Who makes the best disk drives?

[Brink]

Finally, someone with enough volume to test significant numbers of drives comes clean. There are drives to buy and drives to avoid.

Backblaze - the cloud backup company - continues to share their drive experience with us onesy-twosy buyers. It's informative.

Methodology
Backblaze, which open sourced their Storage Pod a few years ago, is now giving drive failure rates. They currently have over 27,000 consumer grade drives spinning in Backblaze storage pods.

Almost 13,000 each are Seagate and Hitachi drives, almost 3000 Western Digital drives and a too small for statistical reporting smattering of Toshiba and Samsung drives.

One cool thing: Backblaze buys drives the way you and I do: they get the cheapest drives that will work. Their workload is almost hundred percent write. Because they spread the incoming writes over several drives their workload isn't very performance intensive either.

Also, like you and me, they are willing to spend a little more for a more reliable drive but not a lot more. And unlike you and me they track every single drive that they install.

They measure the annual failure rate (AFR) rather than MTBF because that's an easier number to understand. They count as a failure anytime they have to replace a drive. Of course, vendors report that about half of all returned drives have no trouble found – but I like Backblaze's definition better.

Read more at: Who makes the best disk drives? | ZDNet

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Pity they didn't use any WD Blacks. They also didn't report on how good warranty support was between various brands.

 

[ThrashZone]

Probably the worst things about large drives is they fail harder,
I'll stick with 250 gig's so it doesn't hurt as badly

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Probably the worst things about large drives is they fail harder,
I'll stick with 250 gig's so it doesn't hurt as badly

Coward! Actually, that's a good idea if you have room for enough of them to hold all your data. However, I would need five to hold all the data I have now and the amount of data I have is increasing every day. My poor little machine can hold only six HDDs (five if I have to get a longer GPU card). Larger HDDs are OK as long as you have them properly backed up (and I'm anal when it comes to backups).

 

[indianacarnie]

That was interesting and actually in line with MY experience, albeit only with WD and Seagate. But as I'm currently (and slowly lol) switching out all my drives for SSD's it is more an academic exercise than practical knowledge for me.

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-rev...ata-capacity-along-turbowrite-great-security/

 

[mjf]

Not good news.
I've got a number of internal Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives (2-4 years old) with no problem but I don't run them 24/7. The minimum size in the test set for Seagates was 1.5TB.
Hitachi seems the winner. I've got one 5 years old.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

The best HDD I ever had was an IDE 60GB Maxtor that lasted seven years. I retired it when I replaced the machine it was in with another one that only had SATA connections.

The brand I've had the best luck with is Western Digital. Of the fourteen I've had, only one failed (one of the early Greens that had head parking issues); I still have the other thirteen.

Seagate, on the other hand... Out of the four I've owned, two failed (the infamous 7200.11s), one was a disappointment (a SSHD that didn't work out for my usage), and one that works fine but is unspectacular.

 

[ThrashZone]

Fortunately I'm not a packrat of data
The best data is on cd/ dvd but not perfect,
Cheers.

 

[LMiller7]

I have a Fujitsu 6 GB hard drive purchased in 1998 that is still in service. It isn't used much anymore but still works well and SMART reports no issues. But I think that is too much to expect from modern drives. I expect the pressure for ever higher capacity and performance without raising the price has taken it's toll in reliability.

 

[Solarstarshines]

Wow i use Seagate and WD just so happen i got a Hitachi from my Dad lol

 

[Rain08]

I've always thought that Seagate drives are very reliable; but when I read this and my old Seagate drive got broken, I'm now baffled. My old drive (check my system specs) lasted about 2½ years. One day last December, I was just modding a game until when I saved the files and opened it again, it's telling me that the file's corrupted and after a couple of days, BSOD's are now appearing. I SMART tested it, but it's not telling me anything. I had to get it fixed so I brought it to a local shop. The technician tested it with HD Tune and it's telling us that there's a problem with the drive. The technician then replaced the old one with the Western Digital WD Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB hard drive plus he upgraded my OS to Ultimate. Heck, even my 2½ year old WD external drive (both drives are bought in the same date, May '11) is still good. The old drive is still here, I might still be able to salvage some files, but the problem is that my PC has no extra power connectors even if it has an extra SATA cable.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hitachi seems to rule and thankfully that's what I have,
One on an external which is 7-8 y.o.
They seem bullet proof especially older models,
No telling what's going to happen in the future with the merge,
Cheers.

 

[kathy025]

I have had 1TB Maxtor and 1TB Seagate. Both suffered the dreaded click-of-death. The external drives lasted no more than 2 years. Personally, I'm not buying Seagate or its subsidiaries.

I have 2TB WD My Book Essential (x2) and pretty much content with their performance.

 

[tinmar49]

I was mildly annoyed when I found that my Samsung M3 external drive is actually made by Seagate

 

[Lebon14]

I was mildly annoyed when I found that my Samsung M3 external drive is actually made by Seagate

Of course, Samsung's HDD branch was bought by Seagate.

Personally, I have 1 Hitachi HDD (500GB) and 2 WD (both the same, 1TB) and one Seagate/Samsung (1TB) HDD. One of the WD ran for ~3½ (it's a Green one) without any signs of weariness until recently the Reallocated sector count went up and the fitness in SMART dropped to 0. I swapped it with the copy which never really ran beside the times I decided to copy the other I heavily used. Note that the WD Green drive isn't the one that suffers from the head-parking problem; although the Stop/Start count was sky high on the first 1TB. My Samsung is running for a year now. No problems. The Hitachi is running perfect for 24/7 for 3½ years now.

I'm actually looking to buy a 4TB HDD sometime this year. My WD 1TB is my music collection and there's only ~70GB left on it... So that page had good data. Thanks!

 

[madcratebuilder]

Backblaze - the cloud backup company - continues to share their drive experience with us onesy-twosy buyers.

Baclblaze buys the cheapest drives it can find, including refurbs. They install them in large racks with inadequate cooling. There blog report "What Hard Drive should I buy?" is worthless IMHO.

I agree with tweaktowns article by Paul Alcorn.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Backblaze - the cloud backup company - continues to share their drive experience with us onesy-twosy buyers.

Baclblaze buys the cheapest drives it can find, including refurbs. They install them in large racks with inadequate cooling. There blog report "What Hard Drive should I buy?" is worthless IMHO.

I agree with tweaktowns article by Paul Alcorn.

Alcorn's article is no better than Backblaze's study. Backblaze's results may be based on extreme operating conditions and are most likely skewed in various ways but the huge percentage of failures for Seagates compared to other brands is still very significant since all the drives involved were operated in the same or very similar conditions. Even if a large number of refurbs were included for one brand only, as Alcorn postulated, why were so many refurbs available in the first place? A high availability of refurbs for predominantly one brand would be damning in itself.

 

[mjf]

There is a clear implication about Seagate drives in general but there appear to be too many variables to draw broadbrush conclusions IMO. I wonder if they got a statistician involved.

 

[madcratebuilder]

Backblaze - the cloud backup company - continues to share their drive experience with us onesy-twosy buyers.

Baclblaze buys the cheapest drives it can find, including refurbs. They install them in large racks with inadequate cooling. There blog report "What Hard Drive should I buy?" is worthless IMHO.

I agree with tweaktowns article by Paul Alcorn.

Alcorn's article is no better than Backblaze's study. Backblaze's results may be based on extreme operating conditions and are most likely skewed in various ways but the huge percentage of failures for Seagates compared to other brands is still very significant since all the drives involved were operated in the same or very similar conditions. Even if a large number of refurbs were included for one brand only, as Alcorn postulated, why were so many refurbs available in the first place? A high availability of refurbs for predominantly one brand would be damning in itself.

Looking at retail outlets I see more refurbs from WD and OZC than Seagate, does that mean WD and OCZ have higher failure rates? I don't think that statistic is a good measure of failure rates.

It seems to me that some users have a much higher rate of HDD failures than others. Could this be from the operating practices some users have vs others?

I've replaced a lot of hdd's for peeps over the years and the vast majority of these failures were caused by a outside event. Sudden power disconnect and heat exposure are the two main issues I have seen.

 

[Britton30]

Very interesting article. While BackBlaze's experience may correlate to consumer use, I doubt that many of us have a drive fully loaded with writes 100% of the time. Perhaps if there were more data on drives used as 99% of the public uses them, the brand failure rates would be different.

Personally I've always thought WD vs. Seagate vs. Hitachi et al, is like the Ford vs. Chevy vs. Dodge debate which started at the introduction of the 2nd brand of auto was sold. We all have bad experience with one brand or other it seems, which I find odd. If WD is always good, we'd all have one, if Seagate is all bad, no one would own one.

My experience is, all the WD drives I've had failed, so that's 100% failure in my case for a brand and very atypical. It may be noteworthy all were in pre-built machines I bought, 2 hp's and one Sony VAIO, all desktops. As stated before, your mileage may [and likely will] vary, and by a lot.

I have had Hitachi, Fujitsu, Maxtor, and Samsung HDDs in the past with no failures among them. Currently I have all Seagate HDDs, one an enterprise class, which don't seem to fare any better than a consumer grade drive, that's disappointing.

I gleaned some more interesting info from the links in the article Shawn posted too. Both are 7 years old so some data may not be relevant now.

NetApp Weighs In On Disks

This one I think in relevant about SMART.

How smart is SMART?
Not very, as Google found, and many in the industry already knew. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) captures drive error data to predict failure far enough in advance so you can back up. Yet SMART focuses on mechanical failures, while a good deal of a disk drive is electronic, so SMART misses many sudden drive failure modes, like power component failure. The Google team found that 36% of the failed drives did not exhibit a single SMART-monitored failure. They concluded that SMART data is almost useless for predicting the failure of a single drive.

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