HDD reliability report via, via....

Saw this from Backblaze via TR this morning:

http://techreport.com/news/27101/la...ows-rising-failure-rates-for-some-hard-drives

This was a very eye-opening report. Ever since Seagate had all those issues several years ago with firmware I tended to avoid using their spinners. And in my personal experience I have had more failures with Seagate than with WD. I assumed Seagate had gotten it back together but apparently not. I have used a few Toshiba drives (mostly in laptops) but you can be I will use them more often if they are competitively priced. I am not as much surprised about how poorly Seagate did in this report as I am that Toshiba spinners did better than WD.

In last half year I made couple of RMA on HDD and all were Seagate. The only Seagate drives that I have around are server series just because they came with some other hardware like latest Dell servers. Still I made 2 RMA for Seagate Constellation drives last month.

I'm surprised that Hitachi results are so good. In last years there was limited access to their drives in local distribution just because they had really high RMA rate for some older series.

I saw many complains about WD Red that I'm not selling but I had no problems with other series. I'm often selling NAS with WDC Green that are working for 2-3 years without issues. There were RMA but most WD that I saw broken were after warranty period.

We must keep in mind that the said report was not about Toshiba consumer level drives but server stuff. When I check the customer reviews on NewEgg for their consumer level 3.5" drives they don't look so good.

Also keep in mind Backblaze uses consumer drives, NOT enterprise, so it gives a good feel for the market.

I saw this and while informative, one should also consider the environment it's in... Enterprise. So the beating that these drives can take there is quite atypical of your personal computer. there is still a correlation though.

Edit: article said that.. haha

This is just my personal experience, but I've seriously only had WD drives fail on me. I have a few ancient Seagates that I can blow the dust off of and plug in and they still work ok*.

*I wouldn't trust them for anything... important.

EarthDog said:

I saw this and while informative, one should also consider the environment it's in... Enterprise. So the beating that these drives can take there is quite atypical of your personal computer. there is still a correlation though.

Edit: article said that.. haha

Click to expand...

Oh yea, I'm pretty confident that if I picked up a Seagate 2TB to replace one of my Caviar Blacks that I may never run into issue and it could run for a very long time. It's just good to see that Hitachi and WD are good at standing up to abuse, especially Hitachi.

Aldakoopa said:

This is just my personal experience, but I've seriously only had WD drives fail on me. I have a few ancient Seagates that I can blow the dust off of and plug in and they still work ok*.

*I wouldn't trust them for anything... important.

Click to expand...

For some people this is all I see, lol. Some only go with Samsung, Hitachi, WD, or Seagate because the other brands cause them nothing but headache. Go with what works for you I have only mainly had Seagates die in my personal experience but my WD drives are still running 10years later without issue.

Interesting read results.
However it did not mention what kind of drives they are.
As someone who is looking to pick up some replacement NAS drives soonish, I don't know if that graph is of any use.
If they were all NAS drives, sure maybe. But a mix of random drives not designed to operate in that environment, its an Apples to Oranges comparison.

Not to mention WD Reds have a high DOA rate as of right now from the information I am collecting.

Seagates have been the ones that fail on me , but I get enough warning from all the new noises they make first. LOL Everybody seems to have thier favorites. I've had nothing but good luck with WDs , but I think the word "luck" plays a big part in most experiences.