Who Makes The Best Hard Drives?

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How in the hell can a hard drive have a 120% annual failure rate?

In general, Backblaze sees more problems with Seagate drives than the other two vendors. Yet those problems have been getting better with each successive generation of high-capacity drives. But the 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 and the Seagate Barracuda Green have the highest AFRs, 25.4% and 120% respectively. And in general the Seagate drives have proven to be less reliable overall.
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Well in a server with 20 drives, if you had to swap in a total of 24 replacements over just one year then that would probably count as 120% AFR.

Not too different from getting six consecutive bad sets of RAM from the same vendor.
 
In the last 10 years I have only had 1 drive fail within a reasonable time period (I don't mind a drive that fails after 4-5 years).

It was a Seagate 2TB. Seagate replaced it with no issues....and RAID5 saved my butt.

I did have one of the infamous 7200.11 drives die on me, but it made it several years so let that one go.
 
Drive fails, you get a replacement under warranty. Then the replacement drives fails. I have had that happen.
 
Seagate is infected with the Maxtor virus.

Had 2 Seagate drives in recent years, they failed in the first 6 months to a year, replaced them with WD Blacks and have been happy.
 
Granted I haven't worked in IT for a while but Seagates were infamous back in the late 90's and early 2000's. We actually had to tell our Dell contact that we wouldn't accept Seagate drives in anything.
For my personal computers I've always had WD's and one Hitachi I saw on sale for next to nothing. I've only had one with any issues over the course of 20 years.
 
Seagate is still garbage in my experience. My vote for best is Hitachi followed by WD.
 
Wow, that is really bad.

I don't think I've had a Seagate drive since back in the 486 days, so I can't speak from person experience, but that seems very excessive.

Personally, I have never had a hard drive physically fail on me in almost 25 years of being a computer geek and building my own rigs. (I've had data loss, but never due to a hard drive physically failing)

I even had a 34GB IBM Deskstar of the famous "Death Star" era that still works, and I keep it in a USB enclosure for backups

In recent years I have used nothing but WD drives though. The only hard drives I have left are the 9 in my NAS server, which has a mix of WD Greens and WD Reds. All of my rigs use SSD's only locally these days.

It is amazing to me how many troubles others have with hard drives.
 
Teenyman45 said:
Well in a server with 20 drives, if you had to swap in a total of 24 replacements over just one year then that would probably count as 120% AFR.
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....what I mean is "HOW THE HELL CAN A HARD DRIVE HAVE A 120% ANNUAL FAILURE RATE?" (not how they calculated it)

;)
 
my 20 drives in a zfs mirror are seagates of the 3tb variety ugh
 
qdemn7 said:
Drive fails, you get a replacement under warranty. Then the replacement drives fails. I have had that happen.
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Western Digital 150GB Raptors (RIPtors) were trash. I went through four of them. FOUR.

They finally just gave me a then-new 300GB VelociRaptor, which has plugged away without issue.
 
I have a mix of Western Digital and Seagate --- honestly the Seagates have been working quite well for me for over 10 years.

Western Digital is my gold standard though, sometimes I don't feel like paying the extra 30 dollars though.
 
I have a 1.28GB Quantum Bigfoot 5.25" drive layin' around somewhere that still worked the last time I fired it up (couple years back while testing a similarly old-as-dirt P2 box).

Woo :p
 
qdemn7 said:
Drive fails, you get a replacement under warranty. Then the replacement drives fails. I have had that happen.
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WD GREEN 1TB Drives proved to be very unreliable.
Had 2 of them go bad in less than 2 years.
The first 1TB drive I ever bought, then the replacement lasted about a year.
 
I still have several working 40, 60 and 80gb HDDs

Most of my bigger hard drives from 120gb and up have died within 3 years.
 
I replaced my 1.5TB Seagate five times during the warranty period. It would work for a month or so and then either start throwing up SMART errors, or just suddenly die with no warning.
 
HGST Hitachi Drives seem to be pretty good. I have two 4TB drives in a Buffalo Linkstation 421E purring along for several months now.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
I replaced my 1.5TB Seagate five times during the warranty period. It would work for a month or so and then either start throwing up SMART errors, or just suddenly die with no warning.
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I've not had one hard drive in the last 10 fucking years that hasn't thrown up SMART errors quality has gone to such fucking shit

Except my SSD's, I've even got a Vertex 3 with 20,000 hours on it that's still plugging along error free
 
What a shame.
My first SATA HDDs (first ones to market, used on an Abit NF7-S motherboard) were 100gb Seagate and they lasted FOREVER.
Just threw them out a month ago, not because they stopped working but because I just don't have enough functioning pcs to use them in and I thought it was time to reduce clutter.
And before I threw them out, I broke them open and microwaved the platters. Yes, I'm paranoid.
 
I have to wonder about this study though.

Backblaze is certainly using the drives in a more strenuous environment than the average home user. I wonder if the failure rate is higher because of the probably high vibration environment that backblaze pods in their racks go through.

Compared to a consumer desktop PC where the vibration should be far less.

One would argue that in Backblaze's usage and environment that they should really be using enterprise drives, but I understand their goal and why they use consumer drives to save costs. And I understand their infrastructure handles using consumer drives just fine.

I just wonder if the high failure rate is due to improper usage of the consumer Seagate drives where in a more proper home usage setting they might have a more similar failure rate to Western Digital.
 
Sovereign said:
Western Digital 150GB Raptors (RIPtors) were trash. I went through four of them. FOUR.

They finally just gave me a then-new 300GB VelociRaptor, which has plugged away without issue.
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I have a 150g raptor bought in 2006 and the only problem I had was ripping the plastic part of the sata connector off so I had to superglue a sata cable to it. It currently works solely for a minecraft server since I bought SSD's for my main rig...

I've had really good luck with western digital, I also have a JB (I wanna say it's either a 160gb or 320gb) I bought in 2003 that worked up until I shelved it last summer. Dunno if it's working now
 
This goes with my personal experience with hard drives as well. Seagate is just shit. I happen to have 1TB Seagate in my PC that I don't even want to use, cause it makes noises from day 1 purchase. My HTPC has two Seagate drives, a 500GB and a 2TB. Both drives have warnings from their SMART status. The 2TB has 122 Ultra DMA CRC Error Count, while the 500GB has 2. The 1TB in my main PC has 66 of them, with the addition of a couple of other errors. The 500GB has 153 sector relocation count, which pretty much means it's time to replace it. Mind you, all my drives have fans on them and run very cool. To give you an idea, the 500GB is at 26C.

But my main PC has two Hitachi drives, and they are fucking fantastic. One 500BG and a 2TB. I've had both for over a year and not one single SMART error has shown up. I've had Western Digital hard drives in my main rig, and they're middle of the road O.K. Used to be two 320GB drives that I've had for 5 years. One I took out and put it in my sisters HTPC, which then shortly died unexpectedly, and the other is still working in a PC for my Dad. I swapped them out for the Hitachi's I have now, because they had a few SMART warnings show up. Good thing I did cause one of them went bad.

From my experience Seagate Bad, Hitachi Good. That 120% failure rate for Seagate makes sense, cause my other sisters HTPC had a 1TB from Seagate and we sent it back 3 times to get replaced. Took them three tries to get a single working drive. The rest died within a week. Western Digital is fine, but they can be a hit or miss. I've had Western Digital's go bad within a year or two, and some still working for 5-6 years. But honestly, I've had so much good results with Hitachi why go with Western Digital? Hitachi is usually cheaper too.
 
Steve said:
....what I mean is "HOW THE HELL CAN A HARD DRIVE HAVE A 120% ANNUAL FAILURE RATE?" (not how they calculated it)

;)
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When they give you a "replacement", they simply replace your bad drive with someone else's. They always say "of equal or greater value", some people get equals.
 
Wow, I'm surprised and shocked. Seagate has always been a name I've trusted and I have been purchasing their hard drives for years (one every 10 months or so).

Over the past 9 years I've had two HDD failures. One was a drive that I dropped.

Looking at these stats, perhaps it's time I reviewed which brand I purchase.
 
This really is not news as most of us have known this for a long time. I have exclusively used either WD or IBM Deskstars before they went horribly bad and got sold off. I have not had a single failure with either of those drives, but have seen countless failures among friends who used Seagate or Maxtors.
 
My experience with Seagate's portable drives wasn't good,the first one didn't last two days,the replacement only lasted a week. Got my money back,bought a WD Black and put in an enclosure.
 
Man this takes me way back! I built 486 and Pentium computers (dating myself) and swapped out a LOT of hard drives. WD's were always ROCK SOLID. In a month, I would replace 20-30 Maxtor, and maybe 1-2 WD's. The thing is, we didnt sell a lot of Maxtor since they failed so often! Customers would request them, or we had a cheap value PC that we stuffed Maxtor's into since they were cheaper. I never trusted Maxtor after that. Also Fujitsu and IBM drives were total crap. There was an odd IBM 5.25 HDD that was called "bigfoot" that was TOTAL junk. Almost every drive came back dead. The magnetic coating that contained the data would de-laminate and turn to dust. The cool thing about these drives is since they were so big, they had massive gyro forces when on, and that would also help de-laminate the platters if someone tipped the computer while it was running. :D:D
 
Gibbage said:
There was an odd IBM 5.25 HDD that was called "bigfoot" that was TOTAL junk. Almost every drive came back dead. The magnetic coating that contained the data would de-laminate and turn to dust. The cool thing about these drives is since they were so big, they had massive gyro forces when on, and that would also help de-laminate the platters if someone tipped the computer while it was running. :D:D
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If I recall, these were made by the Quantum Corporation, not IBM.

Quantum Bigfoot was the name!

I do believe IBM bought some from Quantum and put them in their desktops though...
 
SirMaster said:
Backblaze is certainly using the drives in a more strenuous environment than the average home user. I wonder if the failure rate is higher because of the probably high vibration environment that backblaze pods in their racks go through.
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This is a very good point. Just because a drive doesn't deal well with vibration, doesn't mean that it won't work well in a typical desktop or server use in a stationary computer.
 
It seems like as soon as drives got bigger that the GB range, Seagate's reliability went in the crapper. I've learned to stay away from Seagate and any green drives from any manufacturer. All of the ones that I've ever encountered have failed prematurely (2 years or less).

I do have to contradict myself though... I have 6 pre-flood Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB drives in my home storage server that have been running perfectly for years.

I still have a Quantum Bigfoot too. LOL! Oh yeah, and a 9GB 5.25" full height SCSI-2 Seagate Elite. I use it as a book end. :D

BP
 
in the many large disk arrays I deal with I find that their numbers are pretty close to my observations also...
 
When people mention their stats about failures are these out a of a few disks, a 100 disks or 1000+. I mean statistically don't you need 10 of thousands to say anything with statistical power?
 
Sovereign said:
Western Digital 150GB Raptors (RIPtors) were trash. I went through four of them. FOUR.

They finally just gave me a then-new 300GB VelociRaptor, which has plugged away without issue.
Click to expand...

The new 2.5 inch ones are solid. I have a 500gb and it's very nice and relatively quiet compared to some 10krpm scsi I used to have.

I still like to hear the HD churn. I'm weird like that.
 
Quantum Fireball LM 30GB.....most reliable HD of all time. I have 5 and none of them are dead or showing errors yet. Storagereview had them rated as the most reliable HD produced until they changed their rating systems...in which they did not port the older drive results over to.

I 'll give you that the 1st gen WD Raptor drives in the 150GB were horrid. I had a 72GB one which was fine if you kept them reasonably cool.

The 2nd-3rd Gen WD Raptors in 150gb and later are all fine.

When we used seagate HDs (which we stopped using in 2011) our annual failure rate was just over 40%. This included 7200.7-7200.11


Now a days I'll use
WD: RE, RED, Raptor drives
Seagate: Hybrid drives
Samsung: 830, 840 SSD drives
Intel 520,530 SSD drives
 
My Samsung Spinpoints have been some of the best drives I've used. Got 6 of em in my rig right now 4x1TB, 2x2TB. Why'd they go and sell to Seagate?
 
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