Latest consumer hard drive reliability report is published

[HEXUS]

By cloud-storage provider Backblaze.

Read more.

[GuidoLS]

Interesting report from Backblaze, but incomplete.

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/selecting-a-disk-drive-how-not-to-do-research-1.html

It's kind of unfair to compare 8 year old drives with drives that less than 2 years old...

[shaithis]

Wasn't that posted weeks ago?

[TRUTHnTRINITY]

Haha I love how Seagate got in such a fuss over this report when all the HDDs tested weren't enterprise rated and went through similar testing!!

[nitro912gr]

I have only one thing to say about seagate.

7200.11

[MercutioUK]

While there will be plenty of folks in here to back Seagate, it does seem rather the case that their 3Tb drives from last year are/were pretty shocking.

"It's not a fair test" is thrown around a lot... but... it's percentage of drives failed, all these are used in the same way so it's not like the other drives are subjected to different conditions, they're (clearly) built to withstand it better.
Seagate have a fab in china, the new 4TB drives are almost certainly coming from the Thai factory hence the much lower failure rate.

[miniyazz]

I'm actually with Seagate on this one.
This sort of chart is the kind of thing liable to seriously compromise sales. I could quite easily do a quick google on hard drive reliability, find this report, see Seagate failure rates of 10x higher than any other manufacturer and avoid them like the plague.
In reality the drives are being used out of spec and I'd be unlikely to have any issues with any manufacturer in my home environment.

That article linked to has some good rationale behind some of the flaws in this report amongst which are inconsistent operating conditions and incredibly different workloads compared to consumer use, not to mention differing drive ages.

However all that said it would still indicate to me to show these Seagate drives (of which I currently have one 3TB, two 2TB and two 1.5TB - dating back to 2011, and 2012 in the case of the 3TB) to be underengineered in comparison to the other manufacturers. Which is to say the other manufacturers' drives are overengineered; however this is still a negative point for Seagate in comparison.

Ultimately the key point here is that hard drives are complex mechanical devices and therefore inherently unreliable. Anyone running a hard drive without at least one backup is simply asking for their data to go up in smoke. Depending on quantity and importance of data it is not unreasonable to have four copies - one 'master', one 'online' hard drive for regular backups, one 'off-the-grid' drive preferably at a different location to negate fire/theft as well as power spikes, a locally encrypted cloud backup (if capacity permits) and potentially even a less volatile form of long-term storage such as optical media.

Personally I don't have large quantities of important data so I can easily enough get by with master copy, (encrypted) cloud storage and a few copies on various hard drives lying around for that stuff. The less important data has just one backup because if I lose it, I don't care that much.

[aidanjt]

I'm actually with Seagate on this one.
This sort of chart is the kind of thing liable to seriously compromise sales.

Then they should have done a far better job at QA. All the other drives are also 'consumer' disks, a lot of desktops can also suffer from a lot of vibration too. Disk role isn't an excuse for shoddy reliability.

[TooNice]

I wonder if there are still people avoiding Hitachi in this age. It has been many years since they took over IBM, I still remember people holding a grudge with IBM Death Star episode, stopping them from being Hitachi drives many years after.
Not used a desktop for a few years, but the last time I did, I was mainly running Samsung and Western Digital 5400 drives as I was more concerned with noise than absolute performance. They served me well.

[Annital1950]

Interesting report.. I am happy to read that all by myself

[failquail]

I've probably seen more Seagate drives fail than i have all other manufacturers added together.
In particular i wish i'd ignored the 7200.10 series when i decided to give them another chance, then received some of the loudest and most unreliable drives i've ever seen :O
later found out they entirely lacked acoustic management for no discernible reason.

I think i've had a 100+%* failure rate for seagate drives and ~33% for others over their lifetimes.

*(having a drive fail, then it's warrenty replacement fail twice over is fun)

[miniyazz]

Then they should have done a far better job at QA. All the other drives are also 'consumer' disks, a lot of desktops can also suffer from a lot of vibration too. Disk role isn't an excuse for shoddy reliability.

But it's an unfair position to put them in - 'oh hey look these cambelts made by x 6yrs before we installed them fail when run for 10 years and 150,000miles in our racecar even though they're meant to be changed every 5yrs and 75k miles, whereas these ones by y made 2yrs before we installed them lasted for 12yrs, oh and we used different cars, => don't buy from x for your road car for recommended usage which you plan on changing the belt at the recommended time because they'll fail'.

Just because something fails more out of spec doesn't mean it's less reliable in spec, although it does point towards lower reliability.

I've looked back through my RMA history and over the past 8 yrs or so I have RMAd nine hard drives - five Seagate 1.5TB, one Seagate 3TB, one Samsung 1TB, one Samsung 1.5TB and one WD 2TB. This is from a population of around 10-12 or so drives average and currently just under 50% Seagate (probably a reasonable assumption that proportion hasn't been exceeded; early on I had mostly Samsung drives anyway). So from my own small drive population (an equally if not more flawed study) Seagate are clearly less reliable.

I am less likely to buy Seagate drives based on my own experiences and this study, but I'm not arguing that they should be avoided - because without a sufficiently controlled study (with adequate power to detect significant differences) it is possible that these results could be due to chance.

[BlueScream]

The newer 4TB Seagates are performing better than the 3TB - anyone put that down to Seagate having to raise their game quality wise because Backblaze released data about how shocking the reliability was before?

[aniilv]

scan should release their % of drives rma'd so we have a better picture rather than this nonsense

[TooNice]

I had fond memory of the Cheetah from back in the days. The next Seagate drive I bought was the 7200.10. AFAIK, it wasn't particularly plagued with reliability issues unlike it's successor, but some firmwares had a bug that affected performance but not in a way that was terribly noticeable if you aren't benchmarking, and plenty sufficient to store media and such. What I found terribly noticeable, was the seek noise. The seeking noise was far more noticeable and annoying than the Raptor I had at the time! That was probably when I decided that noise *do* matter for HD, and I started paying attention to noise measurements afterwards (leading me to Samsung drive and WD Green Drives). Combined with the fact that it's successor gained notoriety in the reliability department, I haven't bought an internal Seagate drive in a long time. Saying that though, I was looking pretty closely at their hybrid drive for single HD laptop use few years ago holding for capacity of at least 1TB. While they are available now I no longer feel the rush of upgrading, and by the time I do, I might be content with the cost of SSD drives..

[BlueScream]

scan should release their % of drives rma'd so we have a better picture rather than this nonsense

I wish retailers would do this too.