Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Who Makes the Best Hard Disk Drives?

Posted by Soulskill on from the spoiler:-it's-not-mcdonald's dept.

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."

6 of 444 comments (clear)

  1. Amazing how times change. by t0qer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Amazing how times change. by gigne · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I only have a couple of home servers with a total of 24 disks, 50% WD, the rest seagate. Never had to send a WD back. Those Seagate drives fail all the damn time. I have replaced 25% of them in 1.5 years. Sometimes the brand new replacement (as in a new retail drive) fails very quickly; 1-4 months.
      I also refuse to use any of their RMA replacement drives as they seem to go bad within 6 months. Not a single RMA's drive has lasted more than 1 year.
      At this point I am actively migrating data off those RAID arrays onto the new WD drives. I have no faith in seagate.

      --
      Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
    2. Re:Amazing how times change. by QRDeNameland · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This is why you just buy whatever is cheap and rig up a RAID 5. A drive craps out and you throw another one in and keep on going.

      That's exactly what I did...note I did not claim to have lost any data when the drives failed. The point is that when you have a 66% failure rate on brand new drives within a year, you start reconsidering your choice of vendor, no?

      --
      Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
  2. I was shopping for one recently by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Ignorant to their own research by danknight48 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion