14 ms·

What is the best hard drive?

446 points by tolien 12y ago

mmastrac 12y ago
Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a reference to Dec 31 2014. While not terribly ambiguous now, the ambiguity will only grow as the year marches on. If someone from Backblaze happens to see this: you don't need to put it in your URL, but please date your post near the top or bottom of the text.
- ewams 12y ago
  It is just under the title at the top of the article: " What is the Best Hard Drive? January 21st, 2015 "
- atYevP 12y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely a good middle-ground.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    I'm not sure if it's been edited, but the current post seems fine to me. It doesn't have a date on the post per se, but it's very clear up front when the data is from: the table is labeled "Failure Rates Through December 31, 2014" in bold in the table header, which leaves little room for confusion.
    - atYevP 12y ago
      We haven't edited the current post! It does state that a year ago we published the first set, but that assumes you read last-year's post :)
      - atYevP 12y ago
        Update -> We have NOW edited the posts, so they all have times :)
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    They aren't "evergreen" by nature though, right? Many of the models you list will probably be gone in a handful of years, and the reliability numbers on different companies and different disk sizes could have done a complete 180. Why, just contrast the great numbers out of Hitachi with the Hitachi DeathStar of old...
  - richardwigley 12y ago
    Evergreen, now there's a euphemism. :-) I appreciate, in the end you have to do what gets you the most views, however, from my perspective missing out the date means you prefer to waste my time as I have to scan the article until I get a feel for how old it is. I would read anything written within 6 months and would consider up to 12 months if the information was high quality. It's not like we're overburdened with quality, independent, information. If your going to be business minded, why not have the date on for the first few months and remove it when the first flush of green has gone. ;-)
    - sukilot 12y ago
      Note to the point, it shows that Backblaze cares more about content marketing SEO than HDD reliability.
      - michaelt 12y ago
        It'd be better if they put the date on, but I don't see Amazon or Facebook or Google sharing their reliability data. As long as backblaze is more open than the industry standard, I think that's as a good thing regardless of their motives.
      - atYevP 12y ago
        Yev from Backblaze here -> We've actually done a lot of experimenting and content/SEO marketing has helped us grow and expand quite a bit over the last year. As for the HDD reliability...our software works around HDD failures, so they don't affect is too much, but we do like reporting what we've seen in our environment. Hopefully other companies will do it too.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - ternaryoperator 12y ago
      >Evergreen, now there's a euphemism. :-) It's not a euphemism. It's a standard term in web content for articles that are not time-sensitive. An article on how Quicksort works is an evergreen article. One on predictions for tomorrow's stock market moves is not.
  - rootbear 12y ago
    As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.
    - k-mcgrady 12y ago
      >> "makes it less "evergreen"" The evergreen no date thing is fine with me - provided the content itself is actually evergreen. That's the bit people seem to forget. Not dating content doesn't magically make it last forever. If the information is unlikely to expire then I don't need a date. If there is a chance that the information will go out of date, especially if the dated information will not be useful to the reader, then it should be dated.
      - gnopgnip 12y ago
        In five years will the failure rate of 3-4tb drives that are harvested from external enclosures matter?
        sillysaurus3 12y ago
        I have no idea why this is downvoted at all, let alone downvoted so heavily. It's correct. The content will be out of date in five years, so it's not evergreen and should be dated.
    - SCdF 12y ago
      Agreed. FWIW I basically don't read articles where I can't find the date, unless it's clearly something that doesn't need one (which is rare). Especially anything technology related, truth turns to myth in no time at all.
    - Rapzid 12y ago
      A thousand up-votes for you. Date of information is one of the most important contexts in IT. I can't count the times somebody has said "This says this and that about such and such", and I have to say "Yeah bro, when was that written? Oh, three years ago? What's the story now?".
  - redorb 12y ago
    Perhaps a good middle ground is to add a date to these types of posts - but put the date in a image - so its user readable but most likely skipped by search engines
  - WoodenChair 12y ago
    You definitely should put a date on everything. Without a date, your post loses much of its context: http://www.observationalhazard.com/2014/09/put-date-on-your-blog-post.html http://www.observationalhazard.com/2014/09/put-date-on-your-...
  - atYevP 12y ago
    BREAKING NEWS -> There are now dates on all of the individual blog posts. The landing page is "date-free" but is in chronological order, if you open a post, the date will be below the title...AS NATURE INTENDED!
    - ghshephard 12y ago
      That's amazing - I'm reading the post right now (as in, 11:28 AM pacific)- and I switched back to the tab, and it doesn't show the date. But I opened it less than 10 minutes ago. They couldn't have changed it that real time could they. Hit Refresh. Lo and behold - there is the date. Now that's an agile organization. Thanks very much - I really appreciate the date on these posts as well.
      - atYevP 12y ago
        Our pleasure :)
      - LordIllidan 12y ago
        That's WordPress for you ;)
        atYevP 12y ago
        It certainly helped :)
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    - GavinAnderegg 12y ago
      Backblaze is an excellent service and your blog posts are a favour to the world. Thanks for being awesome. Also, thanks for adding dates to your blog posts :)
  - brokentone 12y ago
    This (and I'd argue most tech posts) is not at all evergreen content though.
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    hey Yev, how about something secure like TLS 1.2 on the blog? RC4 and 3DES are great if you are playing hackme's at defcon to let people break your 'secure' connections on the fly using laptop GPUs, but not on supposedly Secure Cloud Storage company blog.
    - geofft 12y ago
      One minor point since I see a lot of people get this wrong: 3DES is, to the best of anyone's (public) knowledge over the last like 35 years, secure to its intended security level (112 bits, which is basically fine). The only real problem with it is that it's ridiculously slow; there are plenty of faster stream ciphers with higher security levels. 1DES, meanwhile, is weak, but only because a 56-bit security level is useless today. That said, yes, TLS 1.0, RC4, and SHA1 are all starting to smell, and it's probably time to toss them down the drain.
    - LLWM 12y ago
      Why does it matter here? Are you so worried that someone will eavesdrop on your blog reading?
  - ttty 12y ago
    You could do: - Show last update date on all posts; - The evergreen posts you just update every 3-6 months to keep them updated and still green; - The not evergreen posts can be considered not useful therefore let them be old.
  - sjs 12y ago
    Please put dates on things that are published. It can be important information for readers. Leaving off dates is frustrating and doesn't make the content any fresher in any way.
  - bootload 12y ago
    "... Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. ..." @Yev, writing about specific technology is time-bound and doesn't exactly have the half life of DNA. Having said that, I appreciate all that Backblaze writes about hardware. It's interesting and easy to read. This takes time and thought, you (at Backblaze) must be doing something right.
    - atYevP 12y ago
      Yea, for posts like this it certainly made sense to put dates on them, since the data has a shelf-life, but for other "entrepreneurship-centered" posts we figured it would be best if they seemed "fresh" forever, even if they'd get chronologically moved down on our own site, the search traffic would still have the posts appear "newish". We've since added all the dates on all the posts...as nature intended ;-)
  - keerthiko 12y ago
    One of my preferred middle-grounds (what I use for my own writing) is to add a "Last updated: <date>" at the bottom or in faded font at the top of my posts. This way the information is there, and useful, but that doesn't mean the post cannot still be relevant today.
  - Sir_Substance 12y ago
    Websites don't go yellow as they get older, and it's really common for data from 10 years ago to seamlessly update so it looks like it was posted yesterday. If you don't date your articles, they're of casual interest only, because I can't be sure they're current enough to use them as the basis for decisions.
- unreal37 12y ago
  Is it only because they did a similar post last year that you were confused? Maybe this just needs "2015" in the title?
  - Timshel 12y ago
    They recently did an article on 6TB drives. My first thought was that it could be misnamed repost and I started by searching for a date.
- kbenson 12y ago
  Unless they just added the date all over the first couple of paragraphs, the content itself is very clear immediately as to exactly what time period it conforms to, and is not hard to see at all.
- atYevP 12y ago
  Important News Bulletin -> Dates are now back on the individual blog posts!
- wanderingstan 12y ago
  It would be cool to have a browser plugin that could overlay the posting date onto a page. The approximate post date should be inferable from archive.org or Google cache.
- deanclatworthy 12y ago
  Hopefully the end-goal of all these posts and pages is somewhat real-time (maybe updated daily or weekly) data on hard drive reliability. Then the blog posts just serve as a layman's write-up of the interpretation of the data.
notacoward 12y ago
Dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922996 submitted almost two hours earlier.
- ciupicri 12y ago
  You've posted a broken URL: "Post not available".
  - notacoward 12y ago
    I guess I have Backblaze to thank for that. It was a valid URL when I posted it. sigh
    - atYevP 12y ago
      Yev from Backblaze here -> we saw that and couldn't track it down or figure out where it came from, the post itself didn't change since we published it this morning. Sorry Notacoward :(
btown 12y ago
Does anyone know if HGST's 1TB hard drives follow this reliability trend?
- kw71 12y ago
  7K1000's are fantastic in my experience
valarauca1 12y ago
I can't load this site because blackblaze only supports 2 TLS ciphers. TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA, TLS_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA
- cbhl 12y ago
  Have you tried using Google Chrome?
  - rockdoe 12y ago
    I think his point is that neither of those are secure.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.backblaze.com%2Fblog%2Fbest-hard-drive https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=https%3A%2F%2... RC4 and 3DES, top of the line secure Cloud storage service indeed. I browse with old insecure ciphers disabled, and I seem to remember having no problem reading backblaze blog before, either they downgraded their security (Occulus rifts website used to downgrade to rc4 whenever you wanted to pay them any money, but that was before FB buyout), or I disabled rc4 later than I thought.
- darkarmani 12y ago
  Those are old ciphers, so they should be easy to enable in your browser.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
kw71 12y ago
I've been listening to the discussions of data recovery technicians for many years. As such, I took a guess at the results before the page loaded. And I was right. Seagate bad. Hitachi best. WD almost as reliable as Hitachi. I can recall one or two bad WD models over recent years, the one at the top of my memory is the 500GByte WD5000AAKS. There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that made it park too frequently, but at least it had a parking ramp. Hitachi has been a good vendor since the "deathstar" glass platter fiasco blew over. Now: Deskstar 7K's forever! On the other hand, Seagate seems to ship flaw after flaw. Lately they tend to have spindle bearings that die if the drive gets bumped. If that doesn't happen, surely a head will go bad.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  And they put out a ridiculous amount of heat too. I found a one that was too hot to touch in a 24 drive array which heated up the drives adjacent to the point that they too refused to work. So what looked like an extremely unlikely double drive failure ended up being only one.
- xienze 12y ago
  It's funny how things can turn around so completely. Around the time of the Deathstar fiasco, you couldn't pay me to use a Hitachi. Seagate was the brand to buy. Now it's the complete opposite.
  - gtaylor 12y ago
    I still cringe a little bit when I see "Deskstar", but apparently they've turned it around in a big way. I'm still irrationally scared, though.
    - morcheeba 12y ago
      Me, too. I put one in my RAID, with part of my strategy is to use a variety of manufacturers and drive types so the drives don't fail all at once. This one is 50x the capacity of my cursed 75GXP... http://www.computerhistory.org/groups/storagesig/media/docs/DS_IBM%2075GXP%20Family_20121031.pdf http://www.computerhistory.org/groups/storagesig/media/docs/...
moe 12y ago
While I love these recurring blog posts, it would be even nicer if Backblaze could wrap a public API and/or pretty interface around their live monitoring. I'd happily pay a small fee for access to an up-to-date snapshot when I'm in the market for harddrives.
- atYevP 12y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Not a bad idea, though that might take a lot of work on our end. In the mean time, we're going to be releasing some raw data in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that!
- atYevP 12y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Not a bad idea, though that might take a lot of work on our end. In the mean time, we're going to be releasing some raw data in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that!
userbinator 12y ago
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB drives are another story. We’ll cover how we handled their failure rates in a future blog post. I'm really looking forward to this... could it be a similar problem to the one that caused the huge amount of 7200.11 failures a few years ago?
- spydum 12y ago
  agreed. I think I had around 7 different barracuda 7200's.. not a single one remains operable, all failed, though they did survive >1yr, they just didn't have the longevity of WD's or Hitachi's which ran on the same infra (and in most cases, continue to run).
- wiredfool 12y ago
  I've got a sample size of 1 on those things. Glad it's not more, cause it made for an unhappy thanksgiving time when it failed.
  - fuzzix 12y ago
    I have five Seagate branded 3TB external disks, so have no real idea what's inside. Three of them are dead. I stopped using the others.
- shampine 12y ago
  Are you referring to the botched firmware ones (I think the firmware revision was SD15)? If so, at the time (~2008) I had an HTPC with 10 1TB-1.5TB drives with 6 of 10 affected by the firmware issues. I was able to successfully flash all my drives at the time with no data loss.
  - onethree 12y ago
    i built a pc for a family friend around that time... i'd spec'd it with a different drive, but they showed it to the IT guy at their work who recommended seagate. 6 months later the drive stopped working, and it had to be shipped to the other side of the world to be reflashed
udev 12y ago
Looks like Seagate drives are at a very good price point for them, enough to compensate for the higher failure rates. It looks like Blackblaze managed to build a system with good fault tolerance, such that they can control the $-price/failure-rate ratio as they need. In summary: - HGST, good - WD, expensive (in bulk) - Seagate, we buy them despite failures
adad95 12y ago
Hum... I think this explain my one dying drive at home. (4 Seagate drives)
dragontamer 12y ago
I love the data, but I'm a little mad that Hitachi had to die as a company and got sold into pieces. I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as HGST. Technically, the 3.5" drives from Hitachi got sold to Toshiba. For example, the Toshiba DT01ACA300 is allegedly the same design as the Hitachi 7k3000. In the following link, note that the "HDS723030BLE640" is the model number to the 7k3000 with ridiculously low failure rates in the Backblaze study. http://goughlui.com/2013/02/26/toshiba-dt01aca300-aka-hitachi-hds723030ble640-drives/ http://goughlui.com/2013/02/26/toshiba-dt01aca300-aka-hitach... I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all. Again, I hate to criticize such awesome research that you've given away for free in your blog. But I'd definitely would like some research and clarification on the Hitachi -> Toshiba or Hitachi -> HGST situation.
- RickHull 12y ago
  > I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as HGST. > I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all. FTA: > Some of the HGST drives listed were manufactured under their previous brand, Hitachi. We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request.
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    I do realize that is what was asked of them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that was the correct way to go about it. The Serial Number / Model Number information on the other hand should work if enough details are provided.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request. // Intriguing - that suggests some sort of advertising deal? Which calls in to question the impartiality of the report. Who asked them? In what context? Why accede to a third parties interference in the report? Are Backblaze getting reduced price HGST drives now?
    - 12y ago
chdir 12y ago
The winner of this post, HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital. Their NAS are well rated on Amazon & Newegg. Personally, I'm more concerned about the lifetime of laptop HDD (500GB range). Wonder what's the time frame around which I should swap it out (& what brand)
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  Given that you can get 512GB M2 SSDs now, I'd say go for that if you're worried about reliability. From what I've read, SSDs are more reliable unless you're trying very hard to wear out their endurance (on the order of 2PB according to http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim... )
  - pjc50 12y ago
    SSDs also have a wide variance in failure rates by model, the highest I've heard is 8%.
  - mopo2000 12y ago
    SSDs mainly fail by FTL corruption bugs, not flash wear.
  - penguat 12y ago
    but there can be some interesting not-a-failure modes, I know because I suffered one and the recovery was a nightmare due to overly-protective UEFI. Fortunately, anything on my local SSD is only in cache and not to be worried about ;) (and I managed to put the UEFI in dumb mode so it wouldn't interfere)
    - derekp7 12y ago
      For the "not-a-failure" modes, are you referring to things like flipped bits? I had that happen on a USB3 high-speed thumb drive, where several of my source code files had random capitalization throughout the file (bit 6 was flipped on) and other weird corruption that indicated specific bits got either flipped on or off. But the drive was at 98% full when this happened too.
joshstrange 12y ago
Let me start off by saying I am a Backblaze customer and I LOVE these posts and use them as my bible for buying drives for my NAS/Media Server. With that said this is going to sound a little nitpicky but why isn't the publication date anywhere on this article? I've noticed a growing number of blogs not putting the publish date anywhere on the blog page which makes it really hard to know if what they say is still valid. In this case you can infer from the dates of the drives they tested that it was published in 2015 but a number of blogs don't have those clues in the blog to let you know when it was posted. Normally you can look at the URL to see the date but BB uses slugs off /blog/ so you can't get the date from there either.
- brianwski 12y ago
  Backblaze engineer here, the blog folks are trying to fix it right now. I also hate "evergreen" blog posts that don't include a date, I wasn't aware we were doing that. :-(
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    Thanks! You guys rock, I love your posts and product.
  - atYevP 12y ago
    Backblaze blog folk here -> change is hard :-(
- atYevP 12y ago
  Important New Bulletin -> There are now dates on the individual blog posts.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pippy 12y ago
  I'm feeling foolish for not reading it and purchasing four Seagate Barracuda 7200.14s. I had no failures so far but with a 50% failure rate it's bound to happen soon
cjensen 12y ago
Love and appreciate that Backblaze presents this data, but there are some obvious issues: comparing the annual failure rate of a pool where avg. age is 1 year to a pool where avg. age is 3 years isn't a great comparison. Rather than annual rates, I'd really prefer to see failure rate after six months, one year, two years, etc. This would make it easier to answer questions like "was drive X always bad? Or just when new? Or just when old?"
- brianwski 12y ago
  Backblaze employee here - we're going to release the raw data in a couple weeks, so everybody can do their own analysis.
  - deanclatworthy 12y ago
    Can't wait for this, but it'd be great if you considered having "real-time"-ish data feed for everyone to hook into. Then we don't have to wait for the annual blog post ;-)
joering2 12y ago
I think there has never been more personal piece of technology than your full of important data hard drive, especially pre-cloud era, when now people just don't worry much of a dying hardware. But back in the ole' days, every one of us have lost very personal data due to hardware failure at some point. And it's interesting how the opinion about brands are being formed. For example, my first drive that died was Seagate. Surprise surprise my opinion about said company is very low now. But in most part, it's very bias opinion, especially given the fact I have never owned another Seagate for the reason of crash. I love WD and never had one failed, currently about 20 full of data. But I met bunch of folks who hate WD and had them crush and they lost important data. And they love Seagate. It's interesting how opinions about hard drives are being formed throughout our lives.
- schneider_sh 12y ago
  I had the opposite issue. Bought WD Black for my first PC build. It died within ~3 weeks. Bought another to replace it. Again dead within a month. Have about 8 Seagate drives now and have not had an issue at all. Will avoid WD at all costs now.
tracker1 12y ago
Interesting, I built a home FreeNAS a few years ago, with Seagate 3TB drives, 7200.12 iirc, and saw 3 of them (out of 12) fail well under 2 years... at this point, I've had so many issues, it's pretty much sitting there. I put 4x4tb WD reds into my older Synology NAS and have been using that without issue.
ck2 12y ago
It's a shame single platter 1TB drives were not in that test. I bet they are the most reliable because of single platter.
Shivetya 12y ago
so on a given day, or by week, how many drives do you replace?
DanBC 12y ago
Is there any idea which drives were shucked or not shucked from external enclosures?
Norp 12y ago
This sums up my experience with Seagate. I bought my first Barracuda 3TB two months ago, it died out 20 days later with the notorious two-click sound. I can't even be bothered to push warranty for replacement, terrible. Sticking with WD from now on.
icodestuff 12y ago
Oof. I've got a NAS with 4 3TB Seagate Barracudas, same model number as the drives with the 46% failure rate. One's already failed, and I replaced it with the same model drive. Anyone have a recommendation for how to replace all the drives with more reliable models without wrecking the RAID? Downtime is okay, but I don't have spare space for the contents to make a giant backup. It's currently set up as a "Synology Hybrid RAID" that looks an awful lot like a RAID 5.
- wazoox 12y ago
  HGST drives are slightly larger than Seagate of the same advertised capacity. Replacing Seagate drives with HGST ones is therefore easy, while it's often impossible the other way around (fortunately :)
- switch007 12y ago
  Without a backup, you need a temporary, identical NAS device with the 4 new disks. Then do a file-level copy. Then put the 4 new disks in the old NAS and import the array. Do you know of a store with a very lenient returns policy? An online capacity expansion (replacing one at a time) will mean a very long time in a degraded state, possible multiple disk failures, increased chances of data loss (power goes off, etc)
- Rapzid 12y ago
  If the NAS uses linux RAID you just need drives that are AS LARGE or LARGER than the current drives. Precisely, not what's marked on the box. If you want to be on the super safe side and are uncertain, get somebody to help you DD(or dcfldd) each old drive onto a new drive and then just pop the whole new set into the NAS and let it rip. It would also be a good idea to check the NAS vendors forums.
- ValentineC 12y ago
  Are you looking to replace all 4 disks at once? If you have a spare PC lying around, check out the XPenology forums [1] for the software (specifically, NanoBoot or XPEnoboot) required to create your own Synology clone. You'll be able to create a new SHR volume with new disks. As suggested in another post, do a file level copy to the new volume. You should then be able to replace all the disks in your actual Synology NAS with your new disks at once, and perform a migration [2] so everything works with your Synology hardware. (This is possibly a better solution than replacing the disks one by one, since there's the risk of another disk failing while the RAID is being rebuilt.) [1] http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2 http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2 [2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/tutorials/484 https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/tutorials/484
chuckkir 12y ago
The Western Digital Velociraptor is pretty tough to beat. Near SSD performance (depending on what you are doing) and reliable. For compiling code it's definitely the best choice.
- alimoeeny 12y ago
  Is "compiling code" an IO intensive (IO bound) task?
  - TillE 12y ago
    It certainly can be. Theoretically your OS should be pretty good about caching files in memory, but in practice I've measured significant differences when compiling large C++ projects on a fast SSD.
- penguat 12y ago
  Unless you could use an SSD? (most people who compile code are valuable enough that their time warrants the fastest thing available, no?)
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- hga 12y ago
  Ehh; not yet trusting SSDs (or back in 2011 when I did my last computer builds), I prefer 15,000 RPM SAS enterprise drives. 50% greater rotational speed, SAS should be faster than SATA, and even Seagate (true) enterprise disks should be more reliable than WD consumer grade disks. Now/next time I'll seriously consider SSDs.
fivedogit 12y ago
This same URL was submitted an hour earlier and got 4 upvotes. This one has 222 as I write this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016 Timing is everything, I guess.
- atYevP 12y ago
  Much like comedy!
zkhalique 12y ago
The top two rows seem to be contradictory. How can you have a smaller annual failure rate AND a smaller average age? Name/Model Size Number of Drives Average Age in years Annual Failure Rate 95% Confidence Interval HGST Deskstar 7K2000 (HDS722020ALA330) 2.0 TB 4,641 3.9 1.1% 0.8% – 1.4% HGST Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3030ALA630) 3.0 TB 4,595 2.6 0.6% 0.4% – 0.9%
- sib 12y ago
  Reading the model numbers and sizes, the top row is 2TB drives, the second row is 3TB; the 3TB were launched more recently. So, they have a smaller average age. And, apparently, they also fail at a lower rate.
HNaTTY 12y ago
I'm super excited for the new Seagate 8tb drives @$260/each. Please order a carton of them and let us know ASAP how they work for you!
sukumargv 12y ago
The data is not accurate. The stats are literal numbers, Which means these guys are not mentioning how many hard drives each vendor sold. But instead they are just comparing the Faulty drives numbers. If you consider the number of HGST and Seagate pieces sold then only these stats or demographics can be considered reasonable. Punchline: This review or analysis could be biased.
- pierrec 12y ago
  They're not just comparing the faulty drives numbers. Maybe you misunderstood the way they presented the data: in the first table, the "Number of Drives" column refers to the total number of drives they studied for each model, not just the ones that failed. So they give the sample size and the rate of failure for each model. Or are you saying that the difference in worldwide sales for each drive model somehow renders Backblaze's failure rates invalid? The size of the population is irrelevant unless the size of the sample exceeds a few percent of the total population you are examining.
- smackfu 12y ago
  By definition, it's going to be a true analysis of the drives when obtained the way Backblaze obtains them and when used in the environment Backblaze uses them. Both of those may be different from Joe Random consumer.
agumonkey 12y ago
I'll try to find the URL again, but in the mean time, I've read a comment on a thread from a veteran technician saying that hard drives failures were mostly due to heat fluctuations (material expansion) and that without this information, failure rates were not valuable enough.

446 points by tolien 12y ago

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a reference to Dec 31 2014. While not terribly ambiguous now, the ambiguity will only grow as the year marches on. If someone from Backblaze happens to see this: you don't need to put it in your URL, but please date your post near the top or bottom of the text.

ewams 12y ago
It is just under the title at the top of the article: " What is the Best Hard Drive? January 21st, 2015 "
atYevP 12y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely a good middle-ground.
- _delirium 12y ago
  I'm not sure if it's been edited, but the current post seems fine to me. It doesn't have a date on the post per se, but it's very clear up front when the data is from: the table is labeled "Failure Rates Through December 31, 2014" in bold in the table header, which leaves little room for confusion.
  - atYevP 12y ago
    We haven't edited the current post! It does state that a year ago we published the first set, but that assumes you read last-year's post :)
    - atYevP 12y ago
      Update -> We have NOW edited the posts, so they all have times :)
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  They aren't "evergreen" by nature though, right? Many of the models you list will probably be gone in a handful of years, and the reliability numbers on different companies and different disk sizes could have done a complete 180. Why, just contrast the great numbers out of Hitachi with the Hitachi DeathStar of old...
- richardwigley 12y ago
  Evergreen, now there's a euphemism. :-) I appreciate, in the end you have to do what gets you the most views, however, from my perspective missing out the date means you prefer to waste my time as I have to scan the article until I get a feel for how old it is. I would read anything written within 6 months and would consider up to 12 months if the information was high quality. It's not like we're overburdened with quality, independent, information. If your going to be business minded, why not have the date on for the first few months and remove it when the first flush of green has gone. ;-)
  - sukilot 12y ago
    Note to the point, it shows that Backblaze cares more about content marketing SEO than HDD reliability.
    - michaelt 12y ago
      It'd be better if they put the date on, but I don't see Amazon or Facebook or Google sharing their reliability data. As long as backblaze is more open than the industry standard, I think that's as a good thing regardless of their motives.
    - atYevP 12y ago
      Yev from Backblaze here -> We've actually done a lot of experimenting and content/SEO marketing has helped us grow and expand quite a bit over the last year. As for the HDD reliability...our software works around HDD failures, so they don't affect is too much, but we do like reporting what we've seen in our environment. Hopefully other companies will do it too.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - ternaryoperator 12y ago
    >Evergreen, now there's a euphemism. :-) It's not a euphemism. It's a standard term in web content for articles that are not time-sensitive. An article on how Quicksort works is an evergreen article. One on predictions for tomorrow's stock market moves is not.
- rootbear 12y ago
  As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    >> "makes it less "evergreen"" The evergreen no date thing is fine with me - provided the content itself is actually evergreen. That's the bit people seem to forget. Not dating content doesn't magically make it last forever. If the information is unlikely to expire then I don't need a date. If there is a chance that the information will go out of date, especially if the dated information will not be useful to the reader, then it should be dated.
    - gnopgnip 12y ago
      In five years will the failure rate of 3-4tb drives that are harvested from external enclosures matter?
      - sillysaurus3 12y ago
        I have no idea why this is downvoted at all, let alone downvoted so heavily. It's correct. The content will be out of date in five years, so it's not evergreen and should be dated.
  - SCdF 12y ago
    Agreed. FWIW I basically don't read articles where I can't find the date, unless it's clearly something that doesn't need one (which is rare). Especially anything technology related, truth turns to myth in no time at all.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    A thousand up-votes for you. Date of information is one of the most important contexts in IT. I can't count the times somebody has said "This says this and that about such and such", and I have to say "Yeah bro, when was that written? Oh, three years ago? What's the story now?".
- redorb 12y ago
  Perhaps a good middle ground is to add a date to these types of posts - but put the date in a image - so its user readable but most likely skipped by search engines
- WoodenChair 12y ago
  You definitely should put a date on everything. Without a date, your post loses much of its context: http://www.observationalhazard.com/2014/09/put-date-on-your-blog-post.html http://www.observationalhazard.com/2014/09/put-date-on-your-...
- atYevP 12y ago
  BREAKING NEWS -> There are now dates on all of the individual blog posts. The landing page is "date-free" but is in chronological order, if you open a post, the date will be below the title...AS NATURE INTENDED!
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    That's amazing - I'm reading the post right now (as in, 11:28 AM pacific)- and I switched back to the tab, and it doesn't show the date. But I opened it less than 10 minutes ago. They couldn't have changed it that real time could they. Hit Refresh. Lo and behold - there is the date. Now that's an agile organization. Thanks very much - I really appreciate the date on these posts as well.
    - atYevP 12y ago
      Our pleasure :)
    - LordIllidan 12y ago
      That's WordPress for you ;)
      - atYevP 12y ago
        It certainly helped :)
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - GavinAnderegg 12y ago
    Backblaze is an excellent service and your blog posts are a favour to the world. Thanks for being awesome. Also, thanks for adding dates to your blog posts :)
- brokentone 12y ago
  This (and I'd argue most tech posts) is not at all evergreen content though.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  hey Yev, how about something secure like TLS 1.2 on the blog? RC4 and 3DES are great if you are playing hackme's at defcon to let people break your 'secure' connections on the fly using laptop GPUs, but not on supposedly Secure Cloud Storage company blog.
  - geofft 12y ago
    One minor point since I see a lot of people get this wrong: 3DES is, to the best of anyone's (public) knowledge over the last like 35 years, secure to its intended security level (112 bits, which is basically fine). The only real problem with it is that it's ridiculously slow; there are plenty of faster stream ciphers with higher security levels. 1DES, meanwhile, is weak, but only because a 56-bit security level is useless today. That said, yes, TLS 1.0, RC4, and SHA1 are all starting to smell, and it's probably time to toss them down the drain.
  - LLWM 12y ago
    Why does it matter here? Are you so worried that someone will eavesdrop on your blog reading?
- ttty 12y ago
  You could do: - Show last update date on all posts; - The evergreen posts you just update every 3-6 months to keep them updated and still green; - The not evergreen posts can be considered not useful therefore let them be old.
- sjs 12y ago
  Please put dates on things that are published. It can be important information for readers. Leaving off dates is frustrating and doesn't make the content any fresher in any way.
- bootload 12y ago
  "... Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. ..." @Yev, writing about specific technology is time-bound and doesn't exactly have the half life of DNA. Having said that, I appreciate all that Backblaze writes about hardware. It's interesting and easy to read. This takes time and thought, you (at Backblaze) must be doing something right.
  - atYevP 12y ago
    Yea, for posts like this it certainly made sense to put dates on them, since the data has a shelf-life, but for other "entrepreneurship-centered" posts we figured it would be best if they seemed "fresh" forever, even if they'd get chronologically moved down on our own site, the search traffic would still have the posts appear "newish". We've since added all the dates on all the posts...as nature intended ;-)
- keerthiko 12y ago
  One of my preferred middle-grounds (what I use for my own writing) is to add a "Last updated: <date>" at the bottom or in faded font at the top of my posts. This way the information is there, and useful, but that doesn't mean the post cannot still be relevant today.
- Sir_Substance 12y ago
  Websites don't go yellow as they get older, and it's really common for data from 10 years ago to seamlessly update so it looks like it was posted yesterday. If you don't date your articles, they're of casual interest only, because I can't be sure they're current enough to use them as the basis for decisions.
unreal37 12y ago
Is it only because they did a similar post last year that you were confused? Maybe this just needs "2015" in the title?
- Timshel 12y ago
  They recently did an article on 6TB drives. My first thought was that it could be misnamed repost and I started by searching for a date.
kbenson 12y ago
Unless they just added the date all over the first couple of paragraphs, the content itself is very clear immediately as to exactly what time period it conforms to, and is not hard to see at all.
atYevP 12y ago
Important News Bulletin -> Dates are now back on the individual blog posts!
wanderingstan 12y ago
It would be cool to have a browser plugin that could overlay the posting date onto a page. The approximate post date should be inferable from archive.org or Google cache.
deanclatworthy 12y ago
Hopefully the end-goal of all these posts and pages is somewhat real-time (maybe updated daily or weekly) data on hard drive reliability. Then the blog posts just serve as a layman's write-up of the interpretation of the data.

notacoward 12y ago

Dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8922996 submitted almost two hours earlier.

ciupicri 12y ago
You've posted a broken URL: "Post not available".
- notacoward 12y ago
  I guess I have Backblaze to thank for that. It was a valid URL when I posted it. sigh
  - atYevP 12y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> we saw that and couldn't track it down or figure out where it came from, the post itself didn't change since we published it this morning. Sorry Notacoward :(

btown 12y ago

Does anyone know if HGST's 1TB hard drives follow this reliability trend?

kw71 12y ago
7K1000's are fantastic in my experience

valarauca1 12y ago

I can't load this site because blackblaze only supports 2 TLS ciphers. TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA, TLS_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA

cbhl 12y ago
Have you tried using Google Chrome?
- rockdoe 12y ago
  I think his point is that neither of those are secure.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rasz_pl 12y ago
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.backblaze.com%2Fblog%2Fbest-hard-drive https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=https%3A%2F%2... RC4 and 3DES, top of the line secure Cloud storage service indeed. I browse with old insecure ciphers disabled, and I seem to remember having no problem reading backblaze blog before, either they downgraded their security (Occulus rifts website used to downgrade to rc4 whenever you wanted to pay them any money, but that was before FB buyout), or I disabled rc4 later than I thought.
darkarmani 12y ago
Those are old ciphers, so they should be easy to enable in your browser.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

kw71 12y ago

I've been listening to the discussions of data recovery technicians for many years. As such, I took a guess at the results before the page loaded. And I was right. Seagate bad. Hitachi best. WD almost as reliable as Hitachi. I can recall one or two bad WD models over recent years, the one at the top of my memory is the 500GByte WD5000AAKS. There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that made it park too frequently, but at least it had a parking ramp. Hitachi has been a good vendor since the "deathstar" glass platter fiasco blew over. Now: Deskstar 7K's forever! On the other hand, Seagate seems to ship flaw after flaw. Lately they tend to have spindle bearings that die if the drive gets bumped. If that doesn't happen, surely a head will go bad.

jacquesm 12y ago
And they put out a ridiculous amount of heat too. I found a one that was too hot to touch in a 24 drive array which heated up the drives adjacent to the point that they too refused to work. So what looked like an extremely unlikely double drive failure ended up being only one.
xienze 12y ago
It's funny how things can turn around so completely. Around the time of the Deathstar fiasco, you couldn't pay me to use a Hitachi. Seagate was the brand to buy. Now it's the complete opposite.
- gtaylor 12y ago
  I still cringe a little bit when I see "Deskstar", but apparently they've turned it around in a big way. I'm still irrationally scared, though.
  - morcheeba 12y ago
    Me, too. I put one in my RAID, with part of my strategy is to use a variety of manufacturers and drive types so the drives don't fail all at once. This one is 50x the capacity of my cursed 75GXP... http://www.computerhistory.org/groups/storagesig/media/docs/DS_IBM%2075GXP%20Family_20121031.pdf http://www.computerhistory.org/groups/storagesig/media/docs/...

moe 12y ago

While I love these recurring blog posts, it would be even nicer if Backblaze could wrap a public API and/or pretty interface around their live monitoring. I'd happily pay a small fee for access to an up-to-date snapshot when I'm in the market for harddrives.

atYevP 12y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Not a bad idea, though that might take a lot of work on our end. In the mean time, we're going to be releasing some raw data in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that!
atYevP 12y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Not a bad idea, though that might take a lot of work on our end. In the mean time, we're going to be releasing some raw data in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that!

userbinator 12y ago

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB drives are another story. We’ll cover how we handled their failure rates in a future blog post. I'm really looking forward to this... could it be a similar problem to the one that caused the huge amount of 7200.11 failures a few years ago?

spydum 12y ago
agreed. I think I had around 7 different barracuda 7200's.. not a single one remains operable, all failed, though they did survive >1yr, they just didn't have the longevity of WD's or Hitachi's which ran on the same infra (and in most cases, continue to run).
wiredfool 12y ago
I've got a sample size of 1 on those things. Glad it's not more, cause it made for an unhappy thanksgiving time when it failed.
- fuzzix 12y ago
  I have five Seagate branded 3TB external disks, so have no real idea what's inside. Three of them are dead. I stopped using the others.
shampine 12y ago
Are you referring to the botched firmware ones (I think the firmware revision was SD15)? If so, at the time (~2008) I had an HTPC with 10 1TB-1.5TB drives with 6 of 10 affected by the firmware issues. I was able to successfully flash all my drives at the time with no data loss.
- onethree 12y ago
  i built a pc for a family friend around that time... i'd spec'd it with a different drive, but they showed it to the IT guy at their work who recommended seagate. 6 months later the drive stopped working, and it had to be shipped to the other side of the world to be reflashed

udev 12y ago

Looks like Seagate drives are at a very good price point for them, enough to compensate for the higher failure rates. It looks like Blackblaze managed to build a system with good fault tolerance, such that they can control the $-price/failure-rate ratio as they need. In summary: - HGST, good - WD, expensive (in bulk) - Seagate, we buy them despite failures

adad95 12y ago

Hum... I think this explain my one dying drive at home. (4 Seagate drives)

dragontamer 12y ago

I love the data, but I'm a little mad that Hitachi had to die as a company and got sold into pieces. I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as HGST. Technically, the 3.5" drives from Hitachi got sold to Toshiba. For example, the Toshiba DT01ACA300 is allegedly the same design as the Hitachi 7k3000. In the following link, note that the "HDS723030BLE640" is the model number to the 7k3000 with ridiculously low failure rates in the Backblaze study. http://goughlui.com/2013/02/26/toshiba-dt01aca300-aka-hitachi-hds723030ble640-drives/ http://goughlui.com/2013/02/26/toshiba-dt01aca300-aka-hitach... I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all. Again, I hate to criticize such awesome research that you've given away for free in your blog. But I'd definitely would like some research and clarification on the Hitachi -> Toshiba or Hitachi -> HGST situation.

RickHull 12y ago
> I'm not sure if I trust what you guys did, calling the old Hitachi Drives as HGST. > I don't know if HGST drives are related to the old Hitachi models at all. FTA: > Some of the HGST drives listed were manufactured under their previous brand, Hitachi. We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request.
- dragontamer 12y ago
  I do realize that is what was asked of them. But that doesn't necessarily mean that was the correct way to go about it. The Serial Number / Model Number information on the other hand should work if enough details are provided.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request. // Intriguing - that suggests some sort of advertising deal? Which calls in to question the impartiality of the report. Who asked them? In what context? Why accede to a third parties interference in the report? Are Backblaze getting reduced price HGST drives now?
  - 12y ago

chdir 12y ago

The winner of this post, HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital. Their NAS are well rated on Amazon & Newegg. Personally, I'm more concerned about the lifetime of laptop HDD (500GB range). Wonder what's the time frame around which I should swap it out (& what brand)

seanp2k2 12y ago
Given that you can get 512GB M2 SSDs now, I'd say go for that if you're worried about reliability. From what I've read, SSDs are more reliable unless you're trying very hard to wear out their endurance (on the order of 2PB according to http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim... )
- pjc50 12y ago
  SSDs also have a wide variance in failure rates by model, the highest I've heard is 8%.
- mopo2000 12y ago
  SSDs mainly fail by FTL corruption bugs, not flash wear.
- penguat 12y ago
  but there can be some interesting not-a-failure modes, I know because I suffered one and the recovery was a nightmare due to overly-protective UEFI. Fortunately, anything on my local SSD is only in cache and not to be worried about ;) (and I managed to put the UEFI in dumb mode so it wouldn't interfere)
  - derekp7 12y ago
    For the "not-a-failure" modes, are you referring to things like flipped bits? I had that happen on a USB3 high-speed thumb drive, where several of my source code files had random capitalization throughout the file (bit 6 was flipped on) and other weird corruption that indicated specific bits got either flipped on or off. But the drive was at 98% full when this happened too.

joshstrange 12y ago

Let me start off by saying I am a Backblaze customer and I LOVE these posts and use them as my bible for buying drives for my NAS/Media Server. With that said this is going to sound a little nitpicky but why isn't the publication date anywhere on this article? I've noticed a growing number of blogs not putting the publish date anywhere on the blog page which makes it really hard to know if what they say is still valid. In this case you can infer from the dates of the drives they tested that it was published in 2015 but a number of blogs don't have those clues in the blog to let you know when it was posted. Normally you can look at the URL to see the date but BB uses slugs off /blog/ so you can't get the date from there either.

brianwski 12y ago
Backblaze engineer here, the blog folks are trying to fix it right now. I also hate "evergreen" blog posts that don't include a date, I wasn't aware we were doing that. :-(
- joshstrange 12y ago
  Thanks! You guys rock, I love your posts and product.
- atYevP 12y ago
  Backblaze blog folk here -> change is hard :-(
atYevP 12y ago
Important New Bulletin -> There are now dates on the individual blog posts.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pippy 12y ago
I'm feeling foolish for not reading it and purchasing four Seagate Barracuda 7200.14s. I had no failures so far but with a 50% failure rate it's bound to happen soon

cjensen 12y ago

Love and appreciate that Backblaze presents this data, but there are some obvious issues: comparing the annual failure rate of a pool where avg. age is 1 year to a pool where avg. age is 3 years isn't a great comparison. Rather than annual rates, I'd really prefer to see failure rate after six months, one year, two years, etc. This would make it easier to answer questions like "was drive X always bad? Or just when new? Or just when old?"

brianwski 12y ago
Backblaze employee here - we're going to release the raw data in a couple weeks, so everybody can do their own analysis.
- deanclatworthy 12y ago
  Can't wait for this, but it'd be great if you considered having "real-time"-ish data feed for everyone to hook into. Then we don't have to wait for the annual blog post ;-)

joering2 12y ago

I think there has never been more personal piece of technology than your full of important data hard drive, especially pre-cloud era, when now people just don't worry much of a dying hardware. But back in the ole' days, every one of us have lost very personal data due to hardware failure at some point. And it's interesting how the opinion about brands are being formed. For example, my first drive that died was Seagate. Surprise surprise my opinion about said company is very low now. But in most part, it's very bias opinion, especially given the fact I have never owned another Seagate for the reason of crash. I love WD and never had one failed, currently about 20 full of data. But I met bunch of folks who hate WD and had them crush and they lost important data. And they love Seagate. It's interesting how opinions about hard drives are being formed throughout our lives.

schneider_sh 12y ago
I had the opposite issue. Bought WD Black for my first PC build. It died within ~3 weeks. Bought another to replace it. Again dead within a month. Have about 8 Seagate drives now and have not had an issue at all. Will avoid WD at all costs now.

tracker1 12y ago

Interesting, I built a home FreeNAS a few years ago, with Seagate 3TB drives, 7200.12 iirc, and saw 3 of them (out of 12) fail well under 2 years... at this point, I've had so many issues, it's pretty much sitting there. I put 4x4tb WD reds into my older Synology NAS and have been using that without issue.

ck2 12y ago

It's a shame single platter 1TB drives were not in that test. I bet they are the most reliable because of single platter.

Shivetya 12y ago

so on a given day, or by week, how many drives do you replace?

DanBC 12y ago

Is there any idea which drives were shucked or not shucked from external enclosures?

Norp 12y ago

This sums up my experience with Seagate. I bought my first Barracuda 3TB two months ago, it died out 20 days later with the notorious two-click sound. I can't even be bothered to push warranty for replacement, terrible. Sticking with WD from now on.

icodestuff 12y ago

Oof. I've got a NAS with 4 3TB Seagate Barracudas, same model number as the drives with the 46% failure rate. One's already failed, and I replaced it with the same model drive. Anyone have a recommendation for how to replace all the drives with more reliable models without wrecking the RAID? Downtime is okay, but I don't have spare space for the contents to make a giant backup. It's currently set up as a "Synology Hybrid RAID" that looks an awful lot like a RAID 5.

wazoox 12y ago
HGST drives are slightly larger than Seagate of the same advertised capacity. Replacing Seagate drives with HGST ones is therefore easy, while it's often impossible the other way around (fortunately :)
switch007 12y ago
Without a backup, you need a temporary, identical NAS device with the 4 new disks. Then do a file-level copy. Then put the 4 new disks in the old NAS and import the array. Do you know of a store with a very lenient returns policy? An online capacity expansion (replacing one at a time) will mean a very long time in a degraded state, possible multiple disk failures, increased chances of data loss (power goes off, etc)
Rapzid 12y ago
If the NAS uses linux RAID you just need drives that are AS LARGE or LARGER than the current drives. Precisely, not what's marked on the box. If you want to be on the super safe side and are uncertain, get somebody to help you DD(or dcfldd) each old drive onto a new drive and then just pop the whole new set into the NAS and let it rip. It would also be a good idea to check the NAS vendors forums.
ValentineC 12y ago
Are you looking to replace all 4 disks at once? If you have a spare PC lying around, check out the XPenology forums [1] for the software (specifically, NanoBoot or XPEnoboot) required to create your own Synology clone. You'll be able to create a new SHR volume with new disks. As suggested in another post, do a file level copy to the new volume. You should then be able to replace all the disks in your actual Synology NAS with your new disks at once, and perform a migration [2] so everything works with your Synology hardware. (This is possibly a better solution than replacing the disks one by one, since there's the risk of another disk failing while the RAID is being rebuilt.) [1] http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2 http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2 [2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/tutorials/484 https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/tutorials/484

chuckkir 12y ago

The Western Digital Velociraptor is pretty tough to beat. Near SSD performance (depending on what you are doing) and reliable. For compiling code it's definitely the best choice.

alimoeeny 12y ago
Is "compiling code" an IO intensive (IO bound) task?
- TillE 12y ago
  It certainly can be. Theoretically your OS should be pretty good about caching files in memory, but in practice I've measured significant differences when compiling large C++ projects on a fast SSD.
penguat 12y ago
Unless you could use an SSD? (most people who compile code are valuable enough that their time warrants the fastest thing available, no?)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
hga 12y ago
Ehh; not yet trusting SSDs (or back in 2011 when I did my last computer builds), I prefer 15,000 RPM SAS enterprise drives. 50% greater rotational speed, SAS should be faster than SATA, and even Seagate (true) enterprise disks should be more reliable than WD consumer grade disks. Now/next time I'll seriously consider SSDs.

fivedogit 12y ago

This same URL was submitted an hour earlier and got 4 upvotes. This one has 222 as I write this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016 Timing is everything, I guess.

atYevP 12y ago
Much like comedy!

zkhalique 12y ago

The top two rows seem to be contradictory. How can you have a smaller annual failure rate AND a smaller average age? Name/Model Size Number of Drives Average Age in years Annual Failure Rate 95% Confidence Interval HGST Deskstar 7K2000 (HDS722020ALA330) 2.0 TB 4,641 3.9 1.1% 0.8% – 1.4% HGST Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3030ALA630) 3.0 TB 4,595 2.6 0.6% 0.4% – 0.9%

sib 12y ago
Reading the model numbers and sizes, the top row is 2TB drives, the second row is 3TB; the 3TB were launched more recently. So, they have a smaller average age. And, apparently, they also fail at a lower rate.

HNaTTY 12y ago

I'm super excited for the new Seagate 8tb drives @$260/each. Please order a carton of them and let us know ASAP how they work for you!

sukumargv 12y ago

The data is not accurate. The stats are literal numbers, Which means these guys are not mentioning how many hard drives each vendor sold. But instead they are just comparing the Faulty drives numbers. If you consider the number of HGST and Seagate pieces sold then only these stats or demographics can be considered reasonable. Punchline: This review or analysis could be biased.

pierrec 12y ago
They're not just comparing the faulty drives numbers. Maybe you misunderstood the way they presented the data: in the first table, the "Number of Drives" column refers to the total number of drives they studied for each model, not just the ones that failed. So they give the sample size and the rate of failure for each model. Or are you saying that the difference in worldwide sales for each drive model somehow renders Backblaze's failure rates invalid? The size of the population is irrelevant unless the size of the sample exceeds a few percent of the total population you are examining.
smackfu 12y ago
By definition, it's going to be a true analysis of the drives when obtained the way Backblaze obtains them and when used in the environment Backblaze uses them. Both of those may be different from Joe Random consumer.

agumonkey 12y ago

I'll try to find the URL again, but in the mean time, I've read a comment on a thread from a veteran technician saying that hard drives failures were mostly due to heat fluctuations (material expansion) and that without this information, failure rates were not valuable enough.