Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

[jiml8]

I have a total of 12 HGST NAS hard drives that are between 6 1/2 and 7 1/2 years old. They all run 24/7/365.

Eleven of them are 4 TB; one is a 3 TB. The 3 TB and one 4TB are in my workstation. The other 10 4 TB drives are in my NAS.

None show any signs of aging or failure. One drive got kicked out of the NAS array about 2.5 years ago. I removed it from its hot-swap bay, and plugged it back in. It was recognized and rejoined the array. Other than that, there have been no incidents and no evidence of drive aging or failures. The NAS array is a RAID-6 and is scrubbed for errors once a week. No evidence of bit-rot (or if so, the scrubbing fixed it).

I would not have expected to go this long with zero failures. But I have. So, if you are looking for reliable drives, might want to look at HGST NAS drives.

[filip]

Did you check SMART status and run HD tests? I use GsmartControl for that.

[jiml8]

Yes, of course. Given their age, monitoring their status has moved up my priority list and I look at them frequently.

[filip]

So they appear healthy! Good. I guess 24/7 helps to reduce startup stress significantly. I had some old HDs and I had one dying just months before warranty ended. For now no significant loss as I have multiple drives copies.

[morgano]

A tip on the subject:

I have rescued the data from one SSD and one CompactFlash, by heating them in a box and keeping them there while reading. They were stone dead when at room temp, not even present to BIOS. The SSD needed only 40C, the CF 70C.

So if you find yourself needing to get data out of a dead storage device, try to heat it, and if that fails, try to cool it.

[jiml8]

A couple of days ago, I was looking at the hard drive marketplace. I immediately went looking for HGST drives to check on reliability and performance of current models.

Well, I couldn't find any. Seems HGST, the brand, is gone. So I dug deeper. Seems Western Digital bought HGST in 2012 but as part of the purchase agreement had to allow them to operate as an independent entity for several years afterward. It was during this time I purchased all my HGST drives.

Now, HGST as a brand has been unwound and merged completely into WD.

That's really too bad; I don't particularly like WD as a company and I have never been overwhelmed by their drives, whereas HGST was formerly Hitachi and still more formerly IBM and, except for one turkey line of Deskstars, were always outstanding drives.

I hope these HGSTs of mine never fail, because I don't know what I will replace them with. I always go toward enterprise drives because reliability is the very most important thing for me in a hard drive. Right now the most likely replacements look like Seagate Iron Wolf Pro drives.

Seagate historically has a mixed record with respect to reliability; some series have been excellent while others were pretty bad. The reviews I have seen on these Iron Wolf Pro drives are all good, but I don't trust any of them because they don't show actual field reliability numbers. I would be interested in anything anyone here has to say about them, or any other NAS-type enterprise grade SATA drives.

I'm not buying now, but given the age of all my devices, I think I need to be ready to go at any time and I want to be pointed in one direction or another when failures start to happen.

[benmc]

here in NZ, HGST 0.5T drives are commonly the HDD found in PVRs. (excellent source BTW for laptop upgrade HDD drives)

would not have thought the drives were cheap enough to be used in such devices, but maybe the manufactures went for the better quality vs failure cost ratio.

regards