EconTech

I get asked the “which hard drive” question a lot, for whatever reason (and no, this is not in response to my own recent drive failure, but the same question asked of me by several people recently). Let me begin by saying that I am no expert on hard drives. They are extremely complicated, sensitive devices. Secondly, although I have probably gone through more than a dozen HDDs personally in my time and dealt with a few hundred more in a couple of jobs I have held. These sample sizes are all way out of date and rather small for the type of analysis required to make a choice. Besides, I have never kept good data on the drives I run. Data on consumer drives DOES exist, but the gate keepers won’t release it for public perusal (this includes Google). So, unless you are speaking to someone who works at an organization that goes through thousands of drives and keeps detailed data on operating conditions, failure rates, etc. and have done analysis on that data, they are unlikely to know what they are talking about either.

Anecdotes:

With that said, these are my personal experiences, with some notes about what has changed since the experiences.

Every Hitachi drive (n=3) I have ever owned has, within a year, shown serious signs of degradation. One completely died (no BIOS recognition, no spin up, nothing) within 6 months, with Hitachi refusing to replace the drive despite the fact that I kept the receipt and box (as well as the proof of purchase). This doesn’t change the fact that the Hitachi’s have been (with the exception of the 1.8″ 4200 rpm POS) the fastest drives, of their generation, that I have worked with that were below 10K rpms.

The Maxtors that I have used have been reasonably speedy, but noisy and failure prone. However, I have not purchased one in several years due to their shoddy warranty policy (1 year). However, they have since been bought by Seagate. I have no idea what changes, if any, this has brought to their drive construction, engineering, or warranty policies.

I have never had a Samsung (n=4) drive die on me. I’ve replaced them because they got ridiculously small on me (or rather, my data needs outgrew them). However, I still have two that are operational with no signs of problems after 6 or 7 years in service. I believe Samsung still has a reasonsable (3-5 year) warranty policy.

I’ve usually purchased Seagate drives (n=7 or so). They have very quiet versions and have always stuck to their guns in providing a solid warranty (5 years). I’ve received one bad drive that was obviously bad very soon after plugging it in. Replacement was a snap (though I forget if it was through Seagate or the retailer). Not the slowest drives I’ve ever used, but not the fastest. I find the slight price increase worth it for the solid warranty policy. YMMV.

I generally don’t recommend Western Digital. The issue is not that they are bad drives (I can recall only one failure), but they have different warranties depending on how you purchase the drive. A retail purchase (at least, the last time I checked) netted you a 1 year warranty while an OEM purchase left you with 3 years. For most people, 3 years is long enough, so this is not a bad route. But you need to beware how you are purchasing this drive. People have enough problems making sure they get the right interface (IDE/ATA vs SATA) much less having to tell them about OEM vs. retail packaging.

Warranties:

Every drive manufacturer has gone through a period of producing terrible models (7200.9, deathstars, etc.). These are hardly an indictment of an entire manufacturer. The facilities change so quickly that the old data becomes useless rather quickly. Even good, long term data is no guarantee that you will have a solid idea of how a new batch will come out from that manufacturer. Further, you, personally (unless you are purchasing A LOT of drives) could care less about batch statistics. You care about individual drive reliability and performance. And there is NO data on that. You are choosing a random point from a distribution. Of course, if that distribution is way off, you will probably want to avoid it. But even the good ones have tails in “unacceptable” regions. This is the reason I base the purchasing decision solely upon the warranty provided. The better the warranty and replacement policy, the more reliable my drive will be (in the next 2-5 years).

ATA v SATA:

If you are installing an internal drive, get what you need. If you have options, go SATA. If going external, go SATA. Also, purchase your drive and case separately. This is not only cheaper but is likely to net you a better warranty. I might as well mention that my friends and I probably keep Vantec in business. Everyone who gets one loves them and continues to recommend them to their friends and co-workers. I would prefer a screwless model, as I use my external case to recover and/or transport other people’s data more often than to transport my own. Also, get a bit of electrical tape for that blue LED, it is blinding. It is not that SATA is faster (the drives rotation and head speed are the limiting factors, not the interface), it is just a ton easier to deal with compared to the old ribbon cables and molex power. Plus, it is relatively future proof while ATA is going the way of ISA PCI.

USB vs Firewire vs ESATA (if external):

I would love to say ESATA to this. It is much faster and has way less protocol overhead. However, it has two serious drawbacks: 1) It does not provide power 2) it is FAR from ubiquitous. Firewire is dead. Deal with it. Thus, you must go USB. Yes, it has serious protocol overhead and chews through CPU cycles, but it is everywhere.

Capacity:

Well, of course, you have options. The naive calculation is to purchase where the marginal cost/benefit ratio is minimized, that is the lowest price per gigabyte at the margin. So, say you are looking at a 200GB for $80, a 300GB for $90, and a 400GB for $110. The marginal cost of the first extra 100GB is $10, but for the second is $20. So go for the 300. This changes too quickly to be more specific. Why naive? Well, it doesn’t account for how much space you need and electricity costs. If someone has a good formula let me know. (I see an applet with zip code, desired space, and specs (5.4 vs 7.2 vs 10K rpm ; interface; warranty) that fetches electricity and drive prices and pumps out an ordered list based on the marginal price.)

Remember, drive manufacturers are sane. They represent giga- by its ACTUAL base 10 interpretation 10**9 instead of an insane base 2 interpretation that your software will use 2**30, which would more accurately be called a gibibyte. Blame the early computer scientists for being too lazy to properly convert units when your drive shows up as being substantially smaller than you expect.

Size:

Well, this is largely situation dependent. New internal for your desktop, 3.5″. New internal for your laptop, 2.5″ (god forbid you bought a laptop with a 1.8″). An external you want to carry around with you, probably 2.5″, since it is substantially lighter and won’t require a separate power cord. An external for staying in one place for long periods, probably a 3.5″, if you have space on your power strip.

Maintenance:

Try not to smoke around your drive (or computer). Try not to let it get REALLY hot (I’m talking above 55C or so), otherwise temperature does not appear to be a huge issue in long term reliability.  Don’t move it while it is turned on. Don’t drop it, especially if it is turned on. Run SMART diagnostics software. It appears to only be about 50% accurate in predictions, but it has a very small false positive rate. If the alarms on this thing start going off, time to update those backups and look up which SMART issues signify real drive failure is imminent.

BACKUP YOUR DATA. Let me repeat that:

MAKE BACKUPS OF YOUR DATA.

Yes, you might be able to find someone with magic fingers to get your data off your dead drive. But this is likely expensive and is highly unreliable. If you would lose sleep and/or cry and/or have suicidal thoughts if someone stole your hard drive, make AT LEAST weekly backups. See the section on warranties if you are confused as to why this might be important

Alright, I think that is everything. Hopefully that means I will never, ever have to say something about this again.