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Bad Time To Be Buying HDDs

Posted: Fri Nov 04, 2011 6:44 pm
by Jim
I recently bought 10 NEW WD SATA 2 320 GB drives, and tested 7 of them with TESTHDD, which is available in the downloads section here. Of the 7 tested, ONE tested GOOD, and all the rest had either a considerable amount of "Sector Damage" or very LOW Read Speeds, as compared to the ONE GOOD one.

My conclusion is that the flooding in Thailand, (where the majority of WD and Seagate drives are made), is severely disrupting production, and leading the manufacturers to sell substandard drives to meet demand.

I therefore strongly recommend putting off buying HDDs at this time, and if you must buy one or more, then test them with TESTHDD.

Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2011 6:39 am
by DonPedro
jim,
ten hdds? are you going into the reseller-business?
:)

Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2011 5:31 pm
by Jim
Nah, I bought 5 for my newest contraption, (2 Internal & 1 in a Hot Swap Tray; - with 2 more in additional Hot Swap Trays to sustitute in for the mounted 1). They turned out to be pretty bad, so I returned them and bought 5 more, NOT any better.

Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2011 12:24 am
by jsc1973
I haven't heard of a rash of problems like that. Did you get all of those drives from the same vendor? I wonder if they didn't get a shipment of bad drives from the factory that was never meant to be sent out, and now they're reselling them.

It wouldn't make any sense for WD to knowingly ship out dodgy drives, since they'll all eventually be sent back and have to be replaced at their expense. I guess it would make their end-of-year financials look better, but more profit in December would just be offset by a huge loss come March.

If this is going on, I bet we'll find out for sure within a week after Black Friday...

RE: Bad Time To Be Buying HDDs

Posted: Sat Nov 19, 2011 12:43 pm
by soyoboy
I bought a Seagate Barracuba 7200.12 (ST3500418AS) 500 GB mechanical hard drive on March 18. It was in an OEM wrapped anti-static bag. At that time, it cost $35. After one month, the price dropped to $30. Another month later, it was no longer stocked on the shelves. The 1 TB version was its replacement at every retail store in the neighborhood. The 1 TB hard drive was then priced at $55.

Is it just me or have mechanical hard drives doubled or tripled in price? It might be because of the floods in Thailand. But why/how did the 500 GB hard drives reemerge and appear back onto the market? The ST500DM002 appears to be only different from its predecessor in one aspect. It supports SATA 3 (6Gb/s).

The Western Digital hard drives were known to be more reliable than the Seagate drives last year. The only major hick up was seen in the Caviar Blue line of drives. Not sure what the problem was with the Blues. But a lot of people told me to avoid the Caviar Blues. Last year, I purchased a pair of Caviar Blacks based on that advice. They currently run together in RAID 1 (mirroring). One of the drives tends to pop out of RAID, twice so far, but the other runs perfectly. I had a feeling that data goofiness would happen. Hence the need for RAID 1. God help anyone trying to run RAID 0 on a pair of Caviar Blues.

I am currently running the Seagate hard drive, purchased this year, in a socket 7 computer. I read the mikemex posting "Socket 7 into 2011". I thought that I would follow his foot steps but with an infusion of new parts. The project started on October 21st. Replaced the heatsink, on November 1st, with heat pipe technology. Everything seems to be fine. But now I want to try the TESTHDD program.

Thanks to Jim for mentioning TESTHDD. Should I make a thread that highlights my socket 7 in 2011? Or would that just be overkill because mikemex did an excellent job?

RE: Bad Time To Be Buying HDDs

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 8:18 pm
by Jim
And thanks to Soyoboy for telling me that WD "Caviar Blues" are NFG; cause those were the ones I bought !! - All they had in the 320 Gig size I wanted.