3 ms·

I'll never be able to understand how Seagate manages to make so many failing hard drives. A 5.7% failure rate with an average age of 2 years? The only one that

by Hamuko 4y ago

I'll never be able to understand how Seagate manages to make so many failing hard drives. A 5.7% failure rate with an average age of 2 years? The only one that comes close is the 5.3% HGST with over twice the average age and overall low sample size. Out of the many hard drives that I've owned in my life, the only ones to die on me have both been Seagates, with the first one being the infamous ST3000DM001, a hard drive so shit it has its own Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001).

pooloo 4y ago
They also have a drive on that list that has an Avg Age of 92 months, also they have significantly more Seagate drives compared to the rest. Additionally, most of these drives are consumer drives which are not intended to be ran at 100% for months on end.
- paulmd 4y ago
  having high failure rates despite having lots of drives is actually worse - there is the chance the HGST failures are just random chance due to small numbers of drives. But this possibility does not exist for Seagate with much larger statistical samples. AFAIK there hasn't been much of a difference shown between consumer workloads and enterprise workloads for HDD lifespan either, it's just cope and theorycrafting from people who are emotionally attached to the idea of Seagate not being shit for some reason. No other drives seem to have such problems with being used in this fashion: what is your theory for why Seagate drives are uniquely affected by being in the pods in some fashion that would not also affect WD drives or HGST drives or whoever else? Are WD drives not affected by vibration for some reason? For a while Seagate Deniers latched onto the first-gen pods as maybe being the answer but they're all long gone at this point, this failure-rate anomaly is continuing even in the newer pods. The only reasonable possibility would be that Seagate drives are simply constructed in an entirely different, less resilient fashion, which (a) is not factually supported in any way afaik, and (b) would still be very relevant for consumers to know! It's not like a home PC is vibration-free either after all. There comes a point when it's not "steelmanning" it's just denial of reality in the face of consistent evidence. Like you're not "steelmanning" climate change you're just a denier. The data has pretty consistently showed the same thing for 10+ years. It's not a "random sampling bias" that uniformly affects everyone except Seagate in the exact same way almost every single survey, it's not some magical factor that makes Seagate drives uniquely unsuited to storage-array usage but magically resilient when used in a home PC, it's not first-gen backblaze pods being bad, it's just Seagate putting out shitty drives, period the end. All these extremely complex theories to get around the very simple conclusion that Seagate has shitty parts or shitty QC and the failure rates are slightly higher as a result. A lot of the Seagate models are relatively OK, but almost all of the "outlier" drives with really high failure rates are Seagate. It is the old bayesian probability thing: get rid of Seagate and you've gotten rid of almost all of the models with high failure rates. edit: sorry Samsung on the brain since they have another wave of SSD failures too /laugh
the_third_wave 4y ago
Either you're lucky or you just have not had that many drives around... The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a 3½" Seagate connected to an Adaptec RLL controller - this being before IDE was a thing the controller decided the encoding scheme and RLL gave you 50% extra storage space. This Seagate never died on me, I probably have it around somewhere still. Then came the Western Digital IDE drives, two of those died and took ~250MB of data with them to data heaven. They were followed by another WD, this one 1.2GB - it died. When I built a system around the famous Abit BP-6 motherboard I put in two Maxtor drives - which I should not have done, one of them died within 2 years. Meanwhile I'd helped my father get a new drive, one of those fancy IBM Deskstars. Within a year it had turned itself into a Deathstar like most of its brethren seem to have done. Then there was the 10 GB Travelstar which died, then the 20GB Travelstar which also died - but survived the canoe expedition over the Yukon safely tucked away into the water- and probably bulletproof solar-powered Virgin Webplayer I had made to document the 3½ month trip - and the 20GB Toshiba. The 2TB WD Green, dead. One of the 1TB WD Greens, dead - but its mate still running strong at a 120.000+ running hours with its 2TB brand mates coming in second at 100.000+ hours. In the DS4243 array I have replaced 5 15K 600GB drives, good that these were cheap as dirt (but take quite a bit of power to run, hence the low price). Notice that I have not had a Seagate drive die on me yet. There are a few in an array somewhere here but those still do their job even though they're quite old by now. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I never bought any of the failing types since these problems seem to be related to specific types.

by Hamuko 4y ago

pooloo 4y ago

They also have a drive on that list that has an Avg Age of 92 months, also they have significantly more Seagate drives compared to the rest. Additionally, most of these drives are consumer drives which are not intended to be ran at 100% for months on end.

paulmd 4y ago
having high failure rates despite having lots of drives is actually worse - there is the chance the HGST failures are just random chance due to small numbers of drives. But this possibility does not exist for Seagate with much larger statistical samples. AFAIK there hasn't been much of a difference shown between consumer workloads and enterprise workloads for HDD lifespan either, it's just cope and theorycrafting from people who are emotionally attached to the idea of Seagate not being shit for some reason. No other drives seem to have such problems with being used in this fashion: what is your theory for why Seagate drives are uniquely affected by being in the pods in some fashion that would not also affect WD drives or HGST drives or whoever else? Are WD drives not affected by vibration for some reason? For a while Seagate Deniers latched onto the first-gen pods as maybe being the answer but they're all long gone at this point, this failure-rate anomaly is continuing even in the newer pods. The only reasonable possibility would be that Seagate drives are simply constructed in an entirely different, less resilient fashion, which (a) is not factually supported in any way afaik, and (b) would still be very relevant for consumers to know! It's not like a home PC is vibration-free either after all. There comes a point when it's not "steelmanning" it's just denial of reality in the face of consistent evidence. Like you're not "steelmanning" climate change you're just a denier. The data has pretty consistently showed the same thing for 10+ years. It's not a "random sampling bias" that uniformly affects everyone except Seagate in the exact same way almost every single survey, it's not some magical factor that makes Seagate drives uniquely unsuited to storage-array usage but magically resilient when used in a home PC, it's not first-gen backblaze pods being bad, it's just Seagate putting out shitty drives, period the end. All these extremely complex theories to get around the very simple conclusion that Seagate has shitty parts or shitty QC and the failure rates are slightly higher as a result. A lot of the Seagate models are relatively OK, but almost all of the "outlier" drives with really high failure rates are Seagate. It is the old bayesian probability thing: get rid of Seagate and you've gotten rid of almost all of the models with high failure rates. edit: sorry Samsung on the brain since they have another wave of SSD failures too /laugh

the_third_wave 4y ago

Either you're lucky or you just have not had that many drives around... The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a 3½" Seagate connected to an Adaptec RLL controller - this being before IDE was a thing the controller decided the encoding scheme and RLL gave you 50% extra storage space. This Seagate never died on me, I probably have it around somewhere still. Then came the Western Digital IDE drives, two of those died and took ~250MB of data with them to data heaven. They were followed by another WD, this one 1.2GB - it died. When I built a system around the famous Abit BP-6 motherboard I put in two Maxtor drives - which I should not have done, one of them died within 2 years. Meanwhile I'd helped my father get a new drive, one of those fancy IBM Deskstars. Within a year it had turned itself into a Deathstar like most of its brethren seem to have done. Then there was the 10 GB Travelstar which died, then the 20GB Travelstar which also died - but survived the canoe expedition over the Yukon safely tucked away into the water- and probably bulletproof solar-powered Virgin Webplayer I had made to document the 3½ month trip - and the 20GB Toshiba. The 2TB WD Green, dead. One of the 1TB WD Greens, dead - but its mate still running strong at a 120.000+ running hours with its 2TB brand mates coming in second at 100.000+ hours. In the DS4243 array I have replaced 5 15K 600GB drives, good that these were cheap as dirt (but take quite a bit of power to run, hence the low price). Notice that I have not had a Seagate drive die on me yet. There are a few in an array somewhere here but those still do their job even though they're quite old by now. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I never bought any of the failing types since these problems seem to be related to specific types.