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Western Digital or Seagate

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xShadow:

--- Quote ---A longer warranty is good to have. No arguments there. However, you can't use warranty to gauge the quality of parts. That's like saying "This item is cheaper than the other item, thus it is clearly of lesser quality."
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No, it's different from that. If I was making that assumption, I would have been putting Samsungs (pre Seagate buyout) into the high risk bracket, because they were only 80 bucks. That obviously wasn't the case. They had good reviews and good street cred and were very good drives in general. For something that fails easily and (relative to other computer parts) often, warranty means a much different thing. It's pretty much a piecewise function. Basically, if a hard drive has good reviews, street cred, and reliability in general, a low warranty may not mean much. However, once the other factors start going the other way, one might question why something has such a bad warranty. Now, you may bring it up as a subjective factor, but that's obvious. Nothing about parts analysis these days is objective unless you do extensive testing involving thousands of the said part. No one has money for that.


--- Quote ---<insert rest of your rant here>
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The problem here is that hard drives and what you're ranting about are completely different parts by nature. I've powered decent systems on shitty power supplies that came with cases. I've used all kinds of PS's, even fucked up a port or two and they still work fine.

So, the factors that make you wrong:
1. Power supplies are much more durable and trustworthy parts. Fans aside, they don't really involve many variables like mechanical failure. Sure, there are shitty ones, but even those will work fine to a point. Assuming you look at a certain cut of power supplies the entire market is pretty much all low risk.
2. They're cheap. You can get a very reliable (ie chance of failure=about 0%) PSU for relatively low prices.
3. Most importantly, the criteria for reviews is different. Hard drives are 1 and 0. It either fails after X unit of time or it doesn't. The user doesn't need to have any technological expertise to report that.




Edit:
.... Why am I doing this? All I came here to do was advise upon a hard drive that was on sale.....

....

Unless you have some really compelling argument I think I'm gonna end this here...

limefc:

--- Quote ---No, it's different from that. If I was making that assumption
--- End quote ---
It was a comparison not an assertion that you're making this assumption.


--- Quote ---1. Power supplies are much more durable and trustworthy parts. Fans aside, they don't really involve many variables like mechanical failure. Sure, there are shitty ones, but even those will work fine to a point. Assuming you look at a certain cut of power supplies the entire market is pretty much all low risk.
--- End quote ---
Where the hell are you getting this from or is it a joke? There is nothing low risk about the power supply market when the percentage of fake certifications, fake QC and fake specifications is the absolute highest of any type of part used for a PC. The statement that power supplies are universally durable without many variables involved is laughable at best, disgusting at worst. They are only durable as long as you don't try to use them. Incidentally if you barely ever use your HDD, it will also last longer.

Speaking of risk, if you buy a poor quality HDD, it will at worst break after a while.
Buy a shit PSU on the other hand, and you can lose a lot more than the 100 dollars a HDD could cost or the 15 dollars the PSU cost. Personally I've only lost 2 motherboards and 1 graphics card to shit power supplies (power supplies, of which one still works!) and none except the graphics card was more expensive than 50 dollars so I consider myself lucky. No idea how many of my HDDs I lost to that though, haven't tried identifying the failed part on them. I am guessing a whole lot have failed ICs since every single one I've opened up had pristine disks and the spindle motor was more often than not fine.


--- Quote ---Hard drives are 1 and 0. It either fails after X unit of time or it doesn't. The user doesn't need to have any technological expertise to report that.
--- End quote ---
Nothing is black and white. Damaged during transit. Damaged SATA port on motherboard. Power failure from a shit power supply, can't supply adequate 12V to spin up the HDD - rare but possible for it to be accompanied by seemingly normal function of the computer itself.
Shock protection activating and disabling the HDD temporarily which user assumed to be permanent damage. Logic board getting ruined by shitty PSU. etc
You sure as hell won't run out of possible causes for HDD "death" that are irrelevant of the quality of said part. Besides, if you wanted to  you could break down PSUs the exact same way. Fails after x period or doesn't: Who gives a fuck about the reasoning, right? As long as fail rate is low enough, I am perfectly good with using the PSU even if it has no transient filtering or has a defective +5VSB design which gives 6.8V spikes on +5VSB after the low quality capacitors fail and slowly kills motherboards like clockwork.

The most important knowledge you should take out of this is that power supply failure can be transparent to the user. It will continue to run your computer while killing off other parts or causing stability issues that can be explained by another part failing, and fixed by replacing it (due to different out-of spec voltage tolerances, for example).

There is bad luck too. Speaking of newegg reviews, a lot of reviews are posted immidiately after purchase and installation and coloured by expectations. "After hearing that WD is the best thing since sliced bread, I bought a WD drive, but it arrived DOA. I think I just got unlucky and I should return it without making a fuss."

"After buying a Seagate drive it arrived DOA, my friend upon being told my story proclaimed that Seagate is a pile of shit and I should have expected that and I saw some people agreeing with him on the internet. I will thusly post a review saying that I got this DOA and replaced it with something else because it was a piece of shit."

Mass psychology!
If you want to take the opinion of newegg apes for any purpose other than information about possible problems and their solutions, then be my guest. You're however not going to convince me that they have any credibility. I am almost tempted to read HDD reviews to see what sort of retarded bullshit they write there while claiming to be tech experts.

Bottom line is, you're arguing for the credibility of idiots. I will grant you that you don't have a whole lot of other options than their feedback for assessing the quality of HDDs but that doesn't make me wrong. It just makes the only choice for decision making advice a bad one.
Both my statement that newegg feedback is full of raving morons and that warranty is not an indicator of quality are true.

raandomer:

--- Quote from: xShadow on August 26, 2012, 09:04:09 AM ---That's difficult to supply. Generally when I assess hard disks I sort the reviews list on newegg by ownership length and then look at how many people have them failing past one year. The only authoritative study on hard drive reliability (Google's) in recent history will pretty much tell you why. Just look at some of their graphs.

(click to show/hide)It's not like there's anything quantitative to be taken out of that, though. There are simply far too many random variables involved in reviews, and trying to classify them into some standard deviation is probably something that would give me a headache; I'm a computer engineer, not a statistician. At best, you can take some ballpark estimate of a hard disk's general performance. Then there's also "the word on the street"... ie shit that people have probably read in some random tech magazine or hardware site (or a set of them). I don't trust those much, unless they've actually done some statistical studies or they've brought in a person who is seriously an expert in the field (PHD is the minimum). I just look at reviews and then mix in a bit of what I've heard on the streets (of the internet lol) when I make an assessment.tl;dr:
Generally, it boils down 3 risk categories: high, medium, low. With at best mediocre reviews (which is for their 200 dollar line) and a one year warranty, Seagate naturally goes into the "high risk" pool. There isn't any way around this. I mean when When they have a 1 year warranty on their drives, that also says something about their expected quality. When I can get a WD Black for 145 bucks, which is guaranteed to at least give me some place to put my shit for 5 years (ie low risk category), why would I bother?

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Ok, let me get this straight, you rate your hdds by these criterias:

* reviews on the newegg + web
* warranty periodah, so it all boils down to being a sheep, since your saying seagates are shit because other people say its shit. The correct way to go about judging a product is to identify what properties make it "bad" (ie the 7200.11 firmware) not just going by word of mouth. And about the warranty: they still come from the same factory, with the same parts but since warranty has been cut then therefore they must be lower quality, reasoning ftw there. There is no correlation between warranty and reliability (just google it and you'll get plenty of papers on it), warranty is essentially a very powerful marketing tool that can easily fool people into thinking a product is reliable. My theory for the recent warranty cuts is that its now essentially become a oligopoly (off the top of my head i think only toshiba, wd and seagate are left) and wd probably made some close door deals with seagate.

TLDR:

* reviews/word of mouth are a bad indicator of reliability, everyone will rant about bad drives but very few (proportional to the bad reviews) will report having no problems, hence the data is skewed
* a better way of gauging reliability would be getting return rates from distros or better yet from the company themselves (but i doubt they'll reveal that figure to some random internet guy)
* warranty is also a bad indicator of reliability, since companies will most likely base warranty period on something like this: if profit from selling more units due to have advertised x warranty period outweighs warranty overhead for the x period then its all good

Freedom Kira:
On the reliability vs. warranty thing, I want to point out one thing. Manufacturers typically select their warranty periods based on the expected percentage of their products dying by the end of the period, be it 1%, 2%, whatever.

So, at the very least, there is some correlation.

However, that correlation is not useful in determining a drive's reliability. The main reason is that the tolerance will differ between manufacturers. In the instance of Seagate vs. WD, it's entirely possible that Seagate only wants to cover 0.5% of their drives with their warranty, while WD is willing to cover 5%. Depending on this, it is entirely possible that Seagate's products are equally or more reliable than WD's (with the theoretical numbers, about 0.5% of Seagate's drives die within a year and 5% of WD's drives die within 5 years).

I understand the mentality of using a warranty period to gauge how much a manufacturer believes in their drives, though. Generally, the longer a manufacturer is willing to stand by its products, the longer those products are expected to last. A manufacturer slapping a 10-year warranty on stuff that dies every month is asking to go bankrupt. Thus, it's only natural to aim for stuff with solid warranties as opposed to stuff that's only guaranteed for a year or so.

xShadow:
God dammit what did I get myself caught up in this time...

--- Quote from: limefc on August 26, 2012, 11:42:17 PM ---<wall of text responding to quote 1>
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Lol. Where are you getting all of these horror stories from? I simply meant if you do proper research and pick out a certain subset (Good PS⊆All PS) of power supplies that has been proven to work well, you'll generally get something that serves you well for a long period of time... and for not much money. I don't think I'm wrong here, because this Corsair 650TX has been serving me for ages, and it wasn't terribly expensive. But who cares, right? All power supplies are guerrilla soldiers waiting to pop out with rifles and kill your entire system.


--- Quote ---<insert rest of wall of text>

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You're making a pretty moot point here. If you can hear it clicking and it's doing random shit that no other drive in your system is doing, it's probably failing. It's a 1 or 0 relationship, with some very small amount of standard deviation; most motherboards do NOT come with failing ports. Like you pointed out yourself, power supplies are transparent killers. Anyone would have trouble pointing out when their PS is fucking up. Of course their reviews would be sketchy.

No seriously you have some kinda trauma here. I'm sorry for your bad luck with PS's...


--- Quote ---ah, so it all boils down to being a sheep, since your saying seagates are shit because other people say its shit. The correct way to go about judging a product is to identify what properties make it "bad" (ie the 7200.11 firmware) not just going by word of mouth. And about the warranty: they still come from the same factory, with the same parts but since warranty has been cut then therefore they must be lower quality, reasoning ftw there. There is no correlation between warranty and reliability (just google it and you'll get plenty of papers on it), warranty is essentially a very powerful marketing tool that can easily fool people into thinking a product is reliable. My theory for the recent warranty cuts is that its now essentially become a oligopoly (off the top of my head i think only toshiba, wd and seagate are left) and wd probably made some close door deals with seagate.
--- End quote ---

*Facepalm*
You won't know what factors make it bad without having other people test it for you! You'll end up going off word of mouth either way! Because guess what? You don't actually understand what's wrong with the firmware yourself. You can't just open it up yourself and go "oooooh, this line looks a bit off, I think I'll hold off on this hard drive purchase!" There's nothing but end-user experience to go off of it in the end. It's about being an "informed sheep". You need to take everything you see with a grain of salt, but take it into account nonetheless. That's the only information you have. You don't know half of what goes on in that microcontroller on your hard disk. You don't even know 25%. You don't even know 10%. Even if you wanted to, the manufacturers won't let you know. The only reliable method is massive end-user testing and then reporting the results (see: Google paper). What you can do with reviews in front of you is something halfway similar.


--- Quote ---reviews/word of mouth are a bad indicator of reliability, everyone will rant about bad drives but very few (proportional to the bad reviews) will report having no problems, hence the data is skewed
--- End quote ---

That's wrong. Just look at any hard drive's review page and you'll see it's wrong. None of them would be rated 4 stars if that was the case.



--- Quote ---I understand the mentality of using a warranty period to gauge how much a manufacturer believes in their drives, though. Generally, the longer a manufacturer is willing to stand by its products, the longer those products are expected to last. A manufacturer slapping a 10-year warranty on stuff that dies every month is asking to go bankrupt. Thus, it's only natural to aim for stuff with solid warranties as opposed to stuff that's only guaranteed for a year or so.
--- End quote ---

Bingo.

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