Slashdot Mirror
Who Makes the Best Hard Disk Drives?
Hamsterdan writes "Backblaze, the cloud backup company who open sourced their Storage Pod a few years ago, is now providing information on drive failure rates. They currently have over 27,000 consumer grade drives spinning in Backblaze storage pods. There are over 12,000 drives each from Seagate and Hitachi, and close to 3,000 from Western Digital (plus a too-small-for-statistical-reporting smattering of Toshiba and Samsung drives). One cool thing: Backblaze buys drives the way you and I do: they get the cheapest consumer-grade drives that will work. Their workload is almost one hundred percent write. Because they spread the incoming writes over several drives, their workload isn't overly performance intensive, either. Their results: Hitachi has the lowest overall failure rate (3.1% over three years). Western Digital has a slightly higher rate (5.2%), but the drives that fail tend to do so very early. Seagate drives fail much more often — 26.5% are dead by the three-year mark."
I remember when WD caviar drives were the most replaced component on systems I serviced. Seagate was the top contender with their SCSI 10krpm drives.
I built a new gaming rig the weekend after Black Friday and had to comparison shop all the consumer hard drives on the market (read: offered by Newegg). From the reviews, Hitachi is a relative unknown, Seagates tend to last just until their three year warranty is up, and Western Digital offers a five year warranty (and a price premium to match). I ended up grabbing the WD Black. Struck by how crap seek times are on 7200 RPM TB+ sized drives.
Funny how rarely data like this is really available, people are storing more and more these days, and not one of them publishes useful data about environment / workload / failure info.
Glad to see someone is!
They wrote a check to Dice?
After all this research, Backblaze still pick the highest failing drive.
"What Drives Is Backblaze Buying Now?
We are focusing on 4TB drives for new pods. For these, our current favorite is the Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000)"
So what was the point in this advert again?
I live in mortal terror of the Seagate Squeak. This is an intermittent sound that their 2 and 3 GB Barracudas sometimes start to make after a while, which sounds a little like a bird chirp. It's apparently caused by crap power management on the drive.
There's actually very little information out there on whether or not it is a definitive precursor of drive failure, or just something those drives start to do after a while. However, it's so unsettling that I've ended up pre-emptively replacing two drives in my home PC which developed it.
I've gone through many hard drives in my personal computers but only ever had two ever die on me, it was a 80GB and 120GB Maxtor hard drives. I even had an IBM deathstar last me a number of years before I decided to upgrade it to a newer drive. Sure it's a sample size of me but I've been avoiding Seagate drives ever since they acquired maxtor.
What's the use case for any more than 50% write?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Enterprise grade disks? The cheapest disk is not always the cheapest disk in the long run. I can buy consumer disks for my disk servers, but when they fail I have to spend time replacing them and paying for them myself. When my enterprise grade disks fail, they're under warranty and are replaced "free".
For the past 11 years, I used nothing but Seagate drives in my builds for clients. Over those past 11 years, I built something like 20 systems a month (on average) with occasional large scale orders of 200. The number of failed Seagates I could count *on one hand* YMMV clearly, but I stand behind Seagates.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I have a server with mixed WD and Seagate drives, plus a couple of NAS units - probably 15 drives total. I can recall a single WD failure in about 5 years. Seagate's drop dead at a rate of about 1 a year. The Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB seem to be the most likely to fail. Every one of those I have brought has died - the 1TB units and the 3TBs seem to be about as reliable was the WD drives. The only major difference is the WD's are much less like to work in NAS units - in that case it is not a failure, but a compatibility issue - they work fine in a PC.
I (perhaps stupidly) used a lot of the WD green drives in a RAID file server that doesn't stay on 24/7 or get turned on all that often. Yes I know that WD greens are not designed for RAIDs... but I digress.
It seems that they mostly fail when the hard drive electronics fails on them, and then the drive controller on my mainboard can't detect the drives on power up.
One day the drive is working fine, and the next day the BIOS can't tell that there's a drive there!
I've always suspected that Seagate drives would die sooner than the other drives because I've noticed that they run MUCH hotter than the other two brands.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The Deskstar wasn't nicknamed Deathstar for nothing, back in the day...
My old clunker Pentium 200mhz PC with an almost 20 year old 2.1g WD hard drive still works, the drive is noisy as heck but still chugs along.
Ever since that flood in 2010, Drive Failure rates have blown... and blown hard!
Since 2010, I have had more drive fail then I have ever seen before, from DOA, to weeks to a few months... I still have HDD's from BEFORE 2010 that are still running, however I have yet to have a drive MFG after 2010 that has lasted... thats 4 years, longest running one right now is 2 years and its RAID 1 duplicate has just died...
RIP Quality HDD's!
I remember about 7 years ago we used to refer to the Hitachi Deskstar line, as Deathstars. Now what am I to do for silly Hard Drive puns.
Is this a Backblaze ad or a Hitachi ad?
I just store everything in the CLOUD.
Everything in the CLOUD lasts FOREVER.
I like the anecdote + anecdote = data guys here...
they are so sure of themselves and see themselves as 'data' guys when they are like little old ladies leaning over the fence....
The only thing I know from this set of 'observations' is that there are still lots of little companies that are kind of shitty and not worth doing business with.
"Backblaze buys drives the way you and I do: they get the cheapest consumer-grade drives that will work."
Most people on Slashdot will not go for cheapest that will work. I go for quality even if its $15.00-$30.00 more so i dont have to worry about failure as much..Cheapest drives = idiot grade, not consumer grade
If you RTFA, they break down the failure rates by model (no pun intended). There's a pretty huge variation between models (or at least the Seagate models). That's also what I saw in the StorageReview reliability database back when people were actively updating it (unfortunately you have to add a drive to the database to get access to it, so it was never very popular). The same manufacturer can make a gem and a stinker of a model. e.g. the IBM 75GXP (aka Deathstar) drives had one of the highest failure rates in the database. The drive which replaced it (60GXP I think) had one of the lowest failure rates in the database.
So it's more nuanced than "Seagate stinks, Hitachi rules." (Hitachi is a subsidiary of WD now, operating separately only because that was a condition China placed on them before they'd OK the merger.)
mirrors my experience too. i'm very impressed with hitachi drives, western digital/samsung are pretty poor and seagate are just plain shite.
#include <sig.h>
Seagate consumer drives are solid. I have two seagates going 4+ years. Toshiba and Samsung drives are good too.
and switched to 'premium Seagate'
I'm just doomed.
If there's one thing you can credit Seagate for, it's consistency - since the 90's the (R) for refurb on their drives has been the kiss of death, guaranteeing another failure within 3 months of receiving the replacement. While it's great they have a clearly understandable domestic RMA team, they often send you a broken drive to replace your defective drive so you now have to pay to ship two drives back.
If you politely ask them to send you a new drive since they keep sending you bad drives, they'll politely tell you they can't guarantee you a healthy drive. Typically with our servers we're guaranteed a bad Seagate SAS 10k drive with a bank of 10 drives and we're pretty much at a 100% failure rate with RMA drives and many times the RMA drives they send us are broken. Seagate (R) drives should never be installed in a server or anything reliable... heck, I'd keep Seagate drives out of anything you want to remain reliable.
1 terabyte of storage that lasts 2 years is twice as useful as 1 terabyte of storage that lasts 1 year.
Always buy whatever drive is warranted for 5 years. I pay 50% more for this! It's worth every penny. My terabyte-years are the cheapest.
I have a 20TB LAN spread out over 3-4 computers (depending on the year). The only major crashes I've had on anything under 5 years old was, ironically, the 2 WD Cavier Green's I accidentally bought (meant to buy black; got a little slaphappy with the shopping cart one afternoon). They both died within 6 months.
The choice now is: Western Digital Cavier Black. The study posted in this article will not acknowledge this as they bought the cheapest drives possible. It may make business sense with redundancy, but i do not RAID. Too expensive. (Ironic?)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Thank you Backblaze, for posting bona-fide real-world comparisons.
I have had so many Seagate drives fail on me in the past 10 years it's not even funny. One client of mine had a Seagate fail in their server's RAID-1 array, then not more than a month later, the other one failed. Musta been a(nother?) bad batch.
Western Digital has always been a solid drive and that's what I recommend to my clients. Can't say much for the others, because I normally only deal with them when I'm replacing them - either for upgraded storage or because they've failed/are failing.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Since their workload is 100% write, I recommend they use WOM (Write Only Memory).
I guess Hitachi fixed the DeathStar issues. I remember those old IBM Deskstar having horrible failure rates, then Hitachi bought the division.
In my experience, the HGST drives made in Thailand are the ones that have the low failure rate. The HGST drives made in China fail near the end of their 3 year warranty.
My comment subject might seem a bit racially biassed, but it's because pretty much all drives are manufctured in "Asia" these days. So to answer your question directly, Asians make the best drives!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After hearing his horror stories, I wondered if I made the right choice buying WD drives
But, the evidence speaks for itself...100% reliability
This study is interesting, but consumer-grade hard drives are exactly not supposed to be used in this way. I worked on server-grade hard drives (also 3.5") that were going seven years old without spinning down and getting slammed hard all day, every day. The failure rate was less than 1% for all brands in seven years' time in an array that filled two server racks. The 2.5" drives are even better.
Vibrations causing failure? Brother label makers? Isn't this the online storage vendor that was bragging about shucking portable hard drives to get around a soft embargo imposed during the Indonesian flood crisis?
Kriston
I bought a Samsung (which is really a rebranded Seagate) to use in my HTPC and less than a year later, it died. I sent it back and got a replacement, but it was a huge pain to have to reinstall Mythbuntu and XBMC, get the two programs reconfigured and communicating again, as well as re-import all of my TV shows, movies, and music and fix all of the broken metadata. Since I suspected that the drive may have been running hot, I installed temperature monitoring software for the hard drive and had it record the temp once per minute. Less than a year later, that drive began to fail. I looked at the temperature logs while the drive still worked and it was pretty steady at about 40 degrees Celsius. I thought this may have been too hot, but when I looked up the specs for the drive, it was rated to operate at up to 60 degrees Celsius. So that's two Seagate drives that failed in less than a year each. Even though I may be able to get another replacement from Seagate for the failed drive, I wouldn't bother wasting my time reinstalling and reconfiguring the HTPC apps just to have the drive fail again, so I broke down and bought a WD Green since my other WD's have been solid over the past several years.
I'd like to know Google's numbers for drive failures. Or something as statistically significant.
Could have fooled me. I bought my first Hitachi drive last year and it died in less than a week. RMA the drive and it was DOA, twice!! I'll never buy Hitachi again.
It looks like I have my own test going on. I have 4 different manufacturers.
I used Speccy to tell me what I have. http://www.piriform.com/speccy
Two of the drives are internal.
931GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 ATA Device (SATA)
931GB Seagate ST1000DM003-1CH162 ATA Device (SATA)
931GB SAMSUNG HD103SI USB Device (USB (SATA))
931GB Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 USB Device (USB)
Seagate any more. I don't expect Seagate drives to just crash and die, but these stats clearly speak to that Seagate drives are in a class of their own - in a bad way. Hitachi seem to have been building drives of unrivaled quality.
Through sheer coincidence, I started shopping for a "large" home NAS today (large to me, at least, 5-8 bays for 4 TB drives), while snowed in at home. So I've been looking a lot at drives, too. This may definitely help, especially since I do have a budget.
Of course for work, this may help even more, since I'm shopping for stuff for there during my day job. I think I'll probably specify Hitachi drives where possible for that. Oddly, most of the drives in our cluster happen to *already* be Hitachi 2 TB SATA drives.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Slashvertising? Oh welll... I, for one, am happy to have a source of failure rate data from an entity that uses a high volume of consumer level hard drives. I hope they continue to publish these numbers because HD failure rates are a moving target. The only thing better would be to have failure rates on specific model numbers. I'm now tweaking my slickdeals alert to filter for hitachi drives.
My first hard drive failure was a Seagate 20Meg RLL drive in 1990. I replaced it with another (used) one, and it failed in two or three months. After that, I used Maxtor or Quantum exclusively until 2011, when I bought a Seagate 320Mb IDE, which failed in six months. A year later, I bought a Seagate 1 Gig, and the SATA plastic connector sheared during removal, leaving the drive useless. But it didn't fail.
All told, I've had thirteen Maxtors without failure and two Quantums with no failures. Meanwhile none of the four Seagates I've had survived a year.
I've drawn my own conclusions.
I avoided ordering Hitachi drives because of their horrible RMA process. Anyone know if this has improved?
Seagate own Maxtor. Has since 2006.
At The consumer level this is amazing info
I personally have had no joy with WD hard disks and won't buy one again. I have had excellent success with Fujitsu hard drives. Never had one die. They have sold their HD operation to Toshiba. I just bought a Toshiba 2 T hard drive. Hope the quality holds still. I had reasonable success with IBM. One thing I found out with hard drives is occasionally when bad sectors are a problem, that Linux deep badblock test will resurrect an otherwise bad HD. I did this from a Knoppix live CD since that works only on an unmounted partition. But an 80 gig HD takes all night. I hate to think what its going to take with 2 T.
Long ago, a company I worked for had a Seagate in their server. Seagate had a deal where they offered optional overnight replacements for their drives. The HD died and their guarantee turned out to be an illusion. It took 8 days to get a replacement. I have never owned anything Seagate. Quality does not just stop with the hardware.
Cheerful Charlie
That's so 20th century... Went to SSDs a couple of years ago and will never go back.
If a rep's lips are moving, they're lying...
"I will go up to the six-fingered admin and say. Hello. My name is I/O Montoya. You killed my data. Prepare to die."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Backblaze says they suspect their ridiculously high failure rates of some "green" drives are due to aggressive power management... Would you like to guess what 2.5" laptop drives all do???
Laptop components are made to be low-power and light-weight, not particularly durable. Yeah, I'd fully expect WORSE reliability from laptop hard drives than desktop drives.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I say I agree. That's why seagate has the lowest warranties in the business!
Have been buying exclusively WD in the non SSD space since they had that fiasco with the firmwares killing drives. Those ones were probably the last seagate drives I purchased.
But the main reason, is right around that time, maybe because they were in financial trouble, they chopped up all their great 5 year warranties, and made them mostly all 1 year. Or you gotta pay more for more warranty. WD did it as well, but a black still has a 5 year warranty. So its worth the extra 20%. I am sooo not surprised that seagate drives barely last 3 years. One might say they are engineered to fail.
I can't see how that would be a good long term business strategy. Not that companies don't make poor decisions, or cut costs despite engineer's pleas though. Is the proof in the pudding? only time will tell.
-
A year later, I bought a Seagate 1 Gig, and the SATA plastic connector sheared during removal, leaving the drive useless. But it didn't fail.
I'm quite sure 1GB drives did not have SATA connectors back then. Additionally, it did fail: a connector breakage is a failure too.
They sure do. It looks to me like the companies Seagate bought over the years are allowed to do their own thing, pretty much, as long as they turn a profit.
That's not the point. Seagate drives are not Maxtor drives, regardless of who owns the companies that make them.
BTW, doesn't Seagate also own WD?
Seagate own Maxtor. Has since 2006.
And that seems to be about when the decline in their warranty started. I've heard horror stories about Maxtor, but the two I've owned still worked when I took them off line after many years of use. In fact, I just replaced my home grown firewall which had a 15+ year old 12 GB Maxtor in it.
While this may be off topic, I have not had good luck with Duracell 8G SD cards. 2 fails out of 4 devices within the first 24 hours.
Remind me to stay out of the discount aisle at Fry's
Back in the day ..I bought a used Toshiba drive off Usenet from someone at a college in IL. Not home at moment so can't give the exact model.. mk120 maybe? I ran in a server for well over 10 years before I retired it due to capacity constraints - it was still spinning merrily along. It would be interesting to see these drive failure rates as a function of number of platters as well as density and over time.
Actually if you look they do call out model numbers and even talk about which ones they won't touch and I find this VERY interesting and informative! As it happens my 30TB of space happens to contain a mix of both "reliable" and "unreliable" drives according to their testing. I run a mix of sizes from 1.5TB to 3TB using unRAID and as drives fill up they get upgraded. I have a few 1.5s that they call out as being trash (ST31500341AS) and an EARS drive of that size that should probably go ASAP since they are well into their second if not third year of use. I actually happen to be running a parity check right now and once I got past the 1.5 drives speeds increased a great deal. Once past the 2TB models things got even better so the 3TB drives appear to be much better performers. Naturally they list the ST3000DM001 as having a 10% failure rate too so I'm not exactly doing handstands! The replacement drives are all that model and I've been playing with them in another system to try and come up with something better for my needs than unRAID and so far nothing has come out much better so into the array I guess they will go here shortly.
My hat's off to Backblaze for publishing this and letting consumers know who's got decent drives and putting feet to the fire those that don't!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
The same can be said for anyone who's job it is to get someone to buy something from their employer or themselves. Of course they might just be telling you the truth, as the truth does not diminish the probability of a successful sale and might indeed improve it if the rep knows what they're talking about.
I worked for 10 years at an IT parts wholesaler.
Over that time we sold Seagate / IBM / Western Digial / Samsung and Fujitus HDD's in all formats
2.5 / 3.5 - 5400 / 7200 / 10K / 15K RPM
_ALL_ of them had bad batches.
Anyone remember:
Seagate Barracuda II drives ? 30Gb model - at the time the fastest IDE drive you could get - 40+% failure rate
IBM Deskstar ~72Gb IDE Drives - 60% failure rate - just Google `IBM Death Star` you will still get hits and this was _YEARS!_ ago.
Samsung - batch of ( i think ) 500Gb SATA drives ~30% failure rate.
OCZ SSD's ... need i say more....
Moral to the story - they are all the same - if you dont have a backup - you dont have your data.
And in the last 25 years I've replaced about 200 failed drives. The Maxtors failed at about 5x the rate of the Seagates. That shows you want ancidotal evidence is worth.
To know actual reliability, you need stats on the level of Google or Amazon, that can tally failures by the 10's of thousands.
want/what
A few years back a rep told me that 2.5" drives were generally more reliable than 3.5" because 2.5" were designed for laptops, were they would be expected to have a hard life, and 3.5" were generally used in desktops where they would be less likely to be knocked and dropped. He said that the smaller drives reliability was was still better even when based on relative capacity (say 2x 500GB 2.5" vs 1x 1000GB). Obviously the cost differential for large amounts of storage is not favourable (except to the rep), but for home use or where reliability is important it might be worth thinking about - YMMV based on how careful you are?
I think the reason for the longevity difference that you refer to is based on the auto-park head features on 2.5" drives over 3.5" drives. Laptop drives tend to have accelerometers or the like in them to detect shock and weird motion in order to park the heads quickly to prevent data loss. if the drive is "fixed" and not moving around while spinning nor getting jolted while on or off then I can't see where the reliability would come down to anything more than MTBF and manufacturing defects.
--Here's a little optimization tip for you - a 1TB drive takes ~8 hours or so with this, IIRC:
BEGIN /root/bin/scandisk
#!/bin/bash
# RW scan of HD
argg='/dev/'$1
hdparm -c1 -d1 -u1 $argg
blockdev --setra 16384 $argg
blockdev --getra $argg
time badblocks -f -c 10240 -n -s -v $argg
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I searched on 4+ comments, and didn't see anything, so here is Google's study> (they go through a lot of drives)
im still using a WD 120GB 5400rpm EIDE HDD (WD1200JB-00GVA0)... cant remember for how long ive had it. never really write to it... mostly read.
and i have an old WD 150GB 10k rpm SATA HDD in the same PC (WD1500AHFD-00RAR5) thats still chugging along perfectly (love how loud it is... reminds me of times past). lots of read/write.
only HDD to ever die on me was an external WD HDD.
Write-only? What does this company do, just archive perl scripts?
Is there any data on models currently on the market? If I'm looking for, say, a 1TB drive that doesn't die within two years, which models should I be looking for?
I debated for a while as to whether or not I should post my link. I will.
Somethings to keep in mind:
1) My experience is from 5 years ago. Seagate is a different company today and what I say in my link does not apply today. What I wrote back then does NOT directly apply to the discussion in this Slashdot thread.
2) My email address at the end is no longer valid. Feel free to use the one at Slashdot instead. (Somehow, in my recent international move, the password I was using stopped working at that particular account.)
3) I'm posting this because I think those on Slashdot may enjoy what I wrote. It has a table of contents and an obscene number of summaries and tallies throughout so one can accurate keep track of what went on.
4) I'm also posting this because if you're from a company, it may be a good case study in how not to do things. Feel free to do a "Save As". It's only a single page with a CSS.
5) I never did register this link with Google so it never showed up when searching, but it has been out there for 5 years. I was about one day away from making it searchable and posting my link in a bunch of forums when I got a call from the last guy who finally helped me out.
6) In my writings, I say the following: " It does me no good to see Seagate lose sales and have problems. It doesn't benefit me to see Seagate distribute products that are of poor quality. It does me no good to bad mouth Seagate just to bad mouth them." What I was trying to say is this: I want to see Seagate (and every company) fairly compete and fully succeed. Taking the cheap way out every time is a bad idea and companies forget that. In my case, the warning signs were all there, but the customer service reps didn't listen to me and address the actual problems I was having. It's a very common problem that way too many companies have had for a very long time. It is not limited to Seagate.
7) I'm re-emphasizing that what is written in my link is not a reflection of the Seagate of today. Five years is a long time for any company and quality can go in either direction in that time frame. I'll let others speak about the Seagate today.
My link for your reading:http://badexperience.angelfire.com/Seagate.html
Don't knock me too badly for it being on angelfire. It was free, and meant to be throw away. Oh... and use noscript. The only javascript I wrote was to obfuscate my email address, but it looks like a thousand javascript functions are added to my stuff from Angelfire. I have no idea what they put on there.
This is to answer your comment indicating that hard drive failure is up to 66% during the first year. Not the standard situation.
Some time ago I read another article related to Backblaze experience. Their conclusions were that any serious defective hard drive is detected (fails) during the first 30 days running 24x7 (hours). After that period of time they mark it as "safe to use" for a period of time of 2-3 years. After 3 years the chance of failure increase exponentially (similar to warranty). After 5 years is a 50% chance of failuer (if I remember correctly).
At home I do the same: I buy hitachi/toshiba attach them for 30 days 24x7 using somewhat similar RAID-1. After 2 months I known the "life expectancy".
These statistics confirm my experience with all three over the past 20 years. Have been buying Hitachi for past 5 years no issues yet!
I only bought Western Digital drives in the last 15 years and I have never had a single issue.
I also RTM one drive that developed a few bad sectors before warranty expiration and they sent me a new one.
Great customer service for great products.
If you're PAID to punch someone in the face (e.g a Boxer), then you'd be done for fraud for NOT doing so (throwing the fight).
Seagate et al are PAID TO SUPPLY HDD. Supplying information so you can pick the "best candidate" for your needs (e.g. if it's a USB external caddy you want to fill, a cheap and dies early seagate drive is fine) IS REQUIRE for libertarian Free Market Ideals to fucking well WORK.
Laptop drives were optimised for power cycling frequently, enterprise optimised for continuous active operation (spinning storage is expensive: if you're not using it constantly, you're wasting money and should back that up to inert storage) and desktops were optimised for price between the two others. Playing a game you may never touch much of the HDD for half an hour. Writing a long letter, same deal. But you don't power cycle the desktop computer like you would a laptop.
"I've drawn my own conclusion" is not to recommend anyone else draw the same one.
Some people have won the Power Ball lottery more than once, although most people lose.
They help keep me familiar with the rebuild procedures on my RAID cards.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
And when Seagate bought out Maxstor - I stopped buying Seagate. I have boxes of failed Maxstor drives. I don't want to get one hidden under the Seagate name.
HereLooks like they like Hitachi a touch above WD. But YMMV.
Bark less. Wag more.
SMART is, however, usually right if it says a drive is failing. So if it gives you a 10% chance of a heads-up it's worth monitoring.
Seagate bought Maxtor, so there you go.
and how are you finding the toshibas to be doing,i had a problem with a large batch of tosh hd's a few years ago,how are they now? will probably keep buying wd 10k raptors for a while yet,not cgeap butvthey seem to last well. although i find thesectests never seem to carry on with many drives into longervterm tests. i have drives from the early 90's which ran for ten years as system drives on a pair of pc's,they still boot and run ok when hooked upto newer hardware and one has run almist a year of sitting in my bunker just spinning cos i did'nt realise machine was still there,i thought friend had borrowed it for a little project ha had
I have returned a crapload of the older ones that had the good 5-year warranty, and every single one that has been sent back as a replacement was labeled as a refurbished drive.
I stopped trusting Seagate after they bought and rebranded Conner. I have to say the numbers reported in the article make the whole thing wildly inaccurate. "There are over 12,000 drives each from Seagate and Hitachi, and close to 3,000 from Western Digital". Of course WD is going to fail less with numbers like that. Personally I use and Trust WD but I base it off my own experiences not a report like this.
Chris Sheppard
Their cheapest line / budget consumer drives are MAXTOR, which we all know suck big time.
Get up into their better drives, and my bet is the failure rate plummets.
Like a MiniScribe.
We still have a 1989 vintage VAXstation running 24x7 and used every weekday, with a DEC RZ24 (204MB) and RZ25 (425MB) drive in it; those drives weren't orignal (it came with a ~100MB RZ23, which is also still operable but currently shelved). No errors, no failures. The only repair to the system was a new power supply a few years ago.
I also have a working CMS/Seagate ST277N, ~64MB 5.25" half height SCSI, purchased new in 1988, in daily use until about 2006 on an Apple //GS then a Mac, then back to the GS, and still booted about once every two weeks since then, no trouble at all. I think this was not long after Seagate bought the CDC drive division (Imprimis?) which was a premium name back then. So the answer is... older drives were better quality. At least here. And SCSI drives were built better (you got what you paid for)
Odd results.
I've experienced the opposite. Seagate have by far been the most reliable for me over the years, if dead they arrive in the post that way. All have been eventually retired due to storage size in full working order.
Whereas Maxtor die very quickly followed by Hitachi but at least they gave warnings (lasted about five years).
I think a lot of it comes down to usage patterns and the fab center of origin.
WD drives are the worst. I had multiple black, blue, and green ones and they pretty much failed with in a year. So far 3 years and still running a hitachi 512mb drive. Poor quality control for WD.
One cool thing: Backblaze buys drives the way you and I do: they get the cheapest consumer-grade drives that will work.
That is not how I buy hard drives. I buy the hard drive that best fits my requirements at the time, which is literally never "the cheapest one I can find." ...insensitive clods...
This is interesting, as I generally use "laptop" drives for "desktop" and "server" purposes due to lower noise and power draw. I've never had a 2.5'' drive fail, but it's bad statistics with such a low number, as not too many 3.5'' ones have failed on me either.
You might think that smaller size makes things inherently more vulnerable, but there are in fact scaling arguments for the opposite. Insects can take quite a fall, whether relatively to their size or absolutely. OTOH, I think laptop components used to have higher quality standards than their desktop counterparts -- they were prestigious toys for the executives, and it's harder to swap components that go bad, so manufacturers would take extra steps to avoid problems.
Also, I'd like to think that smaller drives should not be inherently slower -- consider the seek latency from the distances the drive head moves, and the fact we generally make electronics faster by making it smaller. Alas, laptop drives tend to have more aggressive power saving mechanisms, such as lower RPM. It's nice that the SATA connector has removed one articifial barrier between "laptop" and "desktop" drives, though.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Well, there's the answer then for Unitron. I'm not surprised at all that they do this and I may have even seen a few myself but since they shortened the warranty I don't think I've had any that fell under it to go back. I did once have one that I was sure was new enough but their system kept kicking out as being an invalid serial and it drove me crazy! I know they pull shenanigans and it sux but much like ISP who else are you going to goto but the very few HDD vendors these days? I'm just BackBlaze is providing info and wish others would as well...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Useful information! I would be interested in a similar "real world" assessment of SSDs. Maybe some day?
That's not really an answer.
I know that drives are sold which are labeled as "refurbished", and I assume that they aren't fresh off the assembly line but were actually returns.
But a label on them saying "refurbished" only proves that someone slapped a label on them, and is no assurance that anyone actually tested the drive to see if anything was wrong and fixed it if there was anything wrong.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
From my experience in the datacenter where I work, the failure rate on 2.5" drives has been way higher than 3.5" (granted all of the drives we use are 15k vs the 7200/5400/4200 rpm ones commonly put in laptops). The 2.5" drives we've used fail at a rate of at least 2-3 times higher than our 3.5" ones. On the flip side, we can fit way more of them in a rack and the power requirements are lower so its been worth it to keep using them despite the failure rate
You guys realize that these manufacturers publish MTBF data for each drive, right? At least a few years ago before I got out of the hardware biz, it was right there clear as purple crayon.
It used to be, that SCSI drives were commercial quality and expensive, and IDE drives were junk consumer. But SCSI drives were expected to be adequately cooled, and some of the old Seagate 4GB SCSI drives had a high failure rate because of inadequate cooling. I wonder if this doesn't translate into modern drives as well, with Seagate expecting that its cooling requirements be followed, or exceeded, while others are more suited to punishment.