spooled up my Drobo S this morning and after a little bit the 3rd position HD (1TB Cavier Black) indicator went RED. in addition i had already started a full back it up to a secondary source as i do weekly before it faulted this drive. it started its fault tolerance routine and i simply pulled out the failing drive popped in a replacement and went out for awhile (like 3 hours). came back with 5 GREEN lights lit and the backup still going and finally completed 30 minutes later. put the failed drive into an external slot i use as a optional drive position and performed the WD diagnostics which it failed "read test element" of the test. pulled up the WD website and sent for an RMA. will have a new drive by wednesday or thursday as it is still under warranty.
no drama, no excitement. it just worked as designed. and i had full access while all this fun was occuring.
no i do what they call advanced replacement.
i give them my credit card number and they send the new drive out the next business day. that most likely being tuesday of next week due to the holiday. they must get the original drive back in 30 days or you get charged full price. that also gives me the proper packaging to return it in too. and yes i do pay to send it back. its $6.50 UPS ground US
so far the 2 previous returns yielded 2 new drives. in addition one was a size upgrade too.
i have refurbs from seagate that are going on 3 years old now too in use.
i've had a couple WD drives die on me, have heard least complaints about hitachis. i'm using 4 WD's and 1 old maxtor that is sounding a little clicky...
remember as of today, i believe,seagate has dropped their 3 and 5 year warranties down to 1 year now. waiting for WD to do it too. all in all drives are complex and with complexity comes tragedy on occasion
WD is keeping the 5 year warranties ONLY for their higher end drives, the Caviar Black drives and Enterprise RE raid rated drives.
It's the consumer drives, green, blue etc where they've decreased the warranty time.
Overall I believe there is an increased failure rate for sata drives over the old "tried and true" ide drives. That fits with our recent experience, also. It's the sata drives that fail more frequently and the failures seem to be related to reads indicating maybe problems with the electronics of their buffers circuits.
Well it's got to be something they're doing to make a better bottom line, for sure.
With all drive prices thru the roof now and projections for normal pricing to return varying from 7 months to 1.5 years, hope we all don't need to replace any drives soon.
To some of the other posters: Generalizing about one brand over another re failure is pointless. What is possible-- but only with copious data (not your anecdotal reports of running 20 or 150 drives in your small business)-- to do is determine when a specific line (design fault) or production run (manufacturing fault) are particularly failure prone (or the opposite). That's beyond the scope of what most of us here can do.
As for the suggestion that SATA drives fail at higher rates than "tried and true" IDE (aka ATA/PATA) drives because of some inherent mechanical difference-- I call BS. The drives are mechanically the same; it's the connector that's different, and connector/cable failure is not HDD failure. Now, arguing that newer drives (SATA) have higher failure rates than older drives (IDE)-- possible. But it'd have to do with something other than the SATA/PATA dichotomy (like larger/more platters, or tighter tolerance requirements, or simply manufacturers deciding that reliability is less important now than it was in the past). But I'd want randomized sampling and good data before I'll believe this.
I think he's saying that the everything in the HDA (the metal "tub" that houses the platters, etc.) is pretty much the same as previous generations and the big change has been on the electronics on the card on the bottom of the drive. I worked in the hard drive industry for 7+ years, and I generally agree with that. The rise of DVR's and similar devices plus things like NAS boxes in the home have almost certainly improved reliability - those things run 24x7x365 and carry a lot of down-stream cost if they fail (e.g. the labor/service cost for Time Warner to replace the drive matters more to them than the drive itself).
That kind of reliability isn't free or easy, especially when we're packing so much stuff on every platter (areal density is putting 1TB drives in laptops in a 9.5mm package!). I'd say there is probably somewhat more risk to certain types of data issues just due to the precision needed to access data and the kinds of loads people are putting on these things, and some higher impact to manufacturing tolerance issues as well as things like contaminants inside the sealed HDA. But on a percentage basis, it is almost certainly true that drives are more reliable today than ever.
It is also true that different vendors have different quality rates, and the differences even between product lines from one vendor can be significant. My data is old, but generally I trust most stuff from Hitachi, the non-consumer end of the Seagate line and pretty much anything from Samsung (who is completing the sale of their hard drive division as we speak). My distrust of WD (among others) comes from data so old that it is silly, but I won't buy outside of the three brands I mentioned, and I generally lean toward their higher lines meant for entry servers and workstations.
The change in warranty probably has as much to do with the flooding and protecting the bottom line while revenue is scarce as anything - one of those things executives have debated for years but nobody wanted to be the first one to do it. I doubt we'll ever see them go back on the consumer lines.
thats all relative to time and location. there's been a steady decline in drive prices as the technology matured. this happens with all tech. i hardly touched IDE and did SCSI. that was pricey in a personal arena.
