Seagate slapped with class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rate

I always though windows accessed drives more than a user most the time

Brds7t7 said:

How did they fix the issue on newer drives? 8 seconds is still 8 seconds after all. You'll still get an excessively high load cycle count compared to a "normal" drive, unless the drive is hardly ever in use. Didn't the older drives stay parked until you accessed them anyway?
The freenas forum still has reports of excessively high counts even on the more recently manufactured greens. Or did they make them more reliable somehow?
Can't say I've ever actually used any Greens though as the intellipark feature never appealed to me. I've always stuck to Blues and Blacks. Usually the Blues are my go to drive though as they're a decent performing drive for the price.
Pity they won't make the larger storage Blues (2 - 6TB) run at 7,200 rpm. Larger & faster Blues would be a welcome addition.
Agree that 5,400 just isn't good enough for an OS drive.

The first Greens had a bug that caused the heads to repeatedly park and unpark, even when the drive wasn't being accessed; that was what caused them to fail prematurely. Frankly, I felt the author of first article you linked didn't know what he was talking about.

The Greens were never intended to be used for anything other than light duty storage. They are like an inexpensive economy car; to get the energy savings, you have to sacrifice performance and some durability. An economy car is fine for a daily, short distance commuter and as a grocery getter but try to use it for frequent or long distance operation, such as taxi cab, delivery vehicle, or daily, long distance commutes, you will wear it out quickly. The same is true of Greens; they are an economy drive intended for light duty usage, such as low duty cycle storage in computers that run only a few hours a day. Power users, such as myself or businesses, should never use the Greens for anything other than backups. Unfortunately, many users, and even manufacturers, try to cut corners (or, to put more harshly, albeit accurately, cheap out) and use the Greens where they never should have been used, such as in RAIDs or as an OS drive, which helped contribute to the undeserved, continuing bad reputation they still have.

The new WD Purples, which were intended solely for surveillance use, have a similar problem. Many people have tried to use them in their computers for normal storage, and even RAIDs, then complained about data corruption. Drives used for surveillance recording receive a continuous data feed. Most drives, if a glitch occurs, will attempt to rewrite the glitched data. If a drive being used to record a surveillance feed were to do that, there would be occasional dropouts in the video because of the time wasted in error correction. To avoid that problem, the Purples were designed with no error correction. This may result in occasional artifacts in the recorded video but, at least, what is recorded is continuous without any skips or gaps. However, when used to save files, an uncorrected error will result in data loss.

I run my computer 24/7 with multiple processes going on from time to time that give its HDDs a pretty fair workout. I could run Greens in it and would probably be ok but I would be pushing my luck and they wouldn't last as long as a better drive, so I chose instead to use the better, more appropriate WD Blacks. There is a reason why the Blacks have a five year warranty and the Greens have only a two year warranty.

I currently have 12 WD Greens in service that I use for backup drives. Of the two I have that failed, one was an early Green that both had the excessive head parking issue and had been installed in my old XP machine as an OS drive by a reputable computer repair chain (not GweekSquad) that should have known better (that was one of the reasons I decided I better learn more about computers). The other was one that was approaching the end of its warranty period and had started to throw reallocation errors. None of them (including the one that had to be replaced under warranty) are (were) anywhere remotely close to exceeding their rated Load/Unload Cycle Count limit.

5400 rpm HDDs work fine for an OS drive; they are just slower. Many netbooks, notebooks, and laptops came with them to inexpensively reduce power consumption, thus increasing battery life. What make the Greens inappropriate for an OS drive is not their speed, but the head parking feature. An OS drive is accessed far more frequently than most storage drives so, a HDD that parks its heads when inactive will be far more frequently unparking/reparking the heads than a drive that is just used for storage only, shortening its life dramatically.

ThrashZone said:

I always though windows accessed drives more than a user most the time

That is true on an OS drive. On a storage drive, not nearly as much.

Borg 386 said:

I have to wonder if during all that flooding they had, that shut down the factories, they didn't ditch the ones that took water damage, just refurbished them & passed them on as new. It would have taken a big chunk of their profits if they would have to throw away a lot of damaged drives.

All the drives that came out after the floods had high failure rates. I read reports that some factories supposedly had workers building drives while standing in water.

strollin said:

The high failure rate was only for the 3TB models. I own a mix of 1.5, 2 and 5TB Seagate drives and haven't had any issues with them. I haven't found them to be any less or any more reliable than the WD drives I have.

My first hdd was a Seagate. A 20MB ST-225. Cost me $500 in 1985.

I read on another forum a post that said the poster had read that 3TB drives were actually 4TB drives that failed inspection due to too many bad sectors and were rerated. If true (keep in mind this is third hand information), that could explain why the 3TB drives in all brands get poorer reviews than the other sizes. It makes me wonder about the 5TB drives although I haven't observed a trend in poorer reviews for them.

I personally try to stay away for these so called Green (save energy) hardware.
If one had 10 of these Green drives installed, the energy you would save couldn't buy a Happy Meal. At the very top of my list when it comes to any computer hardware is reliability.
Whether or not it saves a $1.00 a year on energy is no concern to me. Turning off a light not needed will save more than that. Look around your house at night and see how many lights are on in rooms no one is in.

Layback Bear said:

I personally try to stay away for these so called Green (save energy) hardware.
If one had 10 of these Green drives installed, the energy you would save couldn't buy a Happy Meal. At the very top of my list when it comes to any computer hardware is reliability.
Whether or not it saves a $1.00 a year on energy is no concern to me. Turning off a light not needed will save more than that. Look around your house at night and see how many lights are on in rooms no one is in.

I totally agree. I prefer reliability over meager energy savings. The reason I use the Greens for my backup drives is they get extremely light usage and cost considerably less than the Blacks, which would be way overkill for backups.

If I were to buy all the backup drives I have now at today's prices, WD Blacks would cost me $1880.88 whereas WD Blues (which have replaced the Greens) would cost me $1679.88, a difference of $201. At the times I bought my drives, the price difference was even greater.

The WD Green HDDs are inexpensive.
The power saving isn't really much of a selling point.

The parking timer could be disabled completely in the older Green HDDs (I have 2 of those).
I have my newer Green HDDs set to 5 minutes and I run KeepAliveHD to keep them spinning.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

All the drives that came out after the floods had high failure rates. I read reports that some factories supposedly had workers building drives while standing in water.

Now why does that not surprise me.