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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,

by 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.

by kijin 7y ago

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.