Are Seagates really as bad as they say?

ATWindsor said:
Really? The critique of the test I have seen has frankly been pretty poorly thought out, with 80% misunderstandings and 20% "The data could have been more optimal", as it always can be (backblaze haven't made a scientific study), but as long as people can't find a even better study, the data from backblaze is much better than the alternative (like random users proclaiming they had no problems with seagate)
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Did you look through this one?

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/selecting-a-disk-drive-how-not-to-do-research-1.html
 
well ive bought quiet a few hard drives in the last year, most are still going strong apart from the 3 doa wd hard drives which I put down to bad packaging. I usually swap them out after 2 years so haven't had any die of old age yet, most hard drives seem reliable to me I keep them cool and don't move them around much (the external ones).
 
ATWindsor said:
That was the one in the forefront of my mind when i wrote the reply, the article has some valid points, but is full of oddities and what i can only think is misunderstandings. That article is much poorer work than the backblaze-article it is criticizing.
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Fair enough.

For the record, I've never bought a Seagate drive, and I don't intend to. My file sever has Hitachi and Samsung drives. I used to be a fan of WD Blacks prior to SSDs, but since all I use are SSDs for everything but storage, I can't justify buying them anymore.
 
ATWindsor said:
That was the one in the forefront of my mind when i wrote the reply, the article has some valid points, but is full of oddities and what i can only think is misunderstandings. That article is much poorer work than the backblaze-article it is criticizing.
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ya reading it was painful... and doesn't really change my mind on the backblaze data because I have experienced similar results as backblaze in the many disk arrays I work with
 
FWIW -

1. I have a 1TB Seagate drive that has 154 bad sectors and according to HD Sentinel the health is at 21%. This is clearly a failing HD but the problem is, these numbers were exactly the same a year ago. The drive gets constant use and has never given me any problems. I have no idea how long it will last but so far it's been a real trooper.

2. I've had good luck with Seagate refurbs. I have several of them and none have ever failed.

YMMV
 
Didn't Google's study from some years back indicate that one of the manufacturers had a higher failure rate without naming names?

Even if Seagate has a higher DOA/failure rate I keep buying them for the same reason Backblaze does: cost. Even if I was running expensive enterprise drives I'd still have a RAID 10 array in my desktop and my monthly external backups.
 
I'm replacing far fewer drives these days than 1-2 years ago, when the only drives that I could find here were green wd / seagate. Even the seagate drives I've bought lately (NAS) are still going strong. Thanks to consumer laws here it doesn't cost anything to replace a failing drive that is less than 5 years old, but it is a lot more convenient when you don't have to package/ship drives and rebuild or restore from backup so often.
 
ALL hdd's will fail eventually...its just a matter of *when*, not *IF*...

Having said that, I have used practically every brand made in the past 15+ years. Some failed in 6 months, some have lasted for over 5 years.... I currently have a handful of smaller drives from the mid-late 90's that are still running as well as they did the day I bought them. They are a mix of all the brands mentioned here & then some......like Fujitsu, Panasonic etc as well as Samsung, WD & Seagate too.........

YMMV of course :)
 
I've used WD, Maxtor, and Seagate, over my past 20 years computing experience and I've had to do RMA's on all brands. More WD drives than the others, but I've also bought more WD's than any of the others.
 
I have had 3 Seagates bad on me. One 750GB and two 1TB. 1TB and one 750GB were still under warranty and were replaced. The other 1TB was out of warranty, I threw it away. All my great porno movies got trashed.:)
 
bonehead123 said:
ALL hdd's will fail eventually...its just a matter of *when*, not *IF*...

Having said that, I have used practically every brand made in the past 15+ years. Some failed in 6 months, some have lasted for over 5 years.... I currently have a handful of smaller drives from the mid-late 90's that are still running as well as they did the day I bought them. They are a mix of all the brands mentioned here & then some......like Fujitsu, Panasonic etc as well as Samsung, WD & Seagate too.........

YMMV of course :)
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I would argue the older drives are less likely the fail than newer, which have much more dense platters, spin much faster, and are focused more on speed.
 
But older hard drives have been spinning longer, had their parts stressed by more power up/down cycles and hours in use, I would argue that their parts are more worn out and they are more likely to fail as they ( in extreme cases) have exceeded their MTF
 
I'm running the 4 TB Seagate NAS drives. I like them better than the WD Red drives that I sold. Overall I'd prefer WD.
 
The only drives I've had fail on me are all WDs. Even the "bad" Seagates I own perform better and haven't had an issue. YMMV
 
I bought a refurb 1TB WD RE drive from the Egg just before Christmas. It's a Dell branded drive out of a server. It has over 30k hours on it and very few power cycles. It tests perfect in CDI and HD Sentinel. This leads me to believe that power cycles play a major role in how long a drive lasts. My old WHS box ran for years 24/7 and I never lost a drive in it. Currently it's sitting idle with 4 640gig WD's in it. Last time I fired it up all drives tested perfect. This too makes me believe that power cycles play a major role.
 
This leads me to believe that power cycles play a major role in how long a drive lasts.
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1 drive is way too small of a sample to say anything a few thousand drives maybe.
 
I've done more RMAs of WD drives than seagates from what I remember working in PC repair. The last set of WD desktop drives I bought for personal use (320gb blacks) failed hard and lasted less than a year or thereabouts. Pretty sure the refurbs I got back under warranty for one of those drives died again within a year as I only now have one 320gb drive left floating around. It works but was labeled as dead at one point.

For my laptop drives I'm pretty sure I have a dead Seagate and WD drive sitting in a box here. 2 years on my first crucial SSD and a couple months on my second cruical. No issues yet with either SSD.

It's a roll of the dice. Buy something but make sure to run it in RAID1. Your chance of failure may be higher but at least you'll have a backup.
 
One of my WD blacks has a few bad sectors, but it's been the same amount since i first got it from another forum user. I still have until 2015 on warranty and since it still works, ill be lazy about sending it off haha
 
I haven't dealt with enough drives even in the 20 years I've been working on PCs to make any statisticly valid conclusions, but it is rather interesting that my anecdotal experience matches the Backblaze report rather closely. My drives of choice are HGST now, but who knows what is inside the box now that WD owns them.

Does anyone remember Quantum? I had several of those go bad on me back in the late 90's-early 2000's. Same with Maxtor.
 
crashtech said:
I haven't dealt with enough drives even in the 20 years I've been working on PCs to make any statisticly valid conclusions, but it is rather interesting that my anecdotal experience matches the Backblaze report rather closely. My drives of choice are HGST now, but who knows what is inside the box now that WD owns them.

Does anyone remember Quantum? I had several of those go bad on me back in the late 90's-early 2000's. Same with Maxtor.
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Ah, Quantum. As in "sticktion." Drive won't spin up, so you bang the side of your case hard enough, and then the drive spins up. :D
 
Biznatch said:
I would argue the older drives are less likely the fail than newer, which have much more dense platters, spin much faster, and are focused more on speed.
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Do new drives spin much faster? 7200 Rpm was the norm even a decade ago for 3,5, I would say new drives in average spin slower, since its much more normal with sub 7200 rpm rate now than it was.
 
Biznatch said:
I would argue the older drives are less likely the fail than newer, which have much more dense platters, spin much faster, and are focused more on speed.
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my first PC was a 2002 T-bird 1200MHz and used a 7200rpm 40GB IBM deskstar. :)
 
ATWindsor said:
Do new drives spin much faster? 7200 Rpm was the norm even a decade ago for 3,5, I would say new drives in average spin slower, since its much more normal with sub 7200 rpm rate now than it was.
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hummm,,,, 2 of those old drives I mentioned before are the 10K rpm Raptors, and another is a 15K scsi unit from WAY back........all of them are still humming along just fine :)
 
My luck with WDs has been much worst than with Seagates, so I tend to prefer the latter.

But quite recently I had a 2.5" 1Tb Seagate malfunction after less than a year. It was inside an external HDD box, with a metal cooling plate inside.

So maybe 2.5" are more fragile than 3.5" HDDs.
 
ATWindsor said:
Do new drives spin much faster? 7200 Rpm was the norm even a decade ago for 3,5, I would say new drives in average spin slower, since its much more normal with sub 7200 rpm rate now than it was.
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I don't see 3-5 year old drives as old. I was thinking more early sata/UDMA drives.

bonehead123 said:
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hummm,,,, 2 of those old drives I mentioned before are the 10K rpm Raptors, and another is a 15K scsi unit from WAY back........all of them are still humming along just fine :)
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Yea I have 2- 36GB raptors I used for years that still work. Those were some nice quality drives, but they got shittier/less reliable in the future models. Most from WD sacrificing quality to save on production costs. Which is another reason most of the drives have higher failure rates now.

15K ISCSI is enterprise class, so I wouldn't really use that as a comparison here. With how ridiculously expensive those were, I would expect that kind of reliability.
 
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Biznatch said:
I don't see 3-5 year old drives as old. I was thinking more early sata/UDMA drives.



Yea I have 2- 36GB raptors I used for years that still work. Those were some nice quality drives, but they got shittier/less reliable in the future models. Most from WD sacrificing quality to save on production costs. Which is another reason most of the drives have higher failure rates now.

15K ISCSI is enterprise class, so I wouldn't really use that as a comparison here. With how ridiculously expensive those were, I would expect that kind of reliability.
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I see my post can be misunderstood, I ment that 7200 rpm was the norm even a decade ago for 3,5 inch HDDs, a decade ago is when sata was introduced too. If anything, lower spin speeds is more normal now than it was 10 years ago.
 
drescherjm said:
Very hard question to answer. I mean I do not own 1000 Seagate drives so statistically I can not say anything meaningful about my experiences. Although the blackbaze report was interesting.
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I do.

240 x Es.2 and 960 x Es.3

Failure rates I haven't even bothered to track. I think I've replaced maybe 15 in about 18 months.

Granted these are the enterprise drives. I have no experience with the green drives.
 
madrebel said:
I do.

240 x Es.2 and 960 x Es.3

Failure rates I haven't even bothered to track. I think I've replaced maybe 15 in about 18 months.

Granted these are the enterprise drives. I have no experience with the green drives.
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Makes me feel a little better about the 15 2TB ES.3 drives I have purchased in the last few months.
 
Lower spin speeds are now not only the norm, but the goal for HDDs. If you increase the density of the data on the platter, you can spin it slower and still get the same read/write speeds. Lower spin rates mean less power usage and less heat; less heat is hugely beneficial in the longevity of the drive, especially when you're packing 5 or 6 drives into a small NAS case.

Raw speed is no longer a priority for HDDs because SSDs are ten times faster than HDDs can ever dream of being, so 15K and 10K drives are on their way out.
 
R3MF said:
i also had an old 40GB IBM drives that survived the click-of-death for over eight years!
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Was it in this computer? TigerDirect was offering it for $70, yesterday:

40GB IBM hard drive, 3 GHz Pentium 4 CPU,
qorQUmn.jpg
 
We have had various Seagate Constellation ES drives in 24/7 production since 2004, currently a total of 108 drives, and I had one bad drive that was installed in 2011, no problems at all with other drives. We tend to refresh them every 3-4 years due to capacity upgrades.
 
Thuleman said:
We have had various Seagate Constellation ES drives in 24/7 production since 2004, currently a total of 108 drives, and I had one bad drive that was installed in 2011, no problems at all with other drives. We tend to refresh them every 3-4 years due to capacity upgrades.
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Those last a long time for me, too.

But the consumer SATA stuff, both 3.5 and 2.5", does not.
 
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