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Thread ID: 135528	2013-11-13 18:23:00	Analysis: Failure rates of hard drives	Strommer (42)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
1359770	2013-11-17 15:08:00	primary limitation of hdd's not being immortal is tehy are not meant to last, they are built to fail so you buy more. The primary long term way to do that is the grease on the bearing or the bearing itself. Usually the grease. The bearing eventually dries out. You'd often see that in old drives, they would have trouble starting. but sometimes with a jolt or a bit of luck, they'd start and be just fine, until you switched them off. Segate are ****. I have 2 Dead 3.5 terabyte and above, new, one was DOA, one was 19 hours. I'd put the failure rate for the new seagates above 50% within a month, I can't understand why they are not banned. If you need immortal stuff, then SSD and flash can go well, but you might be best trying to build something yourself. Build a new version of the Gigabyte GC-RAMDISK iRAM PCI Card and people would beat a path to your door. There is also a lot of military hardware you'll never get access to easily which is built to last. Everything about that kind of construction is different to what you're used to. Glass L.E.D.s No plastic or oil based stuff at all, resistors are by wattage and laser trimmed to value just before being added to the pcb. Ratheon made a lot of it that way. But building your own hardware is rewarding and you learn a lot. Ratting 2nd hand will get you stuff you'd never afford otherwise. 'planned obsolesence' is the reason drives fail, and worth looking it up and finding out about it.	TropoScatter (17158)
1359771	2013-11-17 17:56:00	hdd's are built to fail so you buy more . The primary long term way to do that is the grease on the bearing or the bearing itself . Usually the grease . Segate are **** . I have 2 Dead 3 . 5 terabyte and above, new, one was DOA, one was 19 hours . I'd put the failure rate for the new seagates above 50% within a month, I can't understand why they are not banned . If you need immortal stuff, then SSD . You're mad . They are not built to fail - you think the manufacturer wants loads of warranty issues - and I think you might find, regardless of your own personal luck, Seagate does not have a 50% failure rate . And SSD has it's own set of problems .	pctek (84)
1359772	2013-11-17 20:00:00	They arent built to fail but they certainly aint built to last . No company will sell something that lasts forever unless its neccessary . Becuase the company want you to buy their stuff but also dont want warranty issues te warrantys are usually set at a reasonable time but before the peak of the drives failure rate . Just like many things the failure rate of specific brand drives rend to follow the good ole statistical norm of a bell shaped curve . Or atleast thats what ive seen from independant tests . Also do you reckon a SSD would last longer in storage when . Not in use compared to a mechanical drive?	Slankydudl (16687)
1359773	2013-11-17 20:08:00	...they are built to fail so you buy more. I'd put the failure rate for the new seagates above 50% within a month, I can't understand why they are not banned. There is also a lot of military hardware you'll never get access to easily which is built to last. Idiot. PC hardware isnt built to fail. The market is too competitive & they would be out of business in a year. Noticed how hard is is to buy some of the more unreliable oddball HD brands....no one wanted to sell them or buy them. They often had to stop making drives. Seagates do not have a 50% fail rate. Just because your 2 failed , that does not mean a 50% failure rate worldwide. Years ago I was having issues with my home HD's fails . I moved the 12" subwoofer well away from the PC & the issue went away. You could buy Mil spec hardware. It will NOT be the latest greatest & fastest. It WILL cost you 5x-10x more. So go on , spend $600+ on a 250Gb mil speced hard drive. You also may need to buy a few thousand of them. You really want max reliability, dont buy the reasonably priced consumer HD's that normal people are happy with. Buy server(enterprise) SAS etc HD's , pay 3x the $ . You want max reliability, dont buy the biggest capacity Drives, only just released to the market. Or just be reasonable about the whole thing, accept that nothing is 100% reliable & ultra cheap pricing does have some consequences. edit: "aint built to last" get real. Explain the hundreds of thousands of old HD's still ticking over. Explain the HD's still working after 10 years . You want your HD to last 50 years. Can be done. Every 3 years spend $2000+ to have it opened , inspected , bearings oiled/replaced , heads inspected/replaced, platters inspected/replaced etc etc.	1101 (13337)
1359774	2013-11-17 20:19:00	...... Or atleast thats what ive seen from independant tests. Can we please have the link to these 'independent tests' Google use more HD's than anyone. You want real world info, go have a look at what they published about HD reliablity.	1101 (13337)
1359775	2013-11-17 21:07:00	Your misconstruing what i said.... The failure time of all hard drives and for that matter any electronics is defined by a bell shaped curve. This means there are few that fail immediatly or last for rediculiously long amounts of time and the majority lie in the middle. Manufactorers bear this in mind when they set the warranty standard so that they dont cover the majority of expected failures. If this wasnt the case then why are companys paying statiticians to work out things like this. Hence its not only independent studys that find this (they do... but its not really an area of interest or anything amazing). Hence if the warranty time is 5 years then the peak failure rate of the drive is likely to be somewhere a little bit higher. All i was saying is that companys do tests and from these they make approximations about the reliability of the drive... they gear their warranty so that they dont have to cover as many people whilst still making it seem like a good deal and in some cases is. But ofcourse they arent going to release this data so other people try to make it themselves whilst doing their own tests of drive failure rate mearly because thats what you do in statistics.... find stats.	Slankydudl (16687)
1359776	2013-11-17 21:21:00	Re: built to fail. No one wants to deal with repairing items or sending a customer a new item (and to give up that potential profit margin) within that 1 or 5yr warranty period. Or paying the customer courtesy return post or engaging with the overseas supplier. Or employing people to develop systems for RMA processes and administrators to deal with this increased in customer contacts - as you say built to fail and then pay again for the more transports and personnel to fulfil those requests and the technicians and the QA teams, coordinators, team leaders, managers, and the extra unit accountants or lump more work to centralised corporate accountants (and to employ more personnels again) if the existing lot cannot deal with the load. All these remedy costs usually outweigh the more efficient mass production costs. All the geek forums and geek magazines et al .. will slam them, would they still be in business? Let's say if Ford or Holden deliberately motors that break in 3yrs and the majority needs a engine rebuild or a new one. To fix cellphones at the request of particular customer(s) is going to have to be way more than throwing them thru a Chinese assembly line.	Nomad (952)
1359777	2013-11-17 21:33:00	Hence if the warranty time is 5 years then the peak failure rate of the drive is likely to be somewhere a little bit higher. Pure speculation & utter nonsense So what about ALL the electronic devices with a 1 year warranty ?? Hard drives & PC's with 1 year warranty?? In fact, if warranty were at all related to MTBF or av life, then there would be no need for NZ's CGA legislation. My speculation: warranty period is the least amount of time the manufacturer believes they can get away with. ie marketing driven. Some few years back, one HD manufacturer (segate?? cant remember) dropped warranty to 1 year only. That didnt last long. Did hd's suddenely become less reliable forcing a drop to 1 year (No) . I speculate they later put it back to 3 or 5 as the market demanded it.	1101 (13337)
1359778	2013-11-17 21:50:00	To be fair, there are some local companies who do knowingly import & sell cheap crap with appalling failure rates. eg 30% failure rate on the el-cheapo PSU's 1 company sold, they know how bad they were (I know a guy who worked there) Another company we used to buy locally assembled PC's from , over a 3 year period had 90% failure rate on their PC's power supplies. They just kept using this brand of PSU,we & others stopped buying from them , they are now out of business .	1101 (13337)
1359779	2013-11-18 05:24:00	your kidding right? I am not saying they make the hard drive fail. They are simply seeing when the failure occures most frequently then basing their warranty off of that or atleast making sure its equal to that of previous generation and that they are not losing too much money through sending out free product. What reason would they have not to do this. And to reitterate for the 3rd time now I am NOT saying they design them to break at a certain date. I am saying they design them not to last for rediculious amounts of time (because we dont even have that technology) and that they simply hire people whos job it is to test and extrapolate how much money they expect to make from a product, which includes things like projected sales, manufactoring and ofcourse projected losses on things like RMA. They then take this information into account and see what their best bet is and begin manufactoring and marketing a new product in a way that satisfys the cutomer and they make money from.	Slankydudl (16687)
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