Follow-up to Hard disk Reliability Story

I thought yesterday's news story about hard-drive failure rates was interesting, although I did wonder about the methodology of the report:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/3...ity-chart.html

I've just read this follow-up article over at Tweektown, which shed's some doubt over the validity of the original data:

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/60...red/index.html

It just goes to show that you should believe everything you read on the web :) It did occur to me that retailers like Scan might be in a better position to offer their customers objective information regarding the reliability of certain brands and / or models of the products they sell? Presumably they must sell thousands of hard-disks every year, and thus know pretty well the failure rates of each manufacturer (within the first 12 months, at least). How about it, Scan?

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Originally Posted by Jimbobgod1969

I thought yesterday's news story about hard-drive failure rates was interesting, although I did wonder about the methodology of the report:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/3...ity-chart.html

I've just read this follow-up article over at Tweektown, which shed's some doubt over the validity of the original data:

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/60...red/index.html

It just goes to show that you should believe everything you read on the web :) It did occur to me that retailers like Scan might be in a better position to offer their customers objective information regarding the reliability of certain brands and / or models of the products they sell? Presumably they must sell thousands of hard-disks every year, and thus know pretty well the failure rates of each manufacturer (within the first 12 months, at least). How about it, Scan?

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The disadvantage to a retailer doing it is you don't have control over the conditions, you could find that people that buy cheap disks tend to stick them in poorly designed cases full of dust with no airflow, or use them in caddies that they rattle around all the time.

Oh how lovely, just bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST1000DM003 which arrived today, 1TB and according to the tweaktown report it's annual failure rate is among the highest at 9.8%.
My old drive is in there too, in which their report showed the drive having an annual failure rate of 25.4%.


Good luck to me? :( just kidding I suppose it's way you treat your hard drive more than anything? The new drive (Latest Seagate Barracudas) have 1 full 1TB per-platter which in many respects should increase it's life expectancy? Most of the time the logic board goes on hard drives than the drive dying.

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Originally Posted by mikeo01

Oh how lovely, just bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST1000DM003 which arrived today, 1TB and according to the tweaktown report it's annual failure rate is among the highest at 9.8%.
My old drive is in there too, in which their report showed the drive having an annual failure rate of 25.4%.

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Hold on a sec, have you got the right end of the stick here? It was a Backblaze report that identified these high failure rates. The Tweaktown report is arguing that those numbers should be ignored as they're misleading.

It's also worth pointing out that the article isn't immune to errors either, in its eagerness to disparage Backblaze.

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Backblaze claims that drive temperature doesn't affect drive life. That is counter to the observations of many others, including drive manufacturers.

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Yet we know from the Google data that drive temperature isn't a significant factor in drive death, which they've completely ignored.

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Originally Posted by jim

Hold on a sec, have you got the right end of the stick here? It was a Backblaze report that identified these high failure rates. The Tweaktown report is arguing that those numbers should be ignored as they're misleading.

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Oh yes :Oops: my bad. My brain didn't interpret it well, been a long day!