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.
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?
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.
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.)
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You do know there's a vast spectrum between communist and right libertarian, right?
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.
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
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.
I searched on 4+ comments, and didn't see anything, so here is Google's study> (they go through a lot of drives)