BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

[dood]

An interesting read - http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21...-should-i-buy/

Even more interesting that Hitachi is on top. My personal experience has not been the same, but I've also been actively avoiding them for the last few years.

[Mad_Professor]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

I'll take that with a grain of salt. They seem to be pro-Hitachi.

My seagates are consistently failing around 20 month mark as well, which is sad, and only have 1 or two years warranties on them. The ones failing now are the ones I got in june of 2012.

Anyways,
Why would I buy Hitachi drives?
They are expensive, although performance is good, until they cook themselves to death. Not sure why they are doing so well for them. Not too mention they are rebranded WD drives.

[cheapie]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

In my experience, the older Seagates (Barracuda 7200.7-7200.9 <160GB) seem to be very reliable.

[mockingbird]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

Seagate is still #1, if you know which models to choose specifically and how to pre-configure them before putting them to use. After that I would say comes WD, and then it's a toss-up between the rest of them with Toshiba being all the way at the bottom.

Seagate also has the most reliable mobile drives, and WD is the worst, especially the Scorpio Blue (But not the Caviar Blue, which is a first-rate desktop drive), as they're almost always guaranteed to fail after a year or two.

[c_hegge]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

Hitachi is now owned by WD anyway, so I wouldn't be surprised if the two merge completely in the near future (like Samsung and Seagate have done)

EDIT: Lol at this:

Seagate Barracuda Green
(ST1500DL003) 1.5TB 51 0.8 120.0%

120% Failure rate?

[dood]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

Hitachi is now owned by WD anyway, so I wouldn't be surprised if the two merge completely in the near future (like Samsung and Seagate have done)

EDIT: Lol at this:



120% Failure rate?

When drives you receive back from RMA fail, you get over 100% failure rate

[dood]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

I'll take that with a grain of salt. They seem to be pro-Hitachi.

My seagates are consistently failing around 20 month mark as well, which is sad, and only have 1 or two years warranties on them. The ones failing now are the ones I got in june of 2012.

Anyways,
Why would I buy Hitachi drives?
They are expensive, although performance is good, until they cook themselves to death. Not sure why they are doing so well for them. Not too mention they are rebranded WD drives.

My last experience with Hitachi was with (4) 500gb drives that I put in a 1u NAS. This was a DL180 server with lots of airflow, mounted in a rack where the inlet temperature is kept at a steady 72*F. The drives still died after 1.5 years.

[TELVM]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

In my experience, the older Seagates (Barracuda 7200.7-7200.9 <160GB) seem to be very reliable.

Agreed, I got several still running and these old spinners just refuse to die.

[momaka]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

In my experience, the older Seagates (Barracuda 7200.7-7200.9 <160GB) seem to be very reliable.

My personal favorite is the 80 GB 7200.7. Many of them will develop some bad sectors over the first several years, but then they stop and continue to work trouble-free after that.

That aside, I do like Hitachi HDDs too. They never seem to fail "out of the blue". At least from what I've noticed, the ones that fail will usually begin to click every once in a while and start getting lots of bad sectors. But they give you a lot of time before they completely die.
There was actually one PC with a 160 GB Hitachi like that at an IT place where I volunteered/interned. When I saw the bad sectors on that HDD one day (well over a few thousand), I told my boss about it right away. Since it was in a computer that wasn't "too important" (but always ON and often used - go figure), it was left as is. It took about 1.5 years before it finally gave out the ghost and died. And strangely, the data on it never appeared to go corrupt - just bad sectors accumulating. I think I even have its SMART data saved somewhere.

Also, my IBM 305030 is still going strong. Not used in 24/7 environment or anything, but it has 24600 hours on it, 2600 of which I put on it sitting in front of that computer. It's been about 5 years since I found that computer. Can't complain about the service, especially considering that I got it for FREE.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

My personal favorite is the 80 GB 7200.7.

I had bad luck with an ST380013A in 2005. Utilities were expecting an unusually early failure, telling me that I'm lucky for it to last 1 year and it emitted a squeak randomly when defragging. It was returned to Wal-Mart.

[Uniballer]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

It's nice that they name names (unlike Google's paper). Google gave a lot more info on environmental conditions, etc. which is probably more valuable in the long run (but in the short run it's cool to know which drives suck).

Look how bad the Backblaze experience has been with the Seagate ST1500DL003. I have had quite a few of the Seagate 500GB 7200.12 drives and haven't had any failures (various model numbers all very similar). I have two of the ST2000DL003's with no failures (yet). A number of WD black drives (no fails). The few WD green drives I have tried all failed quickly. It's really statistics, but the luck of the draw still matters.

[momaka]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

I had bad luck with an ST380013A in 2005. Utilities were expecting an unusually early failure, telling me that I'm lucky for it to last 1 year and it emitted a squeak randomly when defragging. It was returned to Wal-Mart.

I have one that will probably do something similar with such utilities, but I could care less. The reason I got it is because it would not image all the way with a HDD cloning tool (which other ST38001xx had no problems with). Does work fine otherwise, though. A few bad sectors, but nothing critical.

These drives are solid all around. We were donated about 60 HP DC5000. 40 or 50 of these came with the Seagate ST38001xx. Out of those, only 3 were bad (so about 7.5% failure rate worst case). That may seem bad, but keep in mind we got these used and the computers they were in were not handled very gently when they got retired from the old place. That said, we also had about 10 or so equivalent 80 GB WDs. From those, I saw only 1 failed. That's not a high enough number to count for anything, but as you can see, WD wasn't much better or much worse.

We ended up using only about half of those HP DC5000 PCs, and after about a year and a half, none of them had HDD problems. I think only 20 or so of these computer are still in service now (pulled some out due to badcaps on motherboard and because they are old Pentium 4).

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

I had bad luck with an ST380013A in 2005. Utilities were expecting an unusually early failure, telling me that I'm lucky for it to last 1 year and it emitted a squeak randomly when defragging. It was returned to Wal-Mart.

It seemed cheap! It seemed that I had zero noticeable performance gain and it was possibly slower than my 2002 5,400 RPM Maxtor!

[redlght]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

I never had good luck with maxtor drives they failed on me more times then i can count ~click o death~

[larrymoencurly]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

A couple of years ago, StoreLab of Russia also said Hitachi was the most reliable, but at about the same time a French website that keeps tabs on return rates said Hitachi was the worst. Also Toshiba desktop drives, which are supposed to be based on Hitachi designs, seem to have about as many 1-star as 5-star reviews at NewEgg.com.

I wish they'd explain exactly what failed in those drives.

[Elysarian]

Re: BackBlaze does an analysis of their ~27,000 consumer-grade HDs

I work with HDDs on a daily basis as part of my job maintaining CCTV recording hardware.

In my experience the highest failure rates are of Hitachi drives followed closely by Samsung (talking here purely about complete failure to spin up, clicking and spindle bearing failure).

We don't get many Maxtor drives through the workshop but those I have seen are apparently more reliable than those I had for PC use a few years back.

Bad sectors I've seen on most brands of drive and we automatically reject those as unreliable.

Western Digital (Caviar black) seem to be the most reliable ones we get as I've yet to have one come in that wasn't fixable by running chkdsk over it - aside from one with a snapped-off SATA connector!

Personally speaking I always use WD wherever possible when building PCs as I've had all other brands fail in the past (once bitten twice shy!) - my desktop has a 500GB Caviar black in there as the data drive, same drive was my boot drive for 5 years before I replaced it with an SSD