Vaughn's Summaries

Computer Summaries
Disk Drive Reliability

This web page summarizes hard disk drive reliability, for data backup, by hard drive manufacturer. Many factors affect computer hard drive data loss, including mechanical shock (dropping), temperature, and manufacturer quality control.

Here is a list of major hard disk drive manufacturers, gathered from internet data.

If someone is so dissatisfied with the reliability of a data backup hard disk drive, that they actually post their experience on the internet, we should probably listen to them. Use care when selecting your computer data backup options - nothing can be more costly than loss of valuable data.

Maxtor

Best Marketing
Worst Reliability
Wretched Support

IBM

Class action suit in 2002
Sold HD business to Hitachi

Western Digital WD

Many reports

Seagate

Some complaints

Hitachi

-

Fujitsu

Big problems in 2002

Quantum

High reliability

LaCie

High reliability

Iomega

GOTTA BE GOOD!

**This a special search. Because Lacie is also a girl's name, I appended the search with
-badword, in order to get a far more accurate number for HDs.

The Aubuchon Hypothesis:
The quality/ performance of a large company is inversely proportional to the number of "companyname sucks" pages appearing on the internet.
Type "companyname drives suck" into Google, WITH the quotes.
That's all there is to it.

I have personally visited many disk drive forums, and I can tell you, ESPECIALLY in the case of backup storage, this method is REMARKABLY accurate.


Avoid Maxtor like the plague. They have far more reliability complaints than any other backup drive company. If you are familiar with the bathtub curve of product failure behavior, you will note that Maxtor has a very high number of "infant mortalities".

I myself recently lost a 120G Maxtor backup drive. It was less than a year old. It was in a protected environment, with excellent external cooling. The first symptom was a general slowing-down of everything. It started out slowly at first, and then it became really slow. I thought I had a virus.

When I ran DiskWarrior, the problem became apparent. "Cannot rebuild directory." Then I ran Disk FirstAid, and it said the disk cannot be fixed, and I had to reformat. So I off-loaded my data (the data that was still available), and tried to reformat. No way. I was informed that the S.M.A.R.T. technology in the drive had detected that the drive was going bad. Too bad the S.M.A.R.T. technology is TOO STUPID to tell you BEFOREHAND, without the use of additional software.


I have owned IBM, LaCie, and Iomega drives over the past 10 years, and I have never had a problem with any one of them. Have I just been lucky? Or are these backup options superior?

Added: I am extremely pleased with my new Seagate drive - fast, quiet, reliable.

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