Hard Drive Reliability Study Flawed?

storagedude writes "A recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze was deeply flawed, according to Henry Newman, a longtime HPC storage consultant. Writing in Enterprise Storage Forum, Newman notes that the tested Seagate drives that had a high failure rate were either very old or had known issues. The study also failed to address manufacturer's specifications, drive burn-in and data reliability, among other issues. 'The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old! Since it is well known in study after study that disk drives last about 5 years and no other drive is that old, I find it pretty disingenuous to leave out that information. Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing.'"

Comments

Release Date != Age of Drive

[anagama]

Is he saying that 1.5TB drives are all 5 years old? If you look at the table in TFA, it talks about "release date" -- which may well be some time ago, but I'm sure 1.5TB drives may had new, even if the design hasn't changed in a while.

Re:Meh. fud spam.

[icebike]

Someones working overtime to make seagate look good.
But the pile of dead seagates at work says otherwise.

Yeah, this guy is essentially saying the pre-known facts validate this research finding so therefore the research was deeply flawed.

It really doesn't matter what the accumulated knowledge over the intervening years says, the facts remain that for this user, Blackblaze, the results were the results, and it happened to match what the industry already knew.

  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 anything, this guy just validated Blackblaze's study,

I was not aware this was a scientific study.

[plebeian]

My understanding based upon reading the originally posted materials was that they published their reliability findings based upon their own experience. I did not see anywhere that they claimed that it was comprehensive research into the reliability of hard drives. We should not crap upon backblaze because people could not be bothered to read the articles and made some faulty assumptions based upon the headlines, to do so would just serve to dissuade others from releasing their experiences. As for the argument about some of the hardware having known faults... If a company does not want bad press they should do more quality control before releasing crappy hardware...