4 ms·
I treasure these reports, and yet every time I go to buy more hard disks, it is very difficult resist the low, low prices of those Seagates. I know they'll fail
by pwinnski 6y ago
I treasure these reports, and yet every time I go to buy more hard disks, it is very difficult resist the low, low prices of those Seagates. I know they'll fail faster than the WD/HGSTs, but they're so much cheaper!
Clearly, given these numbers, Backblaze thinks the same way.
- busterarm 6y agoAfter getting burned on a consecutive $3800 worth of dead-on-arrival Seagate drives, well, never again.
- atYevP 6y agoYev from Backblaze here -> price plays a large factor in our purchasing decisions, but you'll notice if you look at the failure rates that they're not THAT much different across the manufacturers. For home usage, you're likely going to be fine regardless of what drives you buy. Though those sweet sweet 4TB HGST drives are getting harder and harder to find!
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoTo me, cheaper disks will always win because I expect hard disks to fail and take precautions against data loss anyway. If they fail within the warranty period it doesn't really matter where they came from. If they fail outside of it I probably still got my money's worth.
- java-man 6y agoThe net effect, paradoxically, is that this encourages and supports low quality. Or perhaps it redirects the resources towards those who need it most, and the average quality improves?
- c0m 6y agoA disk failure is still a cost though in terms of restoring a backup, replacing the failed drive, waiting for an RMA/new drive to come, etc.. If the price delta isn't anything crazy I'd prefer to get something that I know is more reliable.
- pwinnski 6y agoAgreed. Within $10/20, of course I'll go for the better drive. When it's $50/60 or more, I get the Seagate and hope I'm lucky. Earlier this year I had a Seagate fail within months of purchase, putting my NAS into degraded performance mode. So I quickly ordered a replacement drive (a WD Red) and started the RMA process for the Seagate. At some point during this process I removed and reinserted the Seagate, and... its been fine since. So now I have a WD cold spare in my closet for whichever drive fails next.
- karamanolev 6y agoI have a few RAIDZ/RAIDZ2 arrays and I've been wondering ... are let's say 8TB from WD/Seagate all the same size making them interchangeable? What if you have an array with WD drives and the Seagate drives turn out to be a few hundred/thousand bytes smaller?
- gen3 6y agoThe useable vdev space depends on the smallest drive in the vdev. ie, let's say you have a mirror with 1x8tb and 1x7.9tb, the vdev will be 7.9tb large. In the case of it being just a few bytes smaller, I would assume you just loose a block.
- rincebrain 6y agoOnly if all the disks when the vdev were created were the 7.9tb drives. If you have a pool of 8tb drives and want to replace with a 7.9tb drive, you're out of luck.
- mjevans 6y agoI've intentionally under-allocated with array space on my drives and use the rest mostly for swap (which I don't want on ZFS anyway, mdadm raid10 is fine) and backups of /boot; all of which I can sacrifice without worry to make the data fit inside of smaller drives.
- amelius 6y agoIf reliability is a concern, you could still put them in a RAID array. (but of course this may not be economical in every situation)
- pwinnski 6y agoIndeed, all of my disk purchases go into either my WD PR4100 NAS or the USB-connected Drobo next to it. These types of things aren't free, but they're inexpensive enough to be worth it, IMO.
- SigmundA 6y agoJust had a third well reviewed Seagate Nytro Enterprise SSD fail after a very short period of use, very low write volume. Starting to wonder whats up with Seagate. Wish Backblaze had SSD stats.