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Shout out to Seagate, every drive that my friends and I have bought from them have eventually failed, good to see that they fail in non-consumer use too, not ju

Shout out to Seagate, every drive that my friends and I have bought from them have eventually failed, good to see that they fail in non-consumer use too, not just me! Stick to the Western Digitals.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here from Backblaze -> The Western Digital drives that you've purchased will fail too. That's part of the whole point of these reports, all of the drives eventually fail out or reach a state where we have to replace them - it's not any one specific manufacturer. That's part of why having a backup is so important, even the SSDs in newer machines will eventually go wonky.
- Scramblejams 7y ago
  Thanks for posting this data! I love it! I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do. FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work. Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.
  - cheeze 7y ago
    WD isn't much better, but Backblaze stats have consistently shown Seagate to be higher failure rate than everybody else out there. Good riddance.
    - vorticalbox 7y ago
      As noted above all driver will fail, though I get your point I think saying that seagate driver time to fail is lower is a fairer statement.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      I just purchased a newer WD Red (WD80EFAX) to replace an older HGST (pre-WD if memory serves) drive. That drive (and another of the same model I purchased elsewhere to test) is not recognized by the UEFI on the motherboard. The OS probes the drive and fails to negotiate DMA transfers. Turns out there is a publicly available KB article that mentions known bugs with transfer rate negotiation on some of their SATA3 drives. Of course WD won't say which drives. There's even a utility referenced in the article that you can use to disable SATA3 support. But WD won't make it publicly utility. Meanwhile their support is stuck in a "have you tried power cycling the computer" loop. If memory serves Western Digital / HGST / SanDisk were among the first to jack up prices after the Thailand disasters. Fuck em. Meanwhile is the difference in failure rate between Seagate and Western Digital even statistically significant? For most comparisons you're looking at a fraction of a percent.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    This data isn't particularly useful in more ways than that because there are a lot of variables that differ between running in a data center vs desktop/home NAS. I like reading these data because it's interesting to me, but I make purchasing decisions based on other sources, usually in terms of ease of dealing with support for end customers (when I need a drive replaced), noise (it's in my house), heat sensitivity (my house is warmer than a data center), and sensitivity to things like vibration (my case is far less stable than enterprise storage clusters). That being said, I occasionally use these data to break ties or see variations between generations of drives.
- willis936 7y ago
  Do you think the seagate barracuda deserves to take the “death star” title from HGST? I think HGST has redeemed themselves with sub 1% failure rates for years. Seagate managed to put out a 30% failure rate drive.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    I'm not sure about today, but 4 years ago we bought 120 HP notebooks from Verizon (they had cell modems in them) to use with a project. We had a horrendous failure rate of 100 hard drives in the first six months. They were Seagate drives. We ended up just replacing the remaining 20s hard drives as a preventative measure.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    The "Death Star" title really belongs only to that one specific model (75GXP) produced by IBM and its spectacular failure mode (shredding the magnetic media off the platter almost entirely in some cases)
    - willis936 7y ago
      It came with a failure auto audio alarm!
      - vidarh 7y ago
        I've never gotten to hear one fail, but these were the way I learned never to use drives from a single batch in a RAID array back in the day (most of the time these days I never match models in a single array and try to avoid matching manufacturers; gotten paranoid over the years after successive RAID failures) Thankfully it was just stressful - we had backups, but drives in our array started failing one by one, with about a weeks interval; unfortunately it took something like 4 days to rebuild the array each time, so we wasted a lot of time shifting writes elsewhere so the last backup we had + writes going elsewhere combined remained recent enough in case a second drive would fail. We got off easy, but the time we spent probably cost us more than having set up a more redundant system in the first time would have.
    - 7y ago
- piepoter 7y ago
  Then I stand corrected. Is there anyway to avoid drive failures or should we accept the fact that they will break eventually? Also, the data is interesting and appreciated.
  - madeofpalk 7y ago
    All things fail eventually.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Buy a RAID enclosure or setup a home RAIDed server and do backups. You cannot avoid it but you can mitigate the damage.
    - derekp7 7y ago
      I really wish that consumer OSs would mandate RAID (mirroring at the minimum), requiring additional steps to install on unprotected storage. This should have been implemented even back during the early days of consumer hard drives, or at the minimum have a warning on boot that "Your data is stored on temporary storage -- go [here] to configure redundancy". At least something that puts it front and center that storing data on a single hard drive will eventually lead to data loss. Also would be nice to have a similar warning to "Your data has not been backed up in [x] days".
      - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
        I use a Mac. I get those warnings. I use a Synology drive (using Synology's RAID-like format) for my Time Machine backups, and a Drobo for my less critical stuff. They have WD drives. I have not liked the Seagates. However, I like the HGST stats. One of the nice things about both Drobo and Synology, is that I can change the drive type and capacity "on the fly."
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        Ugh, god why? Why must people in our industry daydream about over-complicating things all the time? Very few use-cases benefit significantly from mirrored disks. The amount of data a user actually cares about having a backup of is often significantly smaller than the OS and related garbage on a disk that they can do without. Besides which, a local mirror isn't a good backup anyway!
- ramraj07 7y ago
  I feel like there might be a difference - do drives fail more if they're not continuously running? When I was working in a lab it was generally close to 70% failure rates for drives that were sitting in a box for more than a couple years.
- ravedave5 7y ago
  Yev - have you considered adding in some SSD drives just to see how well they last & what failure modes they have vs HDDs?
  - atYevP 7y ago
    Good question and nope. They're simply too expensive for us. As they get lower in price they do become more interesting, but their $ to density is just nowhere near where we'd need it to be in order to continue providing our service at the rate we do. Some of our boot drives are becoming SSDs though, and they are in the "raw" data that we publish.
me_me_me 7y ago
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/ Seems like WD has similar rates.
- piepoter 7y ago
  No one is safe from inevitable drive failure, it seems.
- supergauntlet 7y ago
  Call it paranoia but I see this "WD is amazing, Seagate is shit" sentiment everywhere, but the data doesn't back it up. Is this guerilla marketing by Western Digital?
  - iotku 7y ago
    I think there's some selection bias as Seagate drives are fairly abundant in oem systems where the oems included the lowest tier drive possible to shave some cost off which may be less well built and more susceptible to damage over time from vibration/impacts than higher tier drives. I suspect that most of the time after a hard drive failure the drive gets replaced with a higher tier drive (typically from another manufacturer like WD as the person feels burnt by Seagate for having a hdd failure) which may prove more reliable. That's my wild speculation anyways.
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    Well, JFYI, in 2009 (starting 2009, last user posted a few days ago) there was the great Seagate 7200.11 Bricking Season (unrelated to quality of the actual hardware, the issues were related to firmware) that killed so many disks (most of which could be revived) that I guess noone hasn't had one or knew not someone with the issue (or heard someone talking of the matter). By any metric a thread on an all in all "niche" technical board with almost 5,000 posts and nearly 4,700,000 views should mean that a lot of people experienced the issue: https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/ https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate...
  - vatueil 7y ago
wil421 7y ago
Agreed. My seagate drives all died, even ones bundled in external usb drives. I have 10 year old WD black and green drives still kicking. I still have a gen 1 or 2 intel ssd drive that’s still kicking.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  I think those in external USB drives are the most likely to fail. It seems that they put their lower quality stuff or at least drives that didn't quite pass qc into those because they know the huge majority of those will have some data out on them and then never touched again.
  - wil421 7y ago
    If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with dragster. Same with WD, I ripped out a green drive. Users in forums have recommended buying certain external drives and ripping them apart to save money. Certain high capacity WD red drives cost less when they were bundled into an “NAS” enclosure.
    - wil421 7y ago
      >If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with dragster. Dragster should be seagate. Weird autocorrect. If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with seagate.
      - jjeaff 7y ago
        How do you know? As I said in my comment, they may be drives that didn't quite meet the qc threshold. All drives usually ship with a certain number of bad sectors. An excessively high number of bad sectors can mean there are quality issues with that specific drive. They may be 'binning' those more poorly testing drives for the external USB drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
    - beatgammit 7y ago
mywacaday 7y ago
I used to work for a long defunct storage manufacturer, reached the point where we skipped either even or odd (i can't remember) firmware versions on the seagate drives. RMA counts would always be higher on the even/odd number.
- myself248 7y ago
  That would be an interesting analysis! Like buying a car built on a friday?
clhodapp 7y ago
As a teenager, I helped a friend revive a Seagate drive after it bricked due to faulty firmware. If I recall correctly, my friend had actually installed some firmware updates for the drive, but had not installed one recently enough to avoid the problem. We had to run wires to contacts on the board to allow us to run commands in a terminal (in Windows) on the only machine we could find with a serial port. When it worked, we felt like hackers from a movie!
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
I'll never buy Seagate again after losing a drive because of a firmware bug that prevents it from coming online.
noja 7y ago
Every failed drive I have owned was a Seagate too.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
Funny how everyone chimes in with their Seagate horror stories. My experience with them isn't much better. But another fun story: I had a PSU blow up a couple years ago in a machine with three WDs and three HGST. All WDs were dead after that, the others worked flawlessly. Probably not a large enough sample size for any definite conclusions but at least it put a failure mode on my radar that wasn't there before.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Dissenting opinion: I've owned and used a lot of Seagate drives. I have had a total of one fail on me. Given that they are usually less expensive they are then competing drives, I think they're fine. At the rate of disk size growth I end up replacing the disks for size reasons before they fail anyway.
- saxonww 7y ago
  My experience is the opposite. 100% of the Seagate drives I have purchased for personal use (total: 4) experienced failures within the warranty period, and of the drives I had a hand in purchasing professionally at least half needed replacement within the warranty period (~64). I think Seagate is fine if you are willing to overbuild and deal with the refurb process within the warranty period. I'm not, and will not personally buy a Seagate product again unless their reputation improves (similar to what happened with IBM/HGST post-deathstar). It's not worth the time or aggravation, to me.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    All I can say is my experience differs. The only Seagate drives I've had that kind of failure rate with were the 3TB ones that were out, IIRC, around the time of The Great Disk Shortage.
    - piepoter 7y ago
      I've still got my 1tb seagate up and running from around six years ago? No problems with that but all the 3tb I've encountered all seemed to have failed quite quickly. Maybe it's the specific model that I got but the higher capacities, in my case, tend to be more faulty.
Hamuko 7y ago
I've ever only had one drive failure. It was a 3 TB Seagate. I remember it failing in like three years, so after the warranty had already expired. My oldest drive is a 500 GB Western Digital from 2008 that's still operational today. I imagine its end is near, but I've thought about that for a couple of years now.
- piepoter 7y ago
  My seagate that failed on me was a 3tb too! Do you remember what year you got it? Thinking that it may be that model.
  - Hamuko 7y ago
    Seagate Barracuda 3 TB, ordered in January 2014.

Shout out to Seagate, every drive that my friends and I have bought from them have eventually failed, good to see that they fail in non-consumer use too, not just me! Stick to the Western Digitals.

atYevP 7y ago

Yev here from Backblaze -> The Western Digital drives that you've purchased will fail too. That's part of the whole point of these reports, all of the drives eventually fail out or reach a state where we have to replace them - it's not any one specific manufacturer. That's part of why having a backup is so important, even the SSDs in newer machines will eventually go wonky.

Scramblejams 7y ago
Thanks for posting this data! I love it! I appreciate your diplomatic language, but the time to failure does matter, and consumers don’t have the same cost structure that incentivizes replacing working drives the way you do. FWIW I share GP’s experience with Seagate. I had quite a few of them, ranging in size from 500 gigs to 2TB. Every last one of them died relatively quickly, while most of my Hitachis, Toshibas, and WDs from that era still work. Seagate earned a permanent boycott from this customer.
- cheeze 7y ago
  WD isn't much better, but Backblaze stats have consistently shown Seagate to be higher failure rate than everybody else out there. Good riddance.
  - vorticalbox 7y ago
    As noted above all driver will fail, though I get your point I think saying that seagate driver time to fail is lower is a fairer statement.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    I just purchased a newer WD Red (WD80EFAX) to replace an older HGST (pre-WD if memory serves) drive. That drive (and another of the same model I purchased elsewhere to test) is not recognized by the UEFI on the motherboard. The OS probes the drive and fails to negotiate DMA transfers. Turns out there is a publicly available KB article that mentions known bugs with transfer rate negotiation on some of their SATA3 drives. Of course WD won't say which drives. There's even a utility referenced in the article that you can use to disable SATA3 support. But WD won't make it publicly utility. Meanwhile their support is stuck in a "have you tried power cycling the computer" loop. If memory serves Western Digital / HGST / SanDisk were among the first to jack up prices after the Thailand disasters. Fuck em. Meanwhile is the difference in failure rate between Seagate and Western Digital even statistically significant? For most comparisons you're looking at a fraction of a percent.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  This data isn't particularly useful in more ways than that because there are a lot of variables that differ between running in a data center vs desktop/home NAS. I like reading these data because it's interesting to me, but I make purchasing decisions based on other sources, usually in terms of ease of dealing with support for end customers (when I need a drive replaced), noise (it's in my house), heat sensitivity (my house is warmer than a data center), and sensitivity to things like vibration (my case is far less stable than enterprise storage clusters). That being said, I occasionally use these data to break ties or see variations between generations of drives.
willis936 7y ago
Do you think the seagate barracuda deserves to take the “death star” title from HGST? I think HGST has redeemed themselves with sub 1% failure rates for years. Seagate managed to put out a 30% failure rate drive.
- protomyth 7y ago
  I'm not sure about today, but 4 years ago we bought 120 HP notebooks from Verizon (they had cell modems in them) to use with a project. We had a horrendous failure rate of 100 hard drives in the first six months. They were Seagate drives. We ended up just replacing the remaining 20s hard drives as a preventative measure.
- vidarh 7y ago
  The "Death Star" title really belongs only to that one specific model (75GXP) produced by IBM and its spectacular failure mode (shredding the magnetic media off the platter almost entirely in some cases)
  - willis936 7y ago
    It came with a failure auto audio alarm!
    - vidarh 7y ago
      I've never gotten to hear one fail, but these were the way I learned never to use drives from a single batch in a RAID array back in the day (most of the time these days I never match models in a single array and try to avoid matching manufacturers; gotten paranoid over the years after successive RAID failures) Thankfully it was just stressful - we had backups, but drives in our array started failing one by one, with about a weeks interval; unfortunately it took something like 4 days to rebuild the array each time, so we wasted a lot of time shifting writes elsewhere so the last backup we had + writes going elsewhere combined remained recent enough in case a second drive would fail. We got off easy, but the time we spent probably cost us more than having set up a more redundant system in the first time would have.
  - 7y ago
piepoter 7y ago
Then I stand corrected. Is there anyway to avoid drive failures or should we accept the fact that they will break eventually? Also, the data is interesting and appreciated.
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  All things fail eventually.
- protomyth 7y ago
  Buy a RAID enclosure or setup a home RAIDed server and do backups. You cannot avoid it but you can mitigate the damage.
  - derekp7 7y ago
    I really wish that consumer OSs would mandate RAID (mirroring at the minimum), requiring additional steps to install on unprotected storage. This should have been implemented even back during the early days of consumer hard drives, or at the minimum have a warning on boot that "Your data is stored on temporary storage -- go [here] to configure redundancy". At least something that puts it front and center that storing data on a single hard drive will eventually lead to data loss. Also would be nice to have a similar warning to "Your data has not been backed up in [x] days".
    - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
      I use a Mac. I get those warnings. I use a Synology drive (using Synology's RAID-like format) for my Time Machine backups, and a Drobo for my less critical stuff. They have WD drives. I have not liked the Seagates. However, I like the HGST stats. One of the nice things about both Drobo and Synology, is that I can change the drive type and capacity "on the fly."
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Ugh, god why? Why must people in our industry daydream about over-complicating things all the time? Very few use-cases benefit significantly from mirrored disks. The amount of data a user actually cares about having a backup of is often significantly smaller than the OS and related garbage on a disk that they can do without. Besides which, a local mirror isn't a good backup anyway!
ramraj07 7y ago
I feel like there might be a difference - do drives fail more if they're not continuously running? When I was working in a lab it was generally close to 70% failure rates for drives that were sitting in a box for more than a couple years.
ravedave5 7y ago
Yev - have you considered adding in some SSD drives just to see how well they last & what failure modes they have vs HDDs?
- atYevP 7y ago
  Good question and nope. They're simply too expensive for us. As they get lower in price they do become more interesting, but their $ to density is just nowhere near where we'd need it to be in order to continue providing our service at the rate we do. Some of our boot drives are becoming SSDs though, and they are in the "raw" data that we publish.

me_me_me 7y ago

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/ Seems like WD has similar rates.

piepoter 7y ago
No one is safe from inevitable drive failure, it seems.
supergauntlet 7y ago
Call it paranoia but I see this "WD is amazing, Seagate is shit" sentiment everywhere, but the data doesn't back it up. Is this guerilla marketing by Western Digital?
- iotku 7y ago
  I think there's some selection bias as Seagate drives are fairly abundant in oem systems where the oems included the lowest tier drive possible to shave some cost off which may be less well built and more susceptible to damage over time from vibration/impacts than higher tier drives. I suspect that most of the time after a hard drive failure the drive gets replaced with a higher tier drive (typically from another manufacturer like WD as the person feels burnt by Seagate for having a hdd failure) which may prove more reliable. That's my wild speculation anyways.
- jaclaz 7y ago
  Well, JFYI, in 2009 (starting 2009, last user posted a few days ago) there was the great Seagate 7200.11 Bricking Season (unrelated to quality of the actual hardware, the issues were related to firmware) that killed so many disks (most of which could be revived) that I guess noone hasn't had one or knew not someone with the issue (or heard someone talking of the matter). By any metric a thread on an all in all "niche" technical board with almost 5,000 posts and nearly 4,700,000 views should mean that a lot of people experienced the issue: https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/ https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate...
- vatueil 7y ago

wil421 7y ago

Agreed. My seagate drives all died, even ones bundled in external usb drives. I have 10 year old WD black and green drives still kicking. I still have a gen 1 or 2 intel ssd drive that’s still kicking.

jjeaff 7y ago
I think those in external USB drives are the most likely to fail. It seems that they put their lower quality stuff or at least drives that didn't quite pass qc into those because they know the huge majority of those will have some data out on them and then never touched again.
- wil421 7y ago
  If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with dragster. Same with WD, I ripped out a green drive. Users in forums have recommended buying certain external drives and ripping them apart to save money. Certain high capacity WD red drives cost less when they were bundled into an “NAS” enclosure.
  - wil421 7y ago
    >If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with dragster. Dragster should be seagate. Weird autocorrect. If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with seagate.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      How do you know? As I said in my comment, they may be drives that didn't quite meet the qc threshold. All drives usually ship with a certain number of bad sectors. An excessively high number of bad sectors can mean there are quality issues with that specific drive. They may be 'binning' those more poorly testing drives for the external USB drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
  - beatgammit 7y ago

mywacaday 7y ago

I used to work for a long defunct storage manufacturer, reached the point where we skipped either even or odd (i can't remember) firmware versions on the seagate drives. RMA counts would always be higher on the even/odd number.

myself248 7y ago
That would be an interesting analysis! Like buying a car built on a friday?

clhodapp 7y ago

As a teenager, I helped a friend revive a Seagate drive after it bricked due to faulty firmware. If I recall correctly, my friend had actually installed some firmware updates for the drive, but had not installed one recently enough to avoid the problem. We had to run wires to contacts on the board to allow us to run commands in a terminal (in Windows) on the only machine we could find with a serial port. When it worked, we felt like hackers from a movie!

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

I'll never buy Seagate again after losing a drive because of a firmware bug that prevents it from coming online.

noja 7y ago

Every failed drive I have owned was a Seagate too.

iforgotpassword 7y ago

Funny how everyone chimes in with their Seagate horror stories. My experience with them isn't much better. But another fun story: I had a PSU blow up a couple years ago in a machine with three WDs and three HGST. All WDs were dead after that, the others worked flawlessly. Probably not a large enough sample size for any definite conclusions but at least it put a failure mode on my radar that wasn't there before.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

Dissenting opinion: I've owned and used a lot of Seagate drives. I have had a total of one fail on me. Given that they are usually less expensive they are then competing drives, I think they're fine. At the rate of disk size growth I end up replacing the disks for size reasons before they fail anyway.

saxonww 7y ago
My experience is the opposite. 100% of the Seagate drives I have purchased for personal use (total: 4) experienced failures within the warranty period, and of the drives I had a hand in purchasing professionally at least half needed replacement within the warranty period (~64). I think Seagate is fine if you are willing to overbuild and deal with the refurb process within the warranty period. I'm not, and will not personally buy a Seagate product again unless their reputation improves (similar to what happened with IBM/HGST post-deathstar). It's not worth the time or aggravation, to me.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  All I can say is my experience differs. The only Seagate drives I've had that kind of failure rate with were the 3TB ones that were out, IIRC, around the time of The Great Disk Shortage.
  - piepoter 7y ago
    I've still got my 1tb seagate up and running from around six years ago? No problems with that but all the 3tb I've encountered all seemed to have failed quite quickly. Maybe it's the specific model that I got but the higher capacities, in my case, tend to be more faulty.

Hamuko 7y ago

I've ever only had one drive failure. It was a 3 TB Seagate. I remember it failing in like three years, so after the warranty had already expired. My oldest drive is a 500 GB Western Digital from 2008 that's still operational today. I imagine its end is near, but I've thought about that for a couple of years now.

piepoter 7y ago
My seagate that failed on me was a 3tb too! Do you remember what year you got it? Thinking that it may be that model.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  Seagate Barracuda 3 TB, ordered in January 2014.