic i guess

[Nu-tra]

I don't know but I think the max I would go on a hd would be 500 gigs. The larger drives seem to fail more often.

[valis]

Originally Posted by Nu-tra

I don't know but I think the max I would go on a hd would be 500 gigs. The larger drives seem to fail more often.

This is only the case when the large capacity is within the first few months of the product cycle imo.


As for the OP's issue, WD Greens are not meant for high duty cycles. For one thing they'll sleep so fast if you hit stop in your daw, fiddle for a sec, then hit start again the HD's often will be in the midst of their parking process...which is why I avoid Greens and mainstream externals for serious work. I have 3 Lacie Ruggeds here that get a fair amount of heavy duty work (video as well as audio) and a few OWC models, a handful of Glyph/Lacie/Promise etc larger externals and I do have a Seagate & WD external that I use for external backup that match what the OP was using. The WD enclosure also houses a green drive but since I only dump backups to it and store files it's lasted me...4 years so far? And the newer seagate is similar, the disk audibly spins down within 10 seconds at idle, I can hear it spin up. I only use it for archival and barring any serious bumps it should last a while.

Oh lastly, quite often the enclosure dies long before the drive does. I have several machines here in ancillary roles that have 'failed' external drives now pulling internal duty. Since they're still low power drives they're obviously not running high duty cycle workloads, but they've lasted years past the enclosure in almost every case.

[Synth Buddha]

Western Digital make the worst hard drives on the planet. I will NEVER buy anything from them again. I was naive enough to use one of their drives as a back up drive, and lost a lot of photos that were quite dear to me as a result, along with some music and samples that I'd made (not a biggie - most of it sucked anyway, but the photos...). WD has a horrible reputation, and I can now back that up and say that it's VERY well deserved.

[Jolly Jimmy]

Originally Posted by Synth Buddha

Western Digital make the worst hard drives on the planet. I will NEVER buy anything from them again. I was naive enough to use one of their drives as a back up drive, and lost a lot of photos that were quite dear to me as a result, along with some music and samples that I'd made (not a biggie - most of it sucked anyway, but the photos...). WD has a horrible reputation, and I can now back that up and say that it's VERY well deserved.

It's just the luck of the draw I'm afraid. I've had all sorts of drives fail, as chance has it I have three 5 + year old WDs that are fine. Their reputation is just as good/bad as the other major manufacturers.

You say you used one as a "back up drive" but you lost the data. That's not a backup.

Expect all drives to fail.

[divine source]

you know that WD bought Hitachi last year... since then they sold the 3.5" devision (form Hitachi) to toshiba...
same with Samsung, Seagate bought them (i think last year). so basically there are only 3 HDD manufacturers...

that said, i've always used Hitachi's as my main HDD and recently i moved to Samsung 830 SSD, for storage and backups im using (and used in the past) several HDs from all the companies, the only HDD that died for me the last 7 years was Seagate... since then, im avoiding this company.
except that, i never had problems.

[mirrorboy]

Originally Posted by R3k

Funny, if you go read the reviews on Newegg or such, it gives the impression that you have more chance of your drive failing than not...def gets you paranoid.

All those years back when IBM had its drives dying- around the time they sold or changed the name to Hitachi, that was the most amount of failed hard drives Ive come across, the only time it made sense to avoid a brand. Since then, been running Hitachi's / Western Digital, and a bunch of Samsung's, some Seagate's, etc.

Very little failure, and I really dont think one brand has much of a margin more failures than the other. Generally I've found that if its going to die hardcore, it usually happens in the 1st few hours of use.

Yep, redundancy is a must, multiple backups, something offsite as well if possible. Archives shifted to fresh drives every 5 years of so.

Funnily, I bought an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD (my 3rd) that just died on me after 3 months of use.. Twas the OSX system disk. No corruption, just dead, no computer could see it. So one dead out of 3 I own. Still, I will be buying more in the future…I'm optimistic i guess

Great post!!

Total bummer re the OWC drive.

From my experience, you got a rare lemon...wouldn't let that steer me away from them.

They're great!

Cheers,

Scott

[R3k]

Originally Posted by mirrorboy

Great post!!

Total bummer re the OWC drive.

From my experience, you got a rare lemon...wouldn't let that steer me away from them.

They're great!

Cheers,

Scott

Hey. Yep I agree completely

[RyanC]

They will have drives that fail. I've had maxtor's and wd's fail and I have a hitachi 2tb that seems to have a bad sector. I use a usb naked drive dock (several) so I can make loads of backups and clones all the time.

Heat is also a major issue, a enterprise setup will always be high fans in a AC controlled room, if you can manage something like this in your studio it will drastically reduce all your computer problems including failed drives.

[dcrigger]

Three thoughts that come to mind...

1. In every case, hard drives failing is a matter of "when", not "if'.

2. Speaking of internal hard drive manufacturers refers to one thing - where speaking of external drive makers always refers to at least two very different things (and thus points of failure) - the drive and the case.

3. And most importantly that old axiom - "Any digital data stored in less than three physically different places is data you don't care if you ever see again."

[rksguit]

If there is one thing about W7 I hate is that,making a Clone of my Laptop HDD[Seagate ST9750420AS 750GB] is a complete no go with Windows Backup.

I have a WD My Book Essential USB3 1TB External,and its pre loaded Software completely messed with my Laptops operation,so badly,that I was forced to wipe it off both laptop disk,AND the External,and reformatted the External,and just do Copy/Cut Paste from the laptop to the External now,instead.

I was hoping to make a bootable clone,but no,that never worked,So i back up to USB 32GB,DVD,CDR,and the WD external.

On my Desktop,I just use the second Seagate 1TB ST31000524AS,as a standard W7 backup,and that works fine so far.
RK

[jessestephens]

I used to do computer repair about a decade ago at an independent computer repair store, and WD drives were the most reliable consumer grade drives that we saw (the worst at the time was Maxtor). This might not be the case now. However, I use WD hard drives for all of my spinning disk hard drives. I haven't had any problems.

Any thing you use will have the potential for failure. The only way to get around that is to have a good backup plan.

If you're using a desktop, a nice way to have a redundant backup in place is to use dual drives in a RAID mirror. Most desktop motherboards have a RAID array controller built into them. Both drives have to fail simultaneously for you to lose the data (which is a possibility if the computer is destroyed via lightning or flooding or such).

If you were to use a RAID mirror and some type of remote cloud backup (dropbox style thing). You would be prettymuch covered from losing your work through hardware failure.

The important thing is to make sure the system is automated and hassle free. If there is a hassle involved, most people will eventually stop backing up the data.

[alphaproject]

Certain sizes IMO fail more. The bigger the drive perhaps, the more fail....not 100% on that. I've had a 40 gig crap out on me after about 2 years. Click of death. It was a 40 gig WD drive. I've also had a brand new Seagate die in like 1 month. I don't recall if we replaced it with a new one or not because it wasn't mine.

I have a 160 gig drive that's been working forever....It indeed is a Black Drive before they called them Black drives. 160 giggers seem like solid drives but too small now. I also have a 80 gig drive that runs like freaking new, can't believe it and it's SOOO old. Its still PATA, LOL.

In fact alot of the SATA drives run worse. Maybe it's a case that they don't make em like they used to. I had a drive fail recently and it was a SATA bought in 2008 and the one I bought way before it still works.

I don't ever think you can tell if you are buying a good drive or not until it passes that 1-2 year grace period and still runs fast.

[emearg_s]

[QUOTE=yosefTux;8105958]Here's a good reason to buy the Enterprise drives, and to make sure you buy from authorized retailers/distributors. Of course, you want to avoid gray market if warranty is important to you.

Most hard Drives will fail with in 3 years if there on 24/7 unless there Enterprise drives thats why there made (and cost more) and meant for begin on all the time

Even Raid is not prefect If your Lucky enough to make money the best tip i heard was to buy usb drive transfer dock (and stick brand new dive in for every Customer $60 250gig) Nothing if charging 1000$ day for you mega studio And make live copy of the day stuff as well as keep on your network drives At the end of the day you got independent back up of the artist (stick label on it and put in the safe till the albums done

[mirrorboy]

Originally Posted by alphaproject

I don't ever think you can tell if you are buying a good drive or not until it passes that 1-2 year grace period and still runs fast.

+1

Scott

[sharke]

Originally Posted by fatcatmusic

Yer but the thing is, I bought a My Studio Book external harddisk. They were not exactly cheaper so I did not expect them to put a Green inside.

These days Western Digital make no guarantees about the drives they put inside their MyBooks. Could be black, could be green, could be 5400, could be 7200. There is no way of telling without opening it up and voiding your warranty. I take that to mean "do not use these drives for audio production."

FFIW I just had a Seagate GoFlex crap out on me after only a year and a half. I was recording audio onto it. It's the same deal, they will not tell you the spin speed and make no guarantees. I think WD and Seagate's externals are more suited for backup purposes to be honest.

I've just put a new WD 2TB black caviar inside my tower, to replace the GoFlex, and it's slow formatting right now. Fingers crossed!

[thenoodle]

A few thoughts, adding to what others have said...

I agree that all drive brands are great and all drives will fail. No one brand gives me less or more grief. I think I still actually have a couple of 40gb Maxtors running somewhere.

I have about 20 wd drives from 80gb to 1.5tb that range from two years back to 7 years old. Black...blue...green. Are all okay. I had a 320gb fail last year after five or so years of service. Maybe a couple of years before that, one of the others failed. No biggie. Freezing a dead drive overnight has ALWAYS worked for me for needed moments of retrieving data one last time. It won't work one time "someday", but hasn't happened yet in a million years of using drives.

I have four or five Seagates and those are old and okay too.

I have ZERO drives inside the computer farm or in any type of enclosure. Which means zero heat. Well.. mostly. They are stacked outside the computers and are cooled by large, silent fans. Dunno if that has added to their lifespan, but they're sure easy to get to.

As others have mentioned, lots of redundancy is a safe routine. For me, I have redundancy on LOTS of drives.. which means no one drive of mine actually runs very often... I switch them around, reformat and re-store files from time to time etc. That may be why some of mine live a bit longer.

I mostly buy from Newegg and never pay attention to negative comments on the reviews.

The max I currently buy is 1.5tb. But I run a lot of those. I have ZERO info on the failure rate of the higher 2tb, 3tb drives out there, but for some reason, I just never buy the highest capacity models. Just a gut feeling to not use those.

[cinealta]

Originally Posted by thenoodle

...I have ZERO info on the failure rate of the higher 2tb, 3tb drives out there, but for some reason, I just never buy the highest capacity models. Just a gut feeling to not use those.

AFAIK, the larger capacity drives are not a single platter (eg 2-3 TB). They may have a higher incidence of failure because they have several 500GB platters in a drive?

[DaveE]

I remember my first day interning- end of the night, ran a backup. Did the same thing during lunch breaks and every single night after that. Now I do the same on my home system. Extra copy on an alternate drive for every important folder. Screenshots of the session folders are in my Dropbox so I can rebuild a new backup if there's a failure.

I've got drives from Seagate, Western Digital, and Maxtor. 4 of them are over 6 years old, two are over 10. I had one Seagate fail after 3 years for some unknown reason, but it started clicking ahead of time and of course I already had many backups. Plan for them all to fail and you'll never get hosed.