The root cause of system downtime or failure is due to hard disk drive failure, so you should be chosing the most reliable drives possible. Hard disk drive manufacturers calculate mean time to failure (MTTF) measurements for their products, but usually do not disclose such information.

In our opinion, Hitachi drives are currently the best on the market. When we tested them for average read speeds, write speeds, burst speeds and random access timing they were head and shoulders above their competitors. However, where they really shine is in their reliability.

Many of their competitors are still fighting ongoing lawsuits, because of the inferior quality or known malfunctions, which were not disclosed to customers. High reliability at Hitachi begins with the design process. As a new disk drive program develops, reliability goals are set, along with access times, data rates, RPM, and cost. Reliability problems and failure modes of past products are studied to help make improvements in the new product.

So which drives to avoid – it is difficult to list every make and model, so we will simply list the drives in manufacturer order, rather than elaborate.

Hitachi – Samsung – IBM – Maxtor – Seagate – Western Digital

Seagate says they’ve isolated a ‘potential firmware issue.’ They say there’s ‘no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;’ however, ‘the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.

The faulty drives predominantly include all Seagate 2.5″ drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. and SATA interface. However we are also seeing high-capacity Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, which are freezing up during data transfers or failing all together. The Barracuda 7200.11 is the eleventh generation of Seagate’s flagship drive for desktop PCs and comes in capacities ranging from 160GB to 1.5TB.

We suggest all users determine what drives are in their system by going into System Profiler, looking under Serial-ATA for the Revision, which shows the firmware of your hard drive.

We are receiving quantities of these drives for recovery, and nearly all display the same cause of failure. The read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives unrecoverable. There are also firmware issues associated with many of the drives and Seagate’s firmware upgrades are having varying results.

Should you have one of these drives in your system, we recommend you ensure that your data backups are regular and even consider replacing the drive. For more information, talk to one of our technicians on 0800 050 1128.

Another common problem we have detected, is that because of the complexity of the drive inside, the bearing or spindle tend to seize when being knocked or bumped or in worst cases, being dropped if inside a external caddie or backup device. There are other troublesome facts that we can mention. The drive will eventually suffer from bad sectors or read errors. In this event, we do not recommend running CHDSK or check disk, as this compresses the data too much and will lead to corruption of the data or even no usable data at all.

We so recommend that if any of these symptoms to occur, please shut down the system and do not power the device up at all. Give MVI Data Recovery a call for a Free, No obligation quotation. www.mvidatarecovery.com.