Our experience of hard drives received for recovery enables us to judge their reliability. This is our current list at 12 August 2010.
Desktop 3.5″ SATA Hard Drives
| Good | Hitachi |
| Neutral |
Seagate hard drives. Upgraded from Downright Ugly on 01 July 2010. We are seeing fewer numbers of Seagate hard drives arriving for recovery. Many people are aware of the debacle regarding the failures of Seagate Momentus drives supplied in Apple’s Macbooks and Mac Minis. Seagate’s other recent issue regarded a firmware anomaly with their 7200.11 range of drives, leading to rumours of multiple class actions against the company. To be fair, Seagate acted reasonably quickly to rectify the issue – but not before many users had already paid for data recovery. |
| Questionable | Samsung hard drives. Downgraded from Status Pending on 01 July 2010. We are now seeing quantities of failed Samsung hard drives. The majority of failures are the HD501LJ models manufactured in 2008 and 2009. Refurbished Samsung drives are especially flakey and now comprise most of the failures we are seeing from our own stocks of drives. |
| Downright Ugly | Western Digital hard drives. Downgraded from Ugly on 25 Feb 2010. These drives appear to have a high failure rate, and we find them used regularly in RAID arrays and in NAS devices. Not only do they appear to be extremely susceptible to heat-related failure, but they are difficult and, in some cases impossible, to recover. |
Laptop 2.5″ SATA Hard Drives
| Good | There are no drives we are currently aware of that have particularly high failure rates, save for the older drives mentioned below. |
| Bad | Hitachi hard drives – but only those with model number beginning HTS541. Those supplied by Apple typically fail with severe media damage, rendering data recovery impossible. If you have one of these in your Macbook, we recommend immediate, proactive replacement. |
| Ugly | |
| Downright Ugly | Seagate Momentus hard drives supplied by Apple in their Macbooks and Mac Minis, and with firmware revisions 7.01 and 3.CAE. Many people are aware of the debacle regarding the failures of Seagate Momentus drives supplied in Apple’s Macbooks and Mac Minis. |
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.
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, some with absolutely no active cooling whatsoever, and others with a token 40mm fan that simply does not produce sufficient airflow for effective cooling. 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
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We will be adding to this page on a regular basis. If you have had issues with any storage device that you would like us to address, please email us details and – if possible – photographs of the offending item.
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.
