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

In all fairness

[hcs_$reboot]

Thank you for posting this. I've always used Seagate which have had a high success rate in terms of reliability and quietness (unlike some other makers that I won't mention).

Not just flawed, but includes non-enterprise drive

[kriston]

As I posted before, this study had included non-enterprise drives which any thoughtful enterprise data preservation expert would not have ever used for enterprise data storage.