As said above, there is a lot that can go wrong with a hard drive, both mechanically and electronically. However until solid state media can prove its longevity, hard drives are still our best option. Yet like cars, some drives are much more reliable than others. Here at MVI Data recovery we spend many hours every day, analysing and rebuilding drive failures, we have built up strong opinions on which are the best drives for reliability.
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
Tags: hard drive data recovery
