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

[Mussels]

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.

 

[Aquinus]

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.

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.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

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

 

[Aquinus]

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.

 

[xrM]

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?

 

[Aquinus]

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.

 

[Vario]

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.

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.

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.

 

[erixx]

"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...

 

[Vario]

"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?

 

[erixx]

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.

 

[Nordic]

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.

 

[Fx]

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.

 

[grenadeh]

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.

 

[Toothless]

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.

 

[95Viper]

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.

 

[Fx]

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.

 

[Static~Charge]

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.

 

[Frick]

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.

 

[kn00tcn]

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)

 

[Jetster]

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.

 

[Fx]

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.