The Good, the Bad and the downright Ugly
Hard drives 3.5” SATA
Good |
Hitachi drives |
Bad |
Downgraded 28 Feb 2010; Samsung drives. In recent weeks we have noticed an unacceptable amount of our own systems and float drives manufactured by Samsung failing or developing bad sectors. We have also seen an increase in the level of these drives arriving for data recovery. Currently we are no longer able to recommend Samsung hard drives and we will no longer be purchasing them for our own use. |
Ugly |
Upgraded 25 Feb 2010 from Downright Ugly; Seagate hard drives. A few years ago, Retrodata used to recommend Seagate drives as being the most reliable in the industry – because they were. However, since then, they have gone from best to one of the worst. Many people are aware of the debacle regarding the failures of Seagate Momentus drives supplied in Apple's Macbooks and Mac Minis. Some will be aware of the more recent firmware anomaly affecting their 7200.11 range which has led to rumours of multiple class-actions against Seagate. In their favour, Seagate reacted fairly swiftly to this - but not before many people had been forced to pay extortionate sums of money for data recovery services. |
Downright Ugly |
Downgraded 25 Feb 2010 from "Ugly"; Western Digital drives. These drives have a high failure rate, and are often used in external drives and NAS devices. Not only do they appear to be extremely susceptible to overheating, but they can be difficult (and sometimes impossible) to recover. |
Hard drives 2.5” SATA
Good |
Most 2.5" drives are fairly reliable. For exceptions, see below. |
Bad |
Hitachi drives Only those with model number beginning HTS541xxx. All other Hitachi models are currently fine. |
Ugly |
Seagate. Only those with firmware 3.CAE or 7.01 and supplied by Apple. |
External drives: 3.5” (disregarding the actual hard drive used)
Good |
Almost anything that has at least an 80mm cooling fan blowing air directly over the hard drive/s. |
Bad |
Any drive the manufacturer of which mentions “passive cooling.” It doesn’t work, and your craving for silence may result in data loss. |
Ugly |
External drives from the likes of G-Tech, Western Digital MyBook, Maxtor and LaCie, and especially those that stripe the drives in a Raid 0 (or JBOD) format to give maximum capacity, without any redundancy. We’ve seen products from Maxtor and LaCie with drives stacked almost touching each other, with absolutely no active cooling whatsoever. Here's an example of such a setup.
In the picture below is a LaCie housing. Note that, despite the appearance of a vent for a 40mm fan (which would be woefully inadequate for cooling the drives) there is no fan installed. It may be that the fan failed and the user removed it. However, we recommend an 80mm fan as being the minimum size required for the cooling of two drives. In both these devices, overheating was the cause of failure
|
External portable drives: 2.5” (disregarding the actual hard drive used)
Because laptop drives do not generate as much heat as a desktop-size hard drive, there is more flexibility with the choice of external enclosure. However, be aware that 7200rpm drives will produce significantly more heat than slower-spinning drives
NAS (Network Attached Storage)
NAS can be both an economical and practical storage solution for homes and smaller businesses. Some NAS products provide a powerful collection of networking tools and services, despite the absence of a more expensive central ‘server’ on the network.
Unfortunately, many of these storage units contain inherently unreliable hard drives, susceptible to failure from overheating, and the units themselves are fitted with either no, or totally inadequate, cooling systems.
We will be adding to this page on a regular basis. If you have had issues with an external hard drive that you would like us to address, please email us details and – if applicable – photographs.
We believe that for too long, manufacturers have been getting away with shipping poor quality storage products, and we would like to see standards and quality improve.
Please use the ONLINE ENQUIRY FORM to submit any enquiries, or telephone us on 01590 673 808 (International + 441590 673 808). We will generally respond to your online enquiry within minutes.