Hmmm... Seems Hitachi must have been desperate to shake off IBM's disastrous hard drive failure debacle when IBM sold its hard drive division to Hitachi about 2001.

I had the infamous IBM 75GXP Deskstar otherwise known as the 'Deathstar'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar

Worse piece of shit ever made! Last about one month before it failed. No joy from IBM or the supplier!

Interesting. It's fun to see how things have changed over the years. I used to work for a company that was using HDDs in a product. We were using Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate and Quantum.

Hitachi drives were just OK. Some failures, but we didn't decide to use them.

Quantum was the worst. 20 drives came in a box. 5 drives wouldn't even work out of the box. Another 5 would fail during cloning and installation. Another 5 would eventually fail before 3 months.

The Maxtor drives weren't much better. You might get 1 or 2 fail out of the box, with 1-3 fail during cloning and installation. Maybe another 1 would fail in 3 months.

Seagate was bulletproof. All drives worked out of the box, all lasted 3 months or more. I still have 2 of these drives running 13 years later..

We did some initial testing with WD drives but they weren't much better than Hitachi at the time.

It's interesting to see how WD and Hitachi have become the best, while Seagate bought Maxtor and became one of the worst..

Seagate recently had an incident where a large batch of 1TB drives would eventually stop working. It turns out it was the firmware on the drive controller itself. The logging data had a date that was offset and the date would simply run out of space so the drive would freak out and put itself into a kind of safety mode. The problem is that once it did that, it was no longer accessible in any way without doing a UART connection directly to the main ASIC chip and resetting the defaults and then updating the firmware. The problem is that this wasn't doable by the average person and Seagate took forever to even acknowledge the problem, and then their solution was to send the person another drive instead of fixing the old one, which still had their data intact.. It was a huge mess.

I did a test with CD-R types. Most will erase or get errors in full sun in a matter of minutes if the dye is left facing the light. Some would last minutes, some hours. The black plastic CD-Rs would last a lot longer than any of the others.. I still wouldn't trust them to last forever though.

DNA is an excellent medium, but the read/write times are just terrible..

@svart Back in 2001 when IBM's GXP Deskstar series drives were failing in droves IBM claimed the problem was a firmware issue. It wasn't. It was hardware related.

There were so many drive failures that IBM ended up RMA'ing drives and many received replacement drives that had previously already failed and arrived DOA. In other words IBM was replacing faulty drives with faulty drives!

A class action lawsuit against IBM began but it dragged on for years with IBM claiming the GXP Deskstar failures rates were not above the norm. (I never knew 'the norm' could be close to 100%)

In the end they settled by paying $100 to each owner of a failed GXP but never admitted responsibility.

Anyway it was such an unmittigated disaster for IBM they sold their entire hard drive division to Hitachi!

Maybe they know how to make a hard drive that is rain and earthquake and nuclear war resistant and lasts forever, but they'd go out of business.

Morals of the story:

1. the whole economic system is flawed and
2. buy two drives and keep two simultaneous backups of everything

Really? I wonder what the mathematical probability is that two separate backup drives fail simultaneously. Even if they come from the same batch, it would seem to me that the probability would be fairly low. Your backup advice is better, but how many people actually do backups daily?

LOL, I am reading this as I am having to clone all my archived video files to a freshly formatted Seagate drive. The first formatting started having issues after 2 months and zero use. After seeing these charts I might have to switch to another brand, sheeeeet!

Does anyone still burn stuff on CDs? I'm thinking it might provide another level of security.

no surprise there. I stopped buying seagate years ago. They fail far too often

You are confused. Western Digital is independent.

Maxtor was acquired by Seagate.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was acquired by Western Digital.

Particularly relevant post ... just looking at 4 Seagate fails in a RAID6. It appears that one disk got very hot and the adjacent two started errors. Disks are just over a year old.