Anything wrong with High-capacity drives?

**Perestroika** · May 2, 2009

Pros: Good capacity....
Cons: High capacity...
Other Thoughts: High capacity drives come at the cost of volatility. When seagate released the 1.5 TB drive, I was skeptical. As a physicist, I know that capacity is limited by technology, and while miniaturization is moving quite quickly, there is still a physical capacity, regardless. with magnetic storage this dense, one slight error by the head will corrupt the file, and repeated events - all of your files.
While the storage, and other perks from reviews already posted, are pretty good, I don't see these drives having a long lifetime, and most definitely wouldn't use them in high volume and mission critical environments. I'll stick with my 1TB drives until these have been on the market for a good amount of time. Call me a skeptic, but I'd like to think that I didn't spend an obscene amount of time in school for nothing.

While this is a single comment on the 2 TB drive page (Newegg), a long time before I read what the guy said I was thinking about the same thing.

First, the Samsung 1 TB drive (HD103UJ) received a high number of complaints from people stating those drives were faulty, so many critics that I decided to purchase the 750 GB model (also the 1 TB drive was expensive that time, so two enough reasons for me). Some people stated the drives worked for months before they eventually died... which is real bad when it's something unpredictable. In that case, we can't say for sure how those things are build and if they will last the same time as the old and low-capacity models. And regarding the 750 GB models, there are now more complaints than the 1 TB one.

Well, I haven't seen any HDD dying yet (not even from old age), and mine are old IDE models (Samsung 160 GB and Seagate 300 GB, the first with 7 years and the second with 3 years old). So I can't say anything about younger and high-capacity drives (currently I own 2 Samsung 750 GB drives, but they are 2 months old). And my system is used 24h/day.

And then, as you might probably know, the massive failure from Seagate 1.5 TB drives (and probably a plenty more from the same company, I believe they are known as 7200.11).

Google did a research about this:

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-...lure-experience

But what I am really concerned about is not why or how the drives might die. It's the expectations we can have with these kinds of drives. Are they really so much complex, build to have a long lifetime, or the companies are investing in something that is not meant to have that capacity?

HDDs are old technology, perhaps a single drive was not supposed to have so much storage capacity, without those side effects, or at least a shorter (or probably risky?) lifetime.

http://www.podnutz.com/podnutz/podnutz028

http://www.podnutz.com/podnutz/podnutz029

http://www.techpodcasts.com/computers/7858...ica-0324-hour-1

http://www.techpodcasts.com/computers/7858...ica-0324-hour-2

Interesting comments quoted from the podcast 29 (you can hear in the 30 minutes/half of the MP3 file) regarding bigger drives:

Q: Is there any particular brand that you think is better than any other on hard drives?
A: I would say that all of the drives are, at least today, not great drives. They are all made, and they are all going to die, a fairly quick death, pretty much the drives that are 500 GB and larger, are dying on a daily-basis for everybody. Terabyte drives, things like that. My preference would be to buy Seagate, only because of the warranty.
So, in my opinion, at least (because the drive is going to die) I can get a replacement based on the warranty, that's my hope.
Q: But why are the bigger drives failing?
A: The thing that has happened since 2006 is that everybody is going to a perpendicular format. And what that means is before, pretty much before 2006 every drive was written in what is called longitudinal format.
And that meant the north and south poles that you used to seem on a platter when you actually think about "how my data is written, it's laying down on a platter, north and south poles, and the head reads in that direction".
Well, since 2006 perpendicular basically means it's no longer laying down on the drive, now we are going to store it up and down. It's the difference between, you know, let's instead of burying [?????] in the ground, laying down, let's bury standing up right, because they will save a lot more space.
That's exactly what's happening with the bits and data stored on the platters now. So, at least from a stand point of sensitivity, the heads are much more sensitive to the amount of space and density that they got to read the content, and everybody is saying "let's get the biggest drive we can possibly get now", so, you know, one of the consequences of that is going to be: heat, and less time to test things.
I've know people who bought 500 GB drives, bought 3 or 4 book drives, or something like that, and within a week of each other they are dying.
And it's a fairly consistent inconstant thing now that one of things that you see in for recovery are these 500 GB drives both from Seagate, Western Digital, a few other companies, but, primarly Seagate and WD, the two I see most of.
Q: I see. So, there is no real brand loyalty, they are build not great, but if you are going to put your money on something, you might wanna put on Seagate because of the warranty?
A: That's my opinion, because they tipically they back the 5-year warranty before, I am pretty sure that's what it is now, still, but, tipically some other vendors, only either add 1-year or 3-years.
It also depends if either you are buying in the external case or not, or OEM drive, cause if you are buying a Lacie, the drives inside them are not made by them, but Maxtor, Seagate, or somebody, and tipically, they only give you a 1-year warranty, you'll have to read the box to be sure, but versus what the manufacturer might offer, so you might not get the 5-year warranty when it's inside the case.

My old drives:

Samsung 160 GB/IDE (probably purchased 7 years ago)

Seagate 300 GB/SATA (purchased in 2006)

And the new 750 GB ones from Samsung:

Scan errors are clean (0.0% damaged blocks) for all drives, except the 160 GB one.

There's also another factor to be considered - the way Newegg ships these drives (and all products in general). Many people complained about this, and is probably another very good reason why some HDDs have a very short lifetime, dying after only a few months or weeks.

My two 750 GB drives were purchased from eBay and sent from US to south america... I wonder if the post office threated them well...

Edited May 2, 2009 by Perestroika