External Hard Drives About Their Problems

Before creating a new product section I do a bit of research to determine how the site can most fairly list the faults and how it can verify issues that are submitted by users.
I created this article to give our sites users some additional information about hard drive failures and to inform you of the concerns that we have with the listings for hard drives on this site.

While researching external hard drives I realized how hard it would be to objectively list their faults.

It is a bit like a lottery

You see after a few searches I found that just under 10% of consumers experienced a drive failure of some description within the first 12 months of purchase. That seems high but these drives are portable and will be dropped, moved, unplugged and jostled about during their lifespan. After a year I would assume most people wouldn't report a failure. Read on to find out about the research we found, a useful website to visit before you make your next HD purchase and how we deal with listing hard drives on this site.

Recent Studies And Papers

In the info section there is a PDF to download  "Failure trends in large disk drive populations"

Below you will find some quotes and info gleaned from a few studies and papers on hard drive falure rates.
Possibly the most significant would be Googles' paper due to their large storage requirements. Over the years  they have had the opportunity to make some measurable observations.

"We find that the group of drives with scan errors are 10 times more likely to fail than the group with no errors,"

"After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors."

"Hard drives less than three years old and used a lot are less likely to fail than similarly aged hard drives that are used infrequently"

"In contrast to age-related results, we note that all results shown in the rest of the paper are not affected significantly by the population mix." The authors found that drives tended to fail very soon after their first reported SMART scan error and based more on the drive model number and when that model was made rather than the manufacturer who produced it. In other words there are good drive models for a manufacturer and bad drive models.

"We expected to notice a very strong and consistent correlation between high utilisation and higher failure rates. However our results appear to paint a more complex picture. First, only very young and very old age groups appear to show the expected behaviour."

Many times the drive itself may not have failed but only the controller within the enclosure. I have read more than a few cases where users have removed the drive from the enclosure  and were able to retrieve the data. This may be an option for you if you have recently suffered a failure.

It's hard to gauge real world failure rates and list them in the reviews. So if you would like  "high failure rate"  listed for a drive email the following info to us.

• The product 
• The company 
• Supporting evidence, a place we can verify the failure rate (A normal review site adding up the total reviews and the total reported failures, a company press release, or a consumer watchdog bulletin.)

If any consumer groups have released any info about this subject we would be happy to hear about it.

As a result for now the listings here are MOSTLY limited to missing features and incompatibilities.

If you wish to find info on drive performance, reviews etc

There are sites dedicated to reviewing HD storage, StorageReview.com is one, they are not affiliated with us but they do have a lot of good information, product comparrisons, reliability and performance surveys. The StorageReview.com Hard Drive Reliability Survey combines and analyzes individual reader experiences with a variety of hard drives into a comprehensive whole that aims to provide reliability information for reviewed drives. They can be found here

Use our custom Google search by clicking the following link to find other relevant reviews or faults associated with the Portable Hard Drives.
(results are displayed within this site.)

Follow these links to find out the product features or to compare prices.