Boring reliability cross-post

[Tannin]

I wrote a fair bit on drive reliability the other week, and posted it at SR. The issues SR had with their server change were a powerful reminder to me that anything posted there could dissapear without warning, so I thought I'd better put them somewhere where I know that they are safe. Also, they were sprinkled around over several threads, so even if I just cut and paste stuff into this one at semi-random, as I intend to do, I'll stand a better chance of finding it later on. It's a real pity that my original records dissapeared in the MBF. Once bitten twice shy, I guess.

http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?p=55921 7/9/02

As the years have rolled by, I have more and more come to ponder on the wisdom of a post on the old BBS by BikeBubba (who worked, as I recall, for one of the drive makers as an engineer - Maxtor, possibly). In the midst of a discussion of reliability, BB said something about your drive supplier being more important than your drive manufacturer, because handling is so critical to hard drive reliability. And it is most certainly true.

Some time ago, we bought a small number of Samsung 5400 RPM drives from a general wholesaler - perhaps a dozen, no more - in several seperate shipments. Usually we buy from Westan, who are a direct distributor of both Samsung and Western Digital drives - i.e., their shipments come straight from the factory, still in the factory shipping cartons, and the only handling our drives have is the guys in Westan's warehouse putting our drives in a box (with appropriate packing), road freight from Melbourne (which is a non-issue, seeing as Westan pack them well) and us unpacking them (which is another non-issue, as we are always very gentle with our drives).

Anyway, the last batch of drives we bought from these other guys (to cover an out of stock) arrived with very poor packing. This was back when we had sold maybe 800 or 1000 Samsung drives and we right away said: no way we are going to count these three in with the Samsung drives we buy from Westan - the packaging is sub-standard (way sub-standard in this particular case), and that in turn implies that their handling procedures will be sub-standard too. We should have sent them back, really, but we were desperate for some stock so we didn't.

And sure enough, of those three 20GB drives that arrived rattling around in a box loose, with just the plastic clamshell to protect them, two have failed. We had had a few drives from the same guys previously, six or eight maybe, which were at least packed, but still not done the way that a major authorised hard drive distributor does it (such as Westan or Agate or Ingram Micro). After a little thought, I decided to regard all the drives we got through Comnet as a seperate category, insofar as we had every reason to believe that their staff training and drive handling procedures were no good and the drives were more than likely abused before we got to see them. So far, of the ten or 15 drives we bought from Comnet, 3 have failed. (Possibly four - Kristi would remember exactly.) I'm not sure if the third failure was from that unpacked shipment or from one of the earlier ones.

Anyway, that gives us a rough but telling direct comparison between the two wholesalers (figures are approximate):

Westan: ~1300 drives: 3 in-service failures.

Comnet: ~12 drives 3 (possibly 4) in-service failures.

And these are the exact same make and model of drive!

 

[Tannin]

http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?p=55921 7/9/02

Given that several people have been kind enough to take my figures seriously, and seeing as I have just (a) said how important I think packing and handling is, and (b) described where our Samsung drives come from and how they are packed, I had better document our other brands too. (For without doing that I have no fair basis for comparison.)

Western Digital: nearly all from Westan, the same people we buy our Samsungs from, but sometimes from Achieva, who are the second of the two WD authorised direct distributors in Oz - i.e., another company that buys direct from, and can be assumed to be under the supervision of, Western Digital.

Seagate: 100% from Agate (direct Seagate and IBM distributor until they went out of business about 18 months ago), then direct from Achieva (also a Seagate direct distributor). Also a very small number - 6 or 8 maybe - of Seagate drives from other sources, mostly Barracuda ATA-IIs and IIIs.

IBM: Almost 100% from Agate. None at all since the 75GXP was introduced. (We were very lucky with the 75GXP - we stopped buying IBM, for unrelated reasons, just in time!)

Maxtor & Fujitsu: Not sold any for years. Well, two Maxtors. Not worth counting two drives.

Quantum: Mostly direct from Ingram Micro (authorised distributor), but we sold very few Quantums in their last year or two in any case.

http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?p=55921 7/9/02

A week or so ago, I took over our RA duties from Kristi, who has taken on so much of our workshop workload that she just hasn't had time to do them for some months. It's hardly scientific, but it is interesting to look at the pile of drives I have just sent back for RMA. Effectively, this is a random sample of a couple of months' worth of accumulated dead drives. (We replace failed drives out of our own stock, and put the dead ones to one side until we get time to deal with them.) The proportions of the various models cannot be taken as a definitive number, of course, but the complete lack of surprise I felt at the particular combination of drives I found in our back room should speak for itself. It seems quite representative. (I'm at home as I write right now, so this is all from memory, but will be pretty close).

Samsung: 1 40GB P40 - the 3rd of our 1300-odd Samsung drives to fail, and the first failed Samsung 7200.

Samsung (from the sleazy mob that I am not counting): 1 20GB 5400, probably a V30 but I forget already, possibly from that same badly packed batch I mentioned above. (Having spoken to my rep there, I am quite certain that they will pack the replacement properly. :twisted: Mind you, given the <understatement> fairly emphatic </understatement> way in which I made my displeasure known, it wouldn't surprise me if the storeman hits the replacement drive with a hammer several times to make sure that it is broken before he packs it beautifully and ships it off to us.) (I have a sneaking suspicion that their storeman no longer likes us. )

Western Digital: 3 drives. A 10GB Protege and a WD30AB (both from Westan) and a WD80BB from Achieva.

Seagate: 4, possibly 5, assorted U Series things and 1 60GB Barracuda ATA-IV (which had lasted about a week), all bought through good wholesalers (Agate or Achieva). (One or two of these are on their second trip back.) Given that we sold many, many more Samsung 5400s than we did U Series Seagates, this is a very telling number. It varied from one season to another as the models came and went, but on the whole we sold more Western Digital drives than Seagates in the earlier part of the three years to date - probably two to three times as many WDs - and perhaps roughly equal numbers of them in the past 12 months. (Not very many, it's nearly all Samsung now.)

Seagate: 2 U Series drives which we did not sell new and were getting replaced on behalf of customers who had bought them elsewhere. Obviously, these don't count.

Seagate (a different wholesaler, not a direct Seagate customer) 1 Barracuda ATA-III which is going back for the second time (or the replacement is). The first time these turkeys replaced this drive, they shipped it back to us via post, packed in its SeaShell, and that in a plain broown paper post bag with just a thin (~5mm)layer of bubblewrap on the inside! Given that level of ignorance, I don't count this drive's repeated failure as a black mark against Seagate. When I faxed off the RMA application to these guys, I added a second page which detailed the exact way in which the drive had been shipped, explained why we would never buy any hard drives from them again (though we continue to use them for Gigabyte mainboards and Leadtek video cards, neither of which need gentle handling), and provided a link to Seagate's web page about correct drive handling procedures. (Which was a very insulting thing to do, and entirely justified in my opinion.)

To summarise, ignoring the drives from unknown or sleazy suppliers, we get:

Seagate: 5 (6?)

WD: 3

Samsung: 1

(Other makers are N/A as we didn't sell any other brands in any quantity to speak of during the warranty period.)

What proportions did we sell of which brands? Again from memory, and going back a few years which makes it difficult, it would be somewhere very roughly:

3 years ago: about even thirds, Seagate, WD and Samsung.

2 years ago: maybe 10 or 15% Seagate, 30 or 40% WD, the rest Samsung.

1 year ago: About 80% Samsung, the rest split 50/50 WD and Seagate.

I could go back through the books and get those sales figures reasonably exact, and maybe I will one rainy weekend. Or maybe not. I think that drive reliability is going to become a very boring subject for me before too long: at the moment we are only selling Samsung drives, and I don't see any changes on the horizon that might alter that. I was toying with the idea of selling Maxtor again, but since they came out with their one year warranty announcement, Maxtor have as much chance of selling me drives as those two wholesalers I mentioned above - which is to say none at all. I guess the only reasons I can think of for us to go back to Seagate/WD/IBM are (a) Samsung have a major stuff-up 75GXP style (it happens to everyone sooner or later - as Samsung's own little sticks of dynamite demonstrated back in 120MB days), (b) Samsung price themselves way too high (not likely), (c) Samsung have major out of stock problems, or (d) someone comes up with a compelling performance advantage in a desktop drive. (And no, I don't mean the trivial gain of the WD JB drives, I mean a fair-dinkum 10,000 RPM performance product.)

Finally, I should mention that I think it is reasonable to expect that we will see a modest increase in the number of Samsung drives we send back over the next year or so, for two reasons. (a) Our in-service Samsung population is relatively young. We didn't start to sell Spinpoints in any volume until about two or three years ago (I posted the exact dates in a thread which disappeared in the MBF, alas) and only gradually built up the mix from an initial, very cautious, trickle to where we are now with them - near enough to 100% of our drives. So the average age of our in-warranty Samsungs is less than the average age of our in-warranty Seagates and WDs, but will increase as the months roll by. (After the three years is up, I don't count the failures any more, except in an impressionistic sort of way.) (b) Because with every week that passes, we put more Samsung drives out into service. Even with a wonderfully reliable product such as the Spinpoints have proved to be, sooner or later the sheer number of them has to produce more failures.

 

[Tannin]

http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?p=55466 4/9/02

We have not sold all that many Cuda IVs, 20 or 30 perhaps. Of those, we have had two in-service failures. This is not a promising indication, but it could just be bad luck, so I wouldn't race in and say "the Cuda IV is a bad drive". I've not heard any particular groundswell of bad reports about them either, so at this stage I'm inclined to think that they are probably pretty good and our two were just random chance. (Some of the other Seagate drives in recent years have been poor to middling: the Cuda ATA II wasn't great, and most of the U Series ones are worse.)

But we will never know now, for I have stopped buying them. Sure, the 60GB and 80GB Cudas are about $15 to $20 cheaper than other drives - though the 40GB ones are dearer, for some reason that I don't claim to understand) but after the second failure I said "to hell with this, why take any more chances?" We dropped the 60GB size from our range (except to special order) and switched out 80GBs over to Samsung. They cost a little more but the failure rate is well established and the lowest I have ever seen in any drive. (It's quite possible that there are even more reliable drives, such as the Seagate SCSI units, but we don't see enough of those to have a sensible opinion.) So far we have sold somewhere around 1000 Samsung 5400 RPM units for 1 DOA (which does not concern us - DOA's are no real problem, you just take another drive and there is no data loss event to give you grief) and two in-service failures, plus around 300 7200 RPM units for no DOAs and one in-servivce failure. All three of the in-service failures were the same fault: a small number of bad sectors, and we were able to save the customer's data in all threee instances.

We are coming up to the end of the three year warranty period now for the first of our Samsung drives (yes, I used to bad-mouth them in 130MB days, entirely deservedly, and proceeded to avoid them like the plague for many years after that, but thanks to a conversation here at SR I eventually tried a couple, then a couple more, and have never looked back) and since it is mainly in-warranty failures that I am interested in, I won't be counting failures of the very old drives (if any) once they go OOW. But (of course) I'll continue to follow their progress with interest.

These days, we have stopped selling Seagates and Western Digitals because although their reliability is quite good it isn't in the same ball park as the Samsungs (Seagate and WD are about the same, and of the WDs the Proteges seem to be the best, with the AAs and ABs pretty good too) and stopped selling the Samsung 5400s because the 7200s are near enough to the same price now, and not started selling Maxtors because they are too damn dear in this country, and wouldn't bother considering IBM (though we sold truckloads of them in 2GB and 6GB days), which leaves us with Samsung 7200s and ... er ... Samsung 7200s. This makes life boring: I like having lots of different drives on the shelf, but I like having our drives work and go on working even more, so I guess that's the way it will stay.

I'm a firm "innocent until proven guilty" believer, so if there is an Australian Maxtor distributor reading this, take a look at Westan's prices for Samsung 40GB and 80GB 7200s and if you are in the same ballpark, sing out: I'd be delighted to give Maxtor another go after all these years. (Last time we sold Maxtor drives in any quantity they were the superb little 7213A. And I do mean little: they were 213MB )

 

[Tannin]

Same thread, same station:

Just as a matter of interest, yesterday I got an RMA replacement from Western Digital of a Caviar AB 30GB. It was a refurb. (It has "refurbished" printed in light blue across the drive label.) This is the first time I have ever seen a WD RMA replacement that was refurbished rather than new. Does this mean WD have a revised policy now? I guess it must, for they always used to send new drives.

Oh. I see from the front page that Maxtor have decided that from 1st October on, they will only provide a one year warranty with their new drives. What I said above inviting a Maxtor rep to call me: forget it.

 

[i]

Same thread, same station:

Just as a matter of interest, yesterday I got an RMA replacement from Western Digital of a Caviar AB 30GB. It was a refurb. (It has "refurbished" printed in light blue across the drive label.) This is the first time I have ever seen a WD RMA replacement that was refurbished rather than new. Does this mean WD have a revised policy now? I guess it must, for they always used to send new drives.

Are you sure they were new? Really, how could you tell?

Perhaps they're just more open about what they do with returned drives than they used to be.

I wonder because a few years ago, after I returned a WD drive, the replacement I received from WD had a suspicious letter "R" included as an extra character at the end of the Serial Number.

I have always assumed that WD (and all other drive manufacturers for that matter) will do everything they can to lower their costs when dealing with returned equipment. Doesn't it make complete sense that they'd just send you someone else's defective drive (refurbished of course) back as a replacement? What the heck else would they do with all those returned drives?

Solves (or at least reduces) the problem nicely, I think.

 

[Tea]

Good question, i. Anyone know something I don't on this one?

 

[Buck]

Almost all Western Digital drives received as replacement are refurbished. It is rare that they are not. As was mentioned, you will see the letter "r" as part of the date code, which will indicate that it is refurbished. Recently WD decided to print the word in full. This was done not for the benefit of RMA clients, but there are customers that purchase refurbished drives from WD that occassionally lie about that fact and sell them as new. Having the word refurbished in blue across the label solved that problem. Hence, it is important that if a WD drive fails, your customer's replacement should be the one that arrives from WD under warranty. Don't pull a new drive from stock and put the replacement from WD on the shelf to resell.

 

[Tannin]

I'm planning to keep on recording my RMA drives here in this thread in the hope that, over time, it will prove instructive. Not so many this time, just two drives, both Western Digitals: a 300BB on its second trip back (i.e., already a warranty replacement) and an 800BB. Or was the 80GB the one that's on it's second time around? I forget already.

 

[Tannin]

By the way, Buck, we always replace a failed drive with one out of our own stock: making a customer wait weeks for a system that works is unacceptable. If we have one, we use a refurb, but if we don't we use a brand new drive. Another reason why I'm not buying Western Digital anymore.

 

[Buck]

By the way, Buck, we always replace a failed drive with one out of our own stock: making a customer wait weeks for a system that works is unacceptable. If we have one, we use a refurb, but if we don't we use a brand new drive. Another reason why I'm not buying Western Digital anymore.

This other reason for not buying Western Digital is because you are waiting weeks for a replacement?

 

[Tannin]

No, they all do that. It's because they send us a replacement that is not of equal value to the new drive that we gave the end-user.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not having good luck with them either.

Buck, what do your return figures for WD and others look like?

 

[Buck]

No, they all do that. It's because they send us a replacement that is not of equal value to the new drive that we gave the end-user.

You don't think that Samsung sends out a refurbished product as replacement?

 

[Buck]

I'm not having good luck with them either.

Buck, what do your return figures for WD and others look like?

My return figures are very low: none for Samsung, and none for WD, although I've been using more Samsung then WD as of the past 6 months.

 

[Mercutio]

I started buying Samsungs a few months ago, also. I notice newegg.com has been having a REALLY hard time keeping the 80GB drives in stock, too.

 

[Buck]

I started buying Samsungs a few months ago, also. I notice newegg.com has been having a REALLY hard time keeping the 80GB drives in stock, too.

I've been using the 20, 40, and 80 gigabyte Samsungs. I have not sold any of the WD JB drives (business don't care for the price). My last WD drive to go was a WD200BB, and I haven't reordered any since (I think that was two weeks ago). Right now my distributor only has 20 and 80 gigabyte Samsungs in stock.

 

[Tannin]

More drives to add to my RMA list:

Western Digital 7200 RPM 60GB BB (bad sectors)
Samsung 5400 60GB SV6003H (bad sectors)
Seagate 8.4GB U8 (hissing noise, does not detect two boots out of three) ALREADY REPLACED AT LEAST ONCE
Seagate U10 10GB (does not detect)

Also three drives not sold new by us that came in for service and proved to be faulty and less than three yesrs old:
Maxtor 32049H2 20GB
Quantum Fireball CX 13GB
Fujitsu 20GB MPG3204AT

Shame about the Samsung. I'm taking it as a personal insult whenever a Samsung drive dies on me these days. That makes ... er ... am I up to four Samsungs in total now? Better read my own thread and count them up.