6 ms·
Always amazed on how far ahead HGST is in reliability. What are they doing that is 2-6x better in failure rates?
by overcast 10y ago
Always amazed on how far ahead HGST is in reliability. What are they doing that is 2-6x better in failure rates?
- theandrewbailey 10y agoHGST was originally IBM's hard drive business (after selling it to Hitachi, and now WDC). There's probably some heavy duty/reliability traits that's still left in the manufacturing and company culture.
- overcast 10y agoThe only thing I remember from IBM is the DeathStar(Deskstar) drives, that ALL failed on me. Even the garbage refurbs they sent back.
- rb808 10y agome too. I wonder if there is a cycle where companies have a terrible reputation then overcompensate, presumably they'll slowly get worse reliability from here on as they focus on costs instead of failure rates.
- maxerickson 10y agoIt would also be interesting to see if the personnel involved in the engineering correlated with failure rates.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jandrese 10y agoYep, it was especially bad because IBM had the gold standard for drives before that point. They were more expensive, but you paid for the reliability, so people got really angry when they started failing regularly. From what I can tell, they fixed those problems and went back to the high quality but slightly more expensive drives of old. The most interesting part is that Backblaze still buys mostly Seagates, simply because they are easier to buy in bulk and have a better price. Even though they fail more often the failure rate isn't bad enough to be a problem. Also, Seagate's failure rate has been decreasing as they release new drives.
- tw04 10y agoHitachi, in general, has always been known for bullet-proof storage. I was extremely sad to see them sell off that business. Hopefully spinning drives are dead before WDC culture can bring HGST back to mediocre reliability.
- kogepathic 10y agoIt's especially interesting because Western Digital bought HGST in 2012. [0] To my knowledge, there have been innovations in the spinning rust (ahem hard drive) market since 2012. So why is HGST, a WD subsidiary, still making much more reliable drives? Different design teams? HGST factories instead of WD? [0] http://m.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/09/wd_closes_hgst_buy http://m.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/09/wd_closes_hgst_buy
- deelowe 10y agoHGST was acquired by WD, but they have very different manufacturing processes and AFAIK the design teams are still seperate.
- handruin 10y agoI've gone all-in on HGST for personal use because I've seen their results from Backblaze and also have good luck with them so far. I have 14 of their 4TB NAS and 22 of the 6TB NAS.
- Symbiote 10y agoI'm amazed that personal use requires 188TB of storage. That's more than my employer's Hadoop cluster...
- overcast 10y agoSmall hadron collider?
- userbinator 10y agoPerhaps a small hardon collider. (Context: http://archive.fortune.com/2006/11/30/magazines/fortune/obrienseagate.fortune/index.htm http://archive.fortune.com/2006/11/30/magazines/fortune/obri... )
- nerdponx 10y agoI was debating whether I should "favorite" this thread. You made my decision for me, thank you.
- avn2109 10y agoMaybe he does his own offsite backups with "personal use" HD's in several physical locations, each in a highly-redundant raid configuration? Even so it seems like a lot.
- antisthenes 10y agoSomeone's gotta back up that climate data...