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3.5" IDE/PATA Drive reliability by manufacturer

Chuck(G)

Chuck(G)

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When a hard drive suddenly goes bad, I take it and add it to a pile that's headed for eventual destruction. Today, after a sudden failure, I added another drive to the pile--now 3--one was a "white box" 160GB one (eventually I'll figure out who really made it) and a 60GB WD and a 320GB WD. No Seagates. Does this tell us something? Does anyone out there have really good experiences with WD IDE hard drives?
 
Never had a single WD drive failing so far, and most of my still-active drives are from WD. Most failed drives I had were Quantum or Conner. After that, Seagate, then IBM.

However, if you pile up broken drives, it's natural that the WD pile will grow faster, simply because WD sold more drives than all other makers together.
 
With that logic, since we have so many WD in our piles, WD has both the largest working pile and largest non-working pile, because they made so many. That logic matches my piles here. That doesn't explain how reliable they are.

But I want to sound the alarm on WD. I am seeing some from 2000-2004 that I had in storage just dying off, like quantum drives. What I want to understand if certain series WD drives are more susceptible. Like the blue or red. But I think they are cheaping out their manufacturing process.

Dave Jones had his WD NAS fail just after the warranty period ended. https://www.bitchute.com/video/NnBPLuw-LnY/
 
The WD800xB series of UATA drives is the most reliable I've ever seen.

You really can't just make blanket judgements about manufacturers. All of the major brands went through "dark periods" of making turds.

I went through a period of a few years where every bad drive I encountered was a Seagate...
 
I have a pair of Samsung SV4002H SpinPoints (circa 2002) and one of them somehow shorted out and took the motherboard with it. The other one remains parked. Only HD that I ever had that fried itself. I've got some older WD's that are still going but are seldom used these days.
 
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I wonder if the manufacture date and location could provide any additional insight. I recall there being a big issue around floods in Thailand. I don't recall if the problem drives were the ones made there at the time, or the ones made elsewhere, in a hurry, to meet the demand from the Thai factories being shutdown.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Just tossing some thoughts out there. I do recall that Seagate had a bad streak with 3TB drives.
Click to expand...

I've got a 6TB Seagate on my big gamer which I used for archiving, and it's been going okay for over a year. I noticed that Newegg has the 4TB version on sale for about $65, which the same amount that paid for the 6TB. Fast drive and you can actually run some games off of it.
 
My Synology NAS has WD Red 3TB drives. One failed many years ago and was replaced under warranty. I have several spares just in case another goes.
 
First generation SATA drives date back to 2003. Motherboard chipsets started removing support for PATA in 2007. In 2013 the last PATA drive manufacturer (WD) called it quits on PATA.

So we're talking about drives that are 8 to 25 years old now. I think the longest warranty on any of them was 5 years. Aging causes things like outgassing of chemicals and physical degradation of the materials so any PATA drive working now is moving into "bonus" territory.

And as was pointed out above, every manufacturer has bad runs. If you look at data from the last 10 years from BackBlaze, Seagate is generally the worst for reliability when looking at large populations of drives. IBM was famous for the Deathstar. It goes around.
 
It's a bit of a problem finding good PATA-to-SATA adapters. I've got a container full of ones that don't work and one or two that do work--on certain systems. Can anyone recommend a good one that will work on any PATA-only-equipped motherboard?
 
I've got a couple of the Vantechs and it's really a tossup as to it working with a specific motherboard. I've had decent luck with the Star-Tech adapters--but only on certain motherboards. The ST does have the advantage that it fits on the rear of a SATA drive and provides both power and signal connections.
 
Chuck(G) said:
When a hard drive suddenly goes bad, I take it and add it to a pile that's headed for eventual destruction. Today, after a sudden failure, I added another drive to the pile--now 3--one was a "white box" 160GB one (eventually I'll figure out who really made it) and a 60GB WD and a 320GB WD. No Seagates. Does this tell us something? Does anyone out there have really good experiences with WD IDE hard drives?
Click to expand...

My experience is similar. WD drives around that time period were garbage. I had a new 120GB WD fail after less than a year. It was still under warranty, so they sent me a 160GB drive as a replacement. It failed within one month. After that I only bought Seagate. Seagates back then all had a 5 year warranty.
 
mbbrutman said:
IBM was famous for the Deathstar.
Click to expand...

I was going to specifically mention those. The 20-80GB models made around 2000-2002 are particularly notorious. If we were lumping laptop drives into this I'd also say IBM/Hitachi drives from that era also seemed to have a high probability of self-destructing relatively young.

Maybe it's just the luck of the draw, but on the flip side I remember Maxtor had a "they suck" kind of reputation in the late 90's through the mid-'aughts, but I don't think I've ever had one die on me.
 
Even the drives that sucked back in the day probably had a 5% defect rate else the maker would be bankrupt. Anything that has survived until now is probably decent.

I have stacks of IDE drives from 80MB to 250GB (desktop and laptop) as spares and they are tested when I get them. Most of what I get that are bad tend to be old under 500MB 50 pin SCSI drives and I just take the boards off those and junk the rest.

The only new IDE drives I purchase back in the day that were junk were 5.25" Quantum drives and a 3.x GB Quantum 3.5". Everything else seems to last forever. Some drive did start having bad sectors after using them in machines for 20 years (60-80GB I think they were forget the brand).
 
Just out of curiosity, I recently checked all 4 of my Quantum Bigfoot drives. All but one worked okay--and I had labeled that one as bad at least a decade and a half ago. I think the largest of the set is only 12GB; the smallest about 4GB. I have some <500MB 3.5" Conner drives--I suspect that most have gone to the bit bucket in the sky.
 
the3dfxdude said:
With that logic, since we have so many WD in our piles, WD has both the largest working pile and largest non-working pile, because they made so many. That logic matches my piles here. That doesn't explain how reliable they are.
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Exactly. Still, for me they fail least. I even run a NAS with 4x 500 GB WD Black drives, which is 10+ years old. Not a single issue ever.
 
I hope people are saving running IDE drives before they start getting harder to find (even if a billion were made).
 
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