Hitachi drives..

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Godmachine

[H]F Junkie
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Apr 7, 2003
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Are Hitachi drives safe over long term use? I'm considering buying some big ones for blu-ray back up but I'm nervous to invest in them considering the history , I (believe) that Hitachi drives are not made by IBM anymore correct?

If not I'll probably go with some cheap Seagates.
 
They're fine. Most of the large storage builds on this forum use their drives. Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive division over 7 years ago...dunno why people even associate them anymore.
 
IBM's HDD division was sold to Hitachi years ago after/during the Death Star fiasco. There is no relation with IBM any more, and Hitachi HDDs have been without issues since. I used two Hitachi HDDs until last year, now just one (80 GB) left :)

The only 'negative' thing one could say is that they sometimes cram in more (up to 5) platters to get to a certain capacity which could affect reliability, but in practice I haven't seen any evidence of this having a noticable effect.
 
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Well thats good. I'm a bit pissed off my 1.5TB Seagate when bottom up today (hearing nothing but *clicking* from it) and I don't wanna spend 100 bucks a drive for the newer WD 640 gig blacks , even though I'd like to.
 
If the Newegg reviews are to be believed, Hitachis are among the most reliable hard drives. OTOH can you really trust reviews that say 5-30% of all HDs fail in a short time?

I have a 200GB PATA Hitachi that klunks a few times an hour. Should I be worried? It's been doing that since 2004.
 
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I have 15 500 Gig Hitachis from a server I built in 2005. I stopped using them about 2 years ago and they sat on a shelf. 7 of them have been put back to use and they are working fine.

I had 12 1TB Hitachis from a server built in ~2007 (I think it was originally 5 drives, then 7 purchased about 6-12 months later). They wound up in an iSCSI array for the last year I had them and I sold the entire thing back in March.

I now have 23? 2TB Hitachis purchased at various times starting 12/2009. They are in use in my current server today.

I can't comment on Hitachi's RMA process because I never had to send one in. I have a 100% success rate so far across all the Hitachis I've had in my ownership.

OTOH, I've had other servers with Seagate and Western Digital drives. Out of 15 Seagate 1TB drives, I've sent back approximately 4 under warranty. These were the ES.2 series drives. I sold them all at the beginning of the year to offset the cost of buy the Hitachis. Out of about 20 250 Gig Western Digitals, I may have sent back about 6 or 7 under warranty. About 4 have died out of warranty now. Some of them are still being used in some form or another in various machines. Both companies have an excellent RMA process.
 
larrymoencurly said:
I have a 200GB PATA Hitachi that klunks a few times an hour. Should I be worried? It's been doing that since 2004.
Click to expand...

That's perfectly normal behaviour. My two Hitachi drives do the same thing. It's basically a fix Hitachi applied to the Deskstar drives before they came up with new drive designs. The Deathstar syndrome was due to the bearings getting stuck, IIRC. What the firmware fix does is reset the position of the heads after a certain idle time to prevent this from happening. This is the 'clunk' sound you hear. It's not harmful.

Newer Hitachi drives do not have this issue and thus do not make 'clunk'-ing noises :)
 
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