Seagate. The company that sold me an HDD which broke down two days after the warranty expired.
No thanks.
laughing in Western Digital HDD running for about 10 years now
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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(10 replies)
How many platters?!
30 to 32 platters. You can write a file on the edge and watch it as it speeds back to the future!
That's good, really good news, to see that HDDs are still being manufactured and being thought of. Because I'm having a serious problem trying to find a new 2.5" HDD for my old laptop here in Brazil. I can quickly find SSDs across the Brazilian online marketplaces, and they're not much expensive, but I'm intending on purchasing a mechanical one because SSDs won't hold data for much longer compared to HDDs, but there are so few HDD for sale, and those I could find aren't brand-new.
Dude i had a 240 gb ssd 14 years old. And the SMART is telling me that has 84% life yet. This was a main OS drive and was formatted multiple times. Literally data is going to be discontinued before this disk is going to die. Stop spreading fake news. Realistically how many times you fill a SSD in a typical scenario?
As per my previous comment, I had /var, /var/log, /home/me/.cache, among many other frequently written directories on the SSD since 2019. SSDs have fewer write cycles than HDDs, it's not "fake news".
"However, SSDs are generally more expensive on a per-gigabyte basis and have a finite number of write cycles, which can lead to data loss over time."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive)
I'm not really sure why exactly mine it's coil whining, it happens occasionally and nothing else happens aside from the high-pitched sound, but it's coil whining.
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(3 replies)
SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs
Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it's being backed up (and if it's not backed up it's not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I'll happily give real backup advise if you need it)
In my anecdotal experience across both my family's various computers and computers I've seen bite the dust at work, I've not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I've only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I've never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)
Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don't need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don't even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB
I replaced my laptop's DVD drive with a HDD caddy adapter, so it supports two drives instead of just one. Then, I installed a 120G SSD alongside with a 500G HDD, with the HDD being connected through the caddy adapter. The entire Linux installation on this laptop was done in 2019 and, since then, I never reinstalled nor replaced the drives.
But sometimes I hear what seems to be a "coil whine" (a short high pitched sound) coming from where the SSD is, so I guess that its end is near. I have another SSD (240G) I bought a few years ago, waiting to be installed but I'm waiting to get another HDD (1TB or 2TB) in order to make another installation, because the HDD was reused from another laptop I had (therefore, it's really old by now, although I had no I/O errors nor "coil whinings" yet).
Back when I installed the current Linux, I mistakenly placed /var and /home (and consequently, /home/me/.cache and /home/me/.config, both folders of which have high write rates because I use KDE Plasma) on the SSD. As the years passed by, I realized it was a mistake but I never had the courage to relocate things, so I did some "creative solutions" ("gambiarra") such as creating a symlinked folder for .cache and .config, pointing them to another folder within the HDD.
As for backup, while I have three old spare HDDs holding the same old data (so it's a redundant backup), there are so many (hundreds of GBs) new things I both produced and downloaded that I'd need lots of room to better organize all the files, finding out what is not needed anymore and renewing my backups. That's why I was looking for either 1TB or 2TB HDDs, as brand-new as possible (also, I'm intending to tinker more with things such as data science after a fresh new installation of Linux). It's not a thing that I'm really in a hurry to do, though.
Edit: and those old spare HDDs are 3.5" so they wouldn't fit the laptop.
I doubt the high pitched whine that you're hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is...honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I've got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!
Everybody taking shit about Seagate here. Meanwhile I've never had a hard drive die on me. Eventually the capacity just became too little to keep around and I got bigger ones.
Oldest I'm using right now is a decade old, Seagate. Actually, all the HDDs are Seagate. The SSDs are Samsung. Granted, my OS is on an SSD, as well as my most used things, so the HDDs don't actually get hit all that much.
I had 3 drives from seagate (including 1 enterprise) that died or got file-corruption issues when I gave up and switched to SSDs entirely...
Yeah, same. I switched to seagate after 3 WD drives failed in less then 3 years. Never had problems since.
I've had a Samsung SSD die on me, I've had many WD drives die on me (also the last drive I've had die was a WD drive), I've had many Seagate drives die on me.
Buy enough drives, have them for a long enough time, and they will die.
Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.
Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)
So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh..check your backups I guess?
Had good impressions and experiences with Toshiba drives. Chugged along quiet nicely.
Ah I thought I had remembered their hard drive division being aquired but I was wrong! Per Wikipedia:
At least 218 companies have manufactured hard disk drives (HDDs) since 1956. Most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. None of the first several entrants (including IBM, who invented the HDD) continue in the industry today. Only three manufacturers have survived—Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital
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(1 replies)
That decade old one is 3TB. 😅
Unfortunately, I have about 10 dead 3TB drives sitting around in my closet. I took the sacrifice so you don't have to :-)
at least you have a bunch of nice coasters and cool magnets now.
Thanks. 👍