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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."
If they are fairly fault tolerant, a reasonable Seagate discount percentage would overcome that higher failure rate, even allowing for installation costs. They can spread that failure out. An individual cannot, therefore I appreciate that they released the statistics.
Personally, I'd really recommend RAID6 with at least 2 parity drives. But always remember, RAID is *NOT* backup. RAID doesn't protect against user stupidity like backup does. RAID does not protect against theft. You don't have to use Backblaze for backups, but for goodness sake USE SOMETHING.
Seagate drives are terrible drives now. I've had three of there external drives not last more then a year.
Agree, I bought 3 2TB Seagates for my home server a few years back...2 of them failed within a year. Yet another brand name I used to trust, now shot to shit.
Why? Because you bought three drives from the same batch. Perhaps they had an issue with that version, or the firmware. Hard drives are extremely cyclical in regards to quality. I remember when Micropolis, Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum, IBM, Conner, and a couple of others used to trade spots for being the best and worst drive manufacturers on an almost yearly basis. I've gone through a hell of a lot of drives over the years, and don't really have a favorite brand. I've had many WD and Seagate drives fail over the years, though proportionally more WD drives. Currently I have a bunch of Seagate and WD spinning drives, along with a couple of Samsung's. I am pretty superstitious regarding anything call Desk Star though. I've had at least half a dozen different models of Desk Stars from both IBM and Hitachi fail with little warning.
DO NOT buy 5 identical drives at the same time from the same place and same manufacturer or face increased risk of more than one dying at (or near) the same time.
Also keep in mind that raid will not protect you from data corruption (or more correctly, it will assure that you retain corrupt data). The happiest event is when a drive flat out dies.