Discussion Forums > Technology
Samsung F4 SpinMaster...[b]by Seagate[/b] (is it safe?)
rostheferret:
The oldest components in my PC are a pair of 160gig seagates, well over 6 years old now. I've had a Samsung and a Western Digital die on me in the mean time. I guess my real point is, it's all just dumb luck in the end.
kitamesume:
my oldest drive would be a 12year old 80GB WD drive =p currently being used as a paper weight since its a 5400rpm drive that has no use as a storage device since it has such a tiny capacity while being bulky and all.
AnimeJanai:
Assuming that you haven't opened the sealed package, I don't know enough about whether or not your drive is from an older batch or newer batch. But you do have a manufacture date, so if that is before the Seagate merger, then of course it is a Samsung drive.
Outside of the planned obsolescence built-in to each drive, I feel that individual drive failures are mostly due to the individual drive's characteristics. If you don't know anything about the drive, then all you can do is lump all of these unknown characteristics into a vague term called "luck". But, there are some empirical things you can do to pull factors out of this amorphous luck cloud.
First: If the drive was sold as part of a low-priced "batch dump", then it may be statistically at risk. So don't buy those if you have good rapport with the store manager and can get info on that.
Second: It is my opinion that drives that vibrate a lot will have a greater chance of a head crash in its future. While your drive is running, very lightly touch the side of the drive. It should not be vibrating a lot if it has nicely balanced platters. I touched a bunch of my drives out of curiousity and found that the older ones were "smoother" running than say the current 2TB ones (april 2012 manufacture date) from China. It used to be that every new drive I purchased was always smooth and non-vibrating, but new drives from China always seem to have a slight vibration as compared to new drives from Malaysia or Thailand. From experience, over time, some drives vibrate more as they age while other drives seem to not change at all. As they have not failed before they were replaced, I have no experience as to whether or not the slightly vibrating drives were on their way to head crash failure from higher chances of rubbing on the platter due to the vibration.
xShadow:
--- Quote from: kitamesume on May 22, 2012, 03:10:13 PM ---my oldest drive would be a 12year old 80GB WD drive =p currently being used as a paper weight since its a 5400rpm drive that has no use as a storage device since it has such a tiny capacity while being bulky and all.
--- End quote ---
?
I'm still actually using an 80gb drive. It's not a lot, but if it works, it's not a big deal. Other than that, I have a 40gb (IIRC) in one of my computers (not in use). The smallest I've had was 8GB. I think we threw away that computer a good while ago though. It's not like I could have used that thing for anything more than like 2 anime seasons though.
I also still use a 16 MB flash drive.
Anyhow:
--- Quote from: rostheferret on May 22, 2012, 03:03:00 PM ---The oldest components in my PC are a pair of 160gig seagates, well over 6 years old now. I've had a Samsung and a Western Digital die on me in the mean time. I guess my real point is, it's all just dumb luck in the end.
--- End quote ---
To say it's all dumb luck is false. Just read this paper.
Summarized version (go to the comment with ~37 upvotes)
The only real beef I have with what he says in the summary is that the manufacturer doesn't matter. Although google didn't focus on it, quoting the study on page 4:
Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model.
Combine this with the study talked about here. The study basically says that who you buy it from matters!. You buy shitty drives, you get a higher chance of failures across the board. It's that simple.
So how do you weed bad drives out? Newegg has a very useful thing, it's called reviews. What I do is I take the reviews and list them by lowest rating first, and then I see how long the drive lasted for them. If you just have that rough patch of 1 egg votes in the 3-6 month period, that's fine. But if you have a lot of them that are failing right around one year to two years, that tells you it's a shitty drive and you shouldn't buy it. That's not the only thing you should be looking out for, but it's probably a major one.
That's how I made up my mind when I purchased my 1.5TB and 2TB Samsung drives, and guess what? They're still working now, years later. Another important thing to note, though, is that I mostly use them for archiving anime and watching anime (and some occasional music). So, I generally don't play games on them. They're not under terribly heavy use (though I recently copied my entire anime and ga--... I mean stuff... collection over to my friend for him to watch, which was a pretty heavy process). Like the study says, how you plan to use the drives, and what conditions you use them under matters, too.
And no, I'm not going to say that some of it isn't just pure luck. These drives are mechanical, that's always a factor. But to say that who you choose to go with doesn't matter is just stupid. You do more research, you get a lower probability of failure. It's simple.
As for the original topic post, since there probably currently isn't enough information about manufacturing changes regarding the new Seagate/Samsung hybrid drives (thus a lack of reviews about the new drives, too), I would hold off on them. If you can find something reliable, at comparable price, and they'll let you take the drive back for a full refund... then do it. If not... well, you'll just have to either take the plunge or decide on an alternative.
... Okay now that took way too much research. I was just interested myself, so that's why I did it. >_>
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