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."

16 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.
    3. Re:Amazing how times change. by brianwski · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Amazing how times change. by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Amazing how times change. by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  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?

    1. Re:Ignorant to their own research by Derec01 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Ignorant to their own research by QuasiSteve · · Score: 5, Informative

      After all this research, Backblaze still pick the highest failing drive

      They're looking for 4TB models. They only cite two models without any further information.

      Seagate ST4000DM000
      vs
      Hitachi HDS5C4040ALE630

      You can look up technical details, benchmarks, etc. but perhaps the decision is simply in the price.
      Seagate: $164.99
      Hitachi: $295.00

      For the Hitachi model to start making sense, price-wise, that Seagate model would have to fail a lot more than their numbers are currently showing,

      ( And yes, I'd imagine they can squeeze better deals than regular consumer prices out of the companies - but then, they could do that for either brand, and probably through an intermediary anyway. )

    3. Re:Ignorant to their own research by brianwski · · Score: 5, Informative

      After all this research, Backblaze still pick the highest failing drive.

      Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. Every month we ask a list of about 20 suppliers for their best price on a variety of drives. There is a little spreadsheet we have that kicks out which drive to purchase based on those prices and drive failure rates. Even if Hitachi is the very highest reliability in our application, it only justifies a SMALL price premium because when one drive dies, we don't lose any customer data. It saves our datacenter IT team 15 minutes to *NOT* swap a drive, so that's worth 15 minutes of salary to us, but not more.

  4. That's interesting by IWantMoreSpamPlease · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:That's interesting by fisted · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well I don't know how many fingers your have on one hand, but it can't be possibly be just five.

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
  5. Re:And what about... by brianwski · · Score: 5, Informative

    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. I object to the marketing term "Enterprise grade", it is confusing, and I'm not even sure they have the attributes you think they have. There is a completely different blog post Backblaze did about "Enterprise vs Consumer Drives" which comes to the conclusion Enterprise isn't better: http://blog.backblaze.com/2013...

  6. Depends on model by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

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

    Comment removed based on user account deletion