Previous discussion threads

• All About Harddisk Thread V3, Discussion for Good Harddisk (Jun 2010 - Jan 2012)
• All About Harddisk Thread V2, Discussion for Good Harddisk (Oct 2008 - Jun 2010)
• Discussion for Good Harddisk, Harddisk Discussion (Oct 2005 - Oct 2008)

Check HDD Warranty

• Hitachi
• Seagate & Samsung
• Western Digital

Utilities

• Benchmarking
  • CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1c
  • ATTO Disk Benchmark
• Information
  • Comparison of S.M.A.R.T tools (Wikipedia)
  • CrystalDiskInfo 5.0.4
  • SpeedFan
• Testing
  • Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows (by Western Digital) (Seagate compatible)
  • Drive Fitness Test (by Hitachi)
  • HDDScan 3.3
  • Seatools for Windows (by Seagate)

Informative Forumer Posts

• Information about Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test by dkk.
• Information about Seagate's Seatools for Windows and Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows by dkk.
• QUOTE(wildwestgoh @ Jan 17 2013, 07:56 AM)
  Western Digital laptop (2.5") drives' thickness chart.
  http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/mobile/ (Z-height)
  
  Seagate laptop (2.5") drives' thickness chart.
  (Click Specifications below the chart.)
  http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drive...op-hard-drives/ (Height)

  

Terminology

• PATA
  Maximum transfer speed: 16, 33, 66, 100, 133 MB/s
  
  
• SATA
  • SATA 1.5 Gbps aka SATA 1 aka SATA I
    Maximum transfer speed: 150 MB/s
  • SATA 3.0 Gbps aka SATA 2 aka SATA II
    Maximum transfer speed: 300 MB/s
  • SATA 6.0 Gbps aka SATA 3 aka SATA III
    Maximum transfer speed: 600 MB/s
• S.M.A.R.T.
  "S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures."

Capacity

• 4.0 TB = 3,725.29 GiB
• 3.0 TB = 2,793.96 GiB
• 2.0 TB = 1,862.65 GiB
• 1.5 TB = 1,396.98 GiB
• 1.0 TB = 931.32 GiB
• 750 GB = 698.49 GiB
• 640 GB = 596.05 GiB
• 500 GB = 465.66 GiB
• 320 GB = 298.02 GiB

Further Reading

• Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population
  "In this paper we present one such study by examining the population of hard drives under deployment within Google's computing infrastructure."

This post has been edited by everling: Jan 30 2013, 08:28 PM

News

2012-01-23

• QUOTE(Western Digital)
  The company also announced it has made significant additional progress to restore its manufacturing capacity following the recent flooding in Thailand. It has continued to ramp HDD production in Thailand and yesterday resumed slider production which had been suspended since October 10. The company now believes its manufacturing capacity will be back to pre-flood capabilities in the quarter ending September 2012.
  http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/re...15-7c4c5346606c
  

2012-03-06

• QUOTE
  Western Digital will be allowed to acquire Hitachi’s 2.5” and SSD businesses, but not the 3.5” business. Instead Western Digital will be selling that business to Toshiba – factories and all – along with granting licenses for the necessary patents, which would allow Toshiba to effectively continue in the 3.5” market from where Hitachi left off.  This would firmly establish Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba as the 3 major players in the hard drive business across all product segments.
  
  [...]
  
  Finally, it would appear that this is as far as the EU and FTC are willing to let the hard drive market contract, at least at this time. Their various rulings have made it clear that they will block any attempt at consolidating the market to two manufacturers, so the wave of acquisitions that started in 2009 should be at an end.
  Western Digital To Sell Hitachi's 3.5” Hard Drive Business To Toshiba, Complete Hitachi Buyout

This post has been edited by everling: Mar 7 2012, 11:55 AM

The prices have dropped since its peak, but still nowhere near what it used to be before the Thailand floods.

For example, from Viewnet price lists:

• Samsung 2TB HD204UI
  • 16-10-2011 : RM 249
  • 25-10-2011 : RM 289
  • 27-12-2011 : RM 449
  • 08-01-2012 : RM 399

No one has any real idea on when the prices will return to the pre-flood prices. Some says it will happen by mid-year, some says it won't happen until the end of the year.

It is very unlikely that you'll be able to keep your five year old HDD for much longer. On the bright side, today's 2.5" HDDs are much better performers and should have larger capacities for a similar price point, despite the Thailand floods.

---

Added on January 26, 2012, 6:14 pmThanks you two. I have added it to the news section, but sourced from WD itself. Hopefully WD's copy will stay around indefinitely.

This post has been edited by everling: Jan 26 2012, 06:14 PM

The warning is based on the SMART data, which may indicate a real problem. However empirical research has shown that the SMART data, as it is, are not good predictors for HDD failures. There is still a chance that your HDD may work fine for its expected lifespan, or it may fail in the next hour.

To get more information about your HDD, you could try using CrystalDiskInfo which details the SMART data. SpeedFan also details SMART data, and it also has an option to analyse your SMART data via a web-service. There are also other free tools that can analyse your SMART data and provide recommendations.

But even with these tools, it would still be difficult to predict when it will fail. I would play it safe and back up important data. If storage space is not an issue and the HDD is still under warranty, sending it in for warranty replacement may be a good option. Otherwise you could treat it like a time bomb and hope that nothing will happen.

I'd like to get my hands on a proper database of the price lists. Unfortunately my copies are quite fragmented and I have only been keeping Viewnet prices lately, which goes back to March 2011.

Thanks for your kind words. Part of it came from other forumers and I hope it would be useful to others.

I'm not significantly impacted by the current temporary loss of cyberlockers and I hope that I'll be able to limit myself to my current hardware. I'm not looking forward to unplugging my DVD drive again.

Unfortunately it isn't SSD's read/write that is what sets it apart from HDDs. It is its access times, which can hit below 0.1ms, something that HDDs can't ever hope to touch. For certain situations, this very low access times can provide a performance improve well above 50x the fastest RAID arrays of HDDs can ever hope to achieve.

This post has been edited by everling: Jan 28 2012, 09:03 PM

I have two Greens, WD10EADS, that have been with me for almost three years. Their warranties expire this year. *touch wood*

---

Added on January 30, 2012, 12:40 amI have added dkk's information to the first post and linked back both of his informative posts. Thanks a lot dkk!

I've also removed the Western Digital warranty policy link as it seems to be out of date.

This post has been edited by everling: Jan 30 2012, 12:42 AM

Did you try informing your bank of this fraudulent CC charge and have them revoke it? If successful, the banks would punish the offending company.

That was his reason for using RAID-5, to get only one partition out of three HDDs.

Sorry, my bad.

The situation is actually more dire than that. Particularly with statements like


By the end of March 2012, Seagate (wiki) and WD (wiki) will assume control of 90% of the HDD market (wiki), leaving only Toshiba (wiki) as the wild card. Seagate and WD's key products is the HDD, so it will be in their best interests to keep the prices high. Maybe Toshiba could try to spoil this, but it would have a small effect since it has only 10% of the market.

It could be a faulty temperature sensor. The WD2500KS (250GB capacity) is known to report it incorrectly by around 19°C higher, but I am not sure about the 160GB series. You could try touching your HDD gently to test its real temperature. I think anything above 60°C would be unbearably hot to the slightest touch. If it is just tolerably warmer to the touch, it may be below 50°C or you are quite used to handling hot stuff.

---

Added on February 9, 2012, 6:15 pmI just thought of a less painful method to test.

Put your computer on standby/sleep. Let your HDDs cool down to room temperature (either let it sleep for a few hours or test with your hand). Wake up your machine and immediately examine the temperature report. If it is immediately ~20°C higher, then you know that the temperature report is faulty.

This post has been edited by everling: Feb 9 2012, 06:15 PM

None of them really stands out.

I don't recall of anyone reporting a successful data recovery through a data recovery service. I suppose it might be because they're simply very expensive, so most forumers didn't bothered.

Well, if that option is out, then you could try recovering the data yourself. There are a number of methods that are known to work and I have tried the freezing trick myself to recover 80% of my data.

If you do not have USB 3.0, then there is no need to think about 5400 or 7200 RPM because, cheap or expensive, you'll be limited to about 30 megabyte/s.

As for determining a given external HDD's performance, you will need to read up benchmarks and reviews for it because it is the only way to know, short of actually doing the performance tests yourself. All the specifications listed are not very meaningful. There are 5400 RPM HDDs that can outperform 7200 RPM HDDs on certain tests* and the 32MB or 64MB cache size is meaningless.

If you are on a budget, it will be best to stick to your budget and buy something that you can afford.

* I'll admit that you'll need to compare a current generation 5400 RPM HDD with a 7200 RPM from a few years ago to find such a situation.

Depends on whether you want portability or storage capacity. But since you want portability, yes, the 2.5" would be better.

How about WD's Passport Essential 1TB? It's a 2.5" USB3.0. It is adequately boring and neat. You don't want your HDDs to be 'exciting', other than being excited by escaping from USB2.0.

It looks nice enough. Asides from being satisfied with WD's Passports and some much old external HDDs, I don't know much about external HDDs. Other than that I have come across one 2.5" ext HDDs that you cannot reuse elsewhere because it is missing the standard SATA connector.