[fw] Backblaze lists most reliable hard drives based on its massivecloud study

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 13:14:43 -0500, Larc
wrote:

Over the years, and with several dozen HHDs, I've had better luck with WD (blacks and
reds only since they've been color coding) than with the others. Hitachi has been
responsible for the worst experiences.

I've had good experience with WD, good with Hitachi (before they were
bought at least, I haven't used any since) and terrible with Seagate.

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 13:14:43 -0500, Larc
wrote:

On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 10:47:18 -0500, Flasherly wrote:

| On Wed, 22 Jan 2014 19:10:09 +0800, "Mr. Man-wai Chang"
| wrote:
|
|
| The results from three years of use were revealing: Western Digital's
| drives lasted an average of 2.5 years, while Hitachi's and Seagate's
| lasted 2 and 1.4 years, respectively. Even so, some of the individual
| Hitachi models topped the reliability charts.
|
| "Hitachi does really well. There is an initial die-off of Western
| Digital drives, and then they are nice and stable. The Seagate drives
| start strong, but die off at a consistently higher rate, with a burst of
| deaths near the 20-month mark," Backblaze wrote in its official blog.
| "Having said that, you'll notice that even after 3 years, by far most of
| the drives are still operating."
|
| I went sour on WD from CompUSA Sun morn while supply lasts sales.
| Seems they had clocks to set them to break at precisely near a year,
| including warrantee replacements. Funny after 10, 15 years that the
| game still hasn't changed, other than SSDs as boot option only.

Over the years, and with several dozen HHDs, I've had better luck with WD (blacks and
reds only since they've been color coding) than with the others. Hitachi has been
responsible for the worst experiences.

Larc

My experience seems to kind of agree with that of the study. I've had
drives in service on the computer, as well as set up as external eSATA
drives connected to HD DVR (3 of them) which means continuous service
recording. I've had both Seagate and WD failures (1 ea), but no
Hitachi failures. Incidentally, both the Seagate and WD failures were
while under warranty (5 years) and both were replaced. These were all
1 TB drives. The newer drives don't come with a 5 year warranty, so
I'm doubtful they will survive long enough to fail under warranty.

I have several 500 GB Seagate drives that were in service in RAID on
the computer, and they now have enough bad sectors reported that I no
longer use them in RAID..... but they still work and I sometimes use
them when I need some temporary storage.

My current plans are to simply buy the cheapest, on sale drive
regardless of brand.... and make frequent backups.