5 ms·

Seems that Seagate are the worst, even if it's a 2% failure rate. And reality sucks: right yesterday I lost one hdd from Seagate and the second one is making n

Seems that Seagate are the worst, even if it's a 2% failure rate. And reality sucks: right yesterday I lost one hdd from Seagate and the second one is making noises. Ohh boy

gruez 7y ago
Keep in mind there's no WD drives in the comparison, only HGST (reputed to be high quality), and tosiba (low sample count).
- kijin 7y ago
  I've been following these Backblaze reports for a few years now, and Seagate always seemed to do worse than other brands. HGST has consistently been at the top, rivaled only by Toshiba lately. No wonder Backblaze has replaced most of their inventory with these two brands.
  - atYevP 7y ago
    Yev here -> Yea, the HGST drives continue to do really well for us, but at around 2% the Seagates are no slouches - especially when you consider the sample size. That's a pretty darn good ROI from drives that also tend to be a bit less expensive!
    - kijin 7y ago
      Yep, I suppose that's why you continue to use Seagate drives. They're often more than 2% cheaper than the competition! I think I saw double-digit failure rates from certain Seagate models a few years ago, though :(
      - atYevP 7y ago
        Yea they went through a bit of a rough patch, but it's honestly been years since that was the case, they're more in-line with other manufacturers now and the pricing is very competitive!
  - brianwski 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > No wonder Backblaze has replaced most of their inventory with these two brands. We Reed-Solomon encode each file across multiple drives in multiple machines, and we always use "enough parity" that the failure rate won't result in data loss. So for us, we have a (pretty simple) little spreadsheet that takes into account drive failure rate as a cost, along with drive density (more dense drives means renting less data center space) and we let the spreadsheet kick out which drives to buy based on the cheapest total cost of ownership. Honestly, we're not brand loyal AT ALL, and we're not afraid of a higher failure rate (other than that raises the cost because we have to buy replacements for failed drives). With that said, if an individual purchases ONE DRIVE they might value a lower drive failure rate differently than Backblaze does. But honestly, if there is a 1% drive failure rate per year or a 10% drive failure rate in a year, you should still backup the data so you can sleep at night.
- linsomniac 7y ago
  I've been a long time IBM/Hitachi/HGST fan, and agree with the "high quality" assessment. Nearly every time I've used Seagate I've had problems. There was one batch I put in a home storage server that I had no problems with, otherwise they seem to fail a lot. Over the decades I've probably had close to a thousand Ultra/Desk Star drives (personal and business). We recently replaced all the 15K Seagate drives in our dev/stg 6 year old server with Samsung 860 EVOs, because I was replacing 1-2 a month (out of ~20 disks). I've also had good luck with Toshiba disks, though I have a much smaller sample size.
  - philpem 7y ago
    I've had a similar experience with Seagate - the usual failure is bad-blocks or a huge number of G-list remaps while SMART claims the drive is fine. Also had a Barracuda 7200 with the bricking firmware bug and a 7200 which suffered spindle-lock on a test bench and launched itself off the bench, smashing the mounts and cables in the process and came to rest in my lap. I could deal with their quality issues if their RMA process was at least reasonable. With WDC it's a credit card number (if you want an advance RMA) and a web form to request an RMA. With Seagate it's a game to try and buy "official" packaging, a tooth-and-nail fight for an RMA number and a long wait. They actually refused to RMA the spindle-locked drive because the PCB was damaged (well, no duh). Thankfully the supplier was more lenient.
    - linsomniac 7y ago
      Hmm, I've had pretty good luck returning Seagates. Which I'm thankful for, because I have to do it a lot. I pay the few bucks for the advance replacement, something like $7-$15 sticks in my head, and use the packaging that they send the new drive out in to return it.
    - _jal 7y ago
      I've had highly divergent experience with WD drives. My home system using WD Reds has been great. It is larger than a normal home storage box (24 drives), and it gets substantially more use than normal (backing store for a bunch of VMs, mostly). I've replaced one drive in five and a half years. Contrast with storage servers built for work with WD Golds. Those are 45 drives each and used for database backup workloads. We replace about a drive a quarter (of the 90 total), and this has been pretty consistent for a bit over two years. Not sure if I got great Reds or if Golds are just terrible, but that's what I've seen.
beatgammit 7y ago
I don't think personal results and Backblaze results are really comparable. I know plenty of people who have have a bad experience with WD drives, and plenty who have had a fantastic experience with Seagate drives. Honestly, all hard drives are pretty solid these days, and I honestly don't think one manufacturer really stands out enough that individuals can really expect a given drive to last longer than another. Statistics just don't work on a sample size that small. You may get lucky, or you may get unlucky, it really just depends on which drive you happen to get. I make my personal HD buying decisions based on: - warranty and customer service - price - noise - performance Both Seagate and WD have about the same warranty, and they both seem to be pretty good with customer service (check recent reviews though, this can change). If you consider them equal in that department, pick based on the other three metrics. I was about to buy some Seagate drives for a NAS, but ended up with WD because they were on sale. I was a little worried about the noise from Seagate, but the price and performance won me over, but I switched at the last minute because the price changed. Now, if you're going to build a data center with a large number of consumer drives, absolutely use Backblaze's results. If your just going to but a few, recognise that all drives the test are reasonably reliable, so whether your drive dies early is mostly luck (assuming you treat them nicely).
- bluedino 7y ago
  If you're as big as Backblaze, it doesn't even matter if 2% of your drives fail (otherwise they wouldn't use Seagate) They have the data spread out across enough drives with enough redundancy to live with it.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  My favorite advice I've heard for home NAS drive buying advice is to mix brands so if you end up buying a lemon model/batch, at least you've lowered the risk of them all failing at once when repairing the RAID
mrtksn 7y ago
The first thing I did was to reassure my prejudice towards Seagate. I recall similar stats over the years and Seagate made an impassion on me that they fail quite more often than the rest. I also had a personal Seagate drive failure so...
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
From my consumer-grade computer repair experience, if the hard drive is dead, it was a Seagate. WD failures are few and far between. That being said, I had a pair of 1 TB Seagates in RAID 1 that had over 7 years of runtime, which I retired for a capacity upgrade.

Seems that Seagate are the worst, even if it's a 2% failure rate. And reality sucks: right yesterday I lost one hdd from Seagate and the second one is making noises. Ohh boy

gruez 7y ago

Keep in mind there's no WD drives in the comparison, only HGST (reputed to be high quality), and tosiba (low sample count).

kijin 7y ago
I've been following these Backblaze reports for a few years now, and Seagate always seemed to do worse than other brands. HGST has consistently been at the top, rivaled only by Toshiba lately. No wonder Backblaze has replaced most of their inventory with these two brands.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> Yea, the HGST drives continue to do really well for us, but at around 2% the Seagates are no slouches - especially when you consider the sample size. That's a pretty darn good ROI from drives that also tend to be a bit less expensive!
  - kijin 7y ago
    Yep, I suppose that's why you continue to use Seagate drives. They're often more than 2% cheaper than the competition! I think I saw double-digit failure rates from certain Seagate models a few years ago, though :(
    - atYevP 7y ago
      Yea they went through a bit of a rough patch, but it's honestly been years since that was the case, they're more in-line with other manufacturers now and the pricing is very competitive!
- brianwski 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > No wonder Backblaze has replaced most of their inventory with these two brands. We Reed-Solomon encode each file across multiple drives in multiple machines, and we always use "enough parity" that the failure rate won't result in data loss. So for us, we have a (pretty simple) little spreadsheet that takes into account drive failure rate as a cost, along with drive density (more dense drives means renting less data center space) and we let the spreadsheet kick out which drives to buy based on the cheapest total cost of ownership. Honestly, we're not brand loyal AT ALL, and we're not afraid of a higher failure rate (other than that raises the cost because we have to buy replacements for failed drives). With that said, if an individual purchases ONE DRIVE they might value a lower drive failure rate differently than Backblaze does. But honestly, if there is a 1% drive failure rate per year or a 10% drive failure rate in a year, you should still backup the data so you can sleep at night.
linsomniac 7y ago
I've been a long time IBM/Hitachi/HGST fan, and agree with the "high quality" assessment. Nearly every time I've used Seagate I've had problems. There was one batch I put in a home storage server that I had no problems with, otherwise they seem to fail a lot. Over the decades I've probably had close to a thousand Ultra/Desk Star drives (personal and business). We recently replaced all the 15K Seagate drives in our dev/stg 6 year old server with Samsung 860 EVOs, because I was replacing 1-2 a month (out of ~20 disks). I've also had good luck with Toshiba disks, though I have a much smaller sample size.
- philpem 7y ago
  I've had a similar experience with Seagate - the usual failure is bad-blocks or a huge number of G-list remaps while SMART claims the drive is fine. Also had a Barracuda 7200 with the bricking firmware bug and a 7200 which suffered spindle-lock on a test bench and launched itself off the bench, smashing the mounts and cables in the process and came to rest in my lap. I could deal with their quality issues if their RMA process was at least reasonable. With WDC it's a credit card number (if you want an advance RMA) and a web form to request an RMA. With Seagate it's a game to try and buy "official" packaging, a tooth-and-nail fight for an RMA number and a long wait. They actually refused to RMA the spindle-locked drive because the PCB was damaged (well, no duh). Thankfully the supplier was more lenient.
  - linsomniac 7y ago
    Hmm, I've had pretty good luck returning Seagates. Which I'm thankful for, because I have to do it a lot. I pay the few bucks for the advance replacement, something like $7-$15 sticks in my head, and use the packaging that they send the new drive out in to return it.
  - _jal 7y ago
    I've had highly divergent experience with WD drives. My home system using WD Reds has been great. It is larger than a normal home storage box (24 drives), and it gets substantially more use than normal (backing store for a bunch of VMs, mostly). I've replaced one drive in five and a half years. Contrast with storage servers built for work with WD Golds. Those are 45 drives each and used for database backup workloads. We replace about a drive a quarter (of the 90 total), and this has been pretty consistent for a bit over two years. Not sure if I got great Reds or if Golds are just terrible, but that's what I've seen.

beatgammit 7y ago

I don't think personal results and Backblaze results are really comparable. I know plenty of people who have have a bad experience with WD drives, and plenty who have had a fantastic experience with Seagate drives. Honestly, all hard drives are pretty solid these days, and I honestly don't think one manufacturer really stands out enough that individuals can really expect a given drive to last longer than another. Statistics just don't work on a sample size that small. You may get lucky, or you may get unlucky, it really just depends on which drive you happen to get. I make my personal HD buying decisions based on: - warranty and customer service - price - noise - performance Both Seagate and WD have about the same warranty, and they both seem to be pretty good with customer service (check recent reviews though, this can change). If you consider them equal in that department, pick based on the other three metrics. I was about to buy some Seagate drives for a NAS, but ended up with WD because they were on sale. I was a little worried about the noise from Seagate, but the price and performance won me over, but I switched at the last minute because the price changed. Now, if you're going to build a data center with a large number of consumer drives, absolutely use Backblaze's results. If your just going to but a few, recognise that all drives the test are reasonably reliable, so whether your drive dies early is mostly luck (assuming you treat them nicely).

bluedino 7y ago
If you're as big as Backblaze, it doesn't even matter if 2% of your drives fail (otherwise they wouldn't use Seagate) They have the data spread out across enough drives with enough redundancy to live with it.
kalleboo 7y ago
My favorite advice I've heard for home NAS drive buying advice is to mix brands so if you end up buying a lemon model/batch, at least you've lowered the risk of them all failing at once when repairing the RAID

mrtksn 7y ago

The first thing I did was to reassure my prejudice towards Seagate. I recall similar stats over the years and Seagate made an impassion on me that they fail quite more often than the rest. I also had a personal Seagate drive failure so...

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

From my consumer-grade computer repair experience, if the hard drive is dead, it was a Seagate. WD failures are few and far between. That being said, I had a pair of 1 TB Seagates in RAID 1 that had over 7 years of runtime, which I retired for a capacity upgrade.