Backblaze posts on drive reliability again

Yup, that graph confirms what I have experienced for years now. Hitachi was the best, and I still buy them even after WD bought them, and seagate drives are shit that should be avoided at all costs.
 
I manage petabytes storage at work, with drives from different vendors. In the 3 year period, Hitachi has 0 failure, not a single failure.

I have over 50 Hitachi disks at home, again, in 2.5 years, 0 failure.
 
Well, at a previous job a couple years back we used Hitachi drives and we went through them like popcorn. I never tracked actual failure rate, but of the 600+ machines we had in inventory, probably at least 300 of them had a pair of Hitachi drives in each unit. I sent back probably about a box of 20 every month or two for several months. I'm pretty sure we basically replaced every single drive we had. Hitachi was very good with the RMA, however.

I still like Hitachi though, and have a few at home that have given me no issue.
 
I have had horrible experiences with seagate as well. None has lasted over 2.5 years, many fail right out of the box. They are cheap(er) than WD and Hitachi and more plentiful here, but I always go for WD and recommend them 100%. I still have an old WD 100GB drive from way back when they were released. It sounds like a whiny drive, but never once has it thrown up an error or failed. It's still running 24/7.
 
iroc409 said:
Well, at a previous job a couple years back we used Hitachi drives and we went through them like popcorn. I never tracked actual failure rate, but of the 600+ machines we had in inventory, probably at least 300 of them had a pair of Hitachi drives in each unit. I sent back probably about a box of 20 every month or two for several months. I'm pretty sure we basically replaced every single drive we had.
Click to expand...

Sorry but I'd have to seriously question the environment they were in then. Sounds like something else was going on.
 
The worse drives only have a 25% failure rate during the first 30 months.

That is good enough for many people.

---

I run my backup drives for perhaps 20 minutes a day for 2 years and then they go into long term storage.

My "important data" drives have never had a failure but usually were upgraded after 2-4 years due to the computer being upgraded. (I have SSDs for data now but ...)

My "video data" dtives do not get much use at all. Most of them sleep all day. The ones that get used get filled up and then replaced with larger models.

Like most people my hard drives do not get enough usage to be concerned about failure.
 
dilidolo said:
I manage petabytes storage at work, with drives from different vendors. In the 3 year period, Hitachi has 0 failure, not a single failure.

I have over 50 Hitachi disks at home, again, in 2.5 years, 0 failure.
Click to expand...

Are they deskstar or ultrastar enterprise?
 
The 1.5TB drives really hurt the Seagate numbers. That bug they had in the firmware that screwed up the recognizable space and the failure rate was pretty high to add insult to injury. To this day I wont buy Seagate solely because of that issue. Nothing is more terrifying than having data loss come about from something you'd never expect.

I'm worried that as we keep climbing to bigger and bigger drives that we're going to face some higher failure rates. The charts seem to be proving this and the warranty drops are proving it. On the other hand I have never had a drive fail me in under 5 years. My original 500GB WD external is going on 6 years now and survived 100+ degree temps, sand, dirty, and horrible treatment in Iraq. HDD's are one of those things that I stick buy the person who makes a product that doesn't fail me. Different for everyone though.
 
odditory said:
Sorry but I'd have to seriously question the environment they were in then. Sounds like something else was going on.
Click to expand...

We got some bad batches, that I think is what Hitachi said. The failed drives were all from one or two batches. I don't recall having any issues with the replacements--or at least very few.

We had a batch of older WD drives of the same size (80GB) but IDE. They went through the same issue, but it was just before I got there. My boss at the time didn't even want to look at WD drives after that issue.

They were used in labs, trade shows, and gaming events. Most were in RAID0 sets, and re-imaged a lot.
 
Unfortunately not that surprising based on my own experiences. It would have been great if the other manufacturers where up to Hitachis levels.
 
What broke so often in those Seagates? BackBlaze did mention 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives, but what about the others?
 
My only HDDs that failed during last 10 years were Seagate 1.5TB (once) and 3TB (twice).

I am currently waiting for price drop to buy 2 or 3 WD 4TB HDDs
 
I really wish Sammy didn't sell their HDD business, but yeah avoid I avoid Seagate because of prior experiences.
 
I wonder if the failure rates have anything to do with using consumer-grade drives in enterprise server workloads and racks with lots more vibrations than a consumer drive is designed to go through.
 
SirMaster said:
I wonder if the failure rates have anything to do with using consumer-grade drives in enterprise server workloads and racks with lots more vibrations than a consumer drive is designed to go through.
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You have it the wrong way around, consumer drives are designed to wrok in areas with high vibration such as your average joes cheap pc case.

Server hard drives are designed to work in enviroments with very little virabtion due to the anti-vibration features of server cases.
 
Spazturtle said:
You have it the wrong way around, consumer drives are designed to wrok in areas with high vibration such as your average joes cheap pc case.

Server hard drives are designed to work in enviroments with very little virabtion due to the anti-vibration features of server cases.
Click to expand...

I challenge that Joe's case has more vibration than a 24-slot pod with all disks running.
 
TCM2 said:
I challenge that Joe's case has more vibration than a 24-slot pod with all disks running.
Click to expand...

So do I, but backblaze have done testing with enterprise drives too (although with a more limited amount), and their fault-rates was more or less the same as desktop drives.
 
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