Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q3 2016
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BLEH!
Are WD slipping in quality?
k3lt
People say Seagate sucks, check out my 4 year old ST2000DM001 which is working almost non stop, and for long period of time i even used it as system hdd.
http://i.imgur.com/6ydweVc.png http://i.imgur.com/VxEr3Bm.png
I'd say it's holding pretty well.
rl66
Kaarme
I've relied on WD alone ever since Samsung dropped out of the business, but based on the trend visible in this article, I might as well just go for whichever is cheaper, WD or Seagate, as Seagate looks no worse at all anymore. This is of course better for the consumer.
Although who knows the model to model variance. Manufacturers have occasionally have unlucky models.
Aura89
Kaarme
alanm
xrodney
For me WD have 100% failure rate. out of 5 i used 4 died just 6-12 months after end of warranty, and last one 6 months till warranty end and replacement died 12 months later.
On other hand I had about 20 seagate drives with 300GB, 1TB, 1.5TB, 3TB and 6TB size and only got 1 dead and 3 bad ones from faulty line that had issues with high failing disk sectors (catched by smart and recovered nearly all data with only 9 files out of ~700k unreadable).
2 years ago I switched to Seagate Enterprise disks with 5 years waranty instead of 2 and so far much better performance and no issues (100% health according to smart)
vbetts
Moderator
So Toshiba and HGST who both were known to be prone to hardware failure actually has the least amount on average out of this list? Wow! lol
Darren Hodgson
I've had three Seagate hard drive fail in the last five years which is why the last hard drive I bought was a Western Digital Black. It was expensive for a 2 TB drive though.
I do have four hard drives in my system though (3 for games totalling 8 TBs and one internal 1 TB for backups plus three external USB 3.0 backup drives for another 4.5 TBs) so I guess the chance of one of those drives failing is statistically much higher than, say, someone who just has one or two.
BlueRay
HDD hardware fails are complete roulette. Some people just won that roulette many times thus the assumptions. I would trust investigations like this which try out many HDDs rather than what some people say judging from their 2-3 HDDs they bought over the years.
DeskStar
"Just" had another se agate HDD fail on me. That will make three drives out the seven I bought from seven years ago thst have failed. Sorry excuse of a storage company to have that much of a failure rate amongst its hardware.
Must have been part of an inside job as I got these 500gb HDD's for cents in the dollar when the promotion was going on. Now I can see why...
Not sure if I'll ever buy another HDD from seagate.
slyphnier
vbetts
Moderator
Humanoid_1
schmidtbag
Personal anecdotes to denote statistics is such a useless act, especially when it comes to something mechanical. You could spend hundreds of and have a drive that dies in a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, you could buy the cheapest refurbished drive and it will last 10 years of constant use. Imperfections are unavoidable and sometimes you might just get really lucky with something cheaply made.
Of all brands I personally have come across, they have all failed at one point. When it comes to WD vs Seagate, you could argue one of them screws over their customers, depending on your perspective. In my experience, Seagate's SMART log is much more in-depth. That being said, you could say WD cheats by intentionally ignoring something that may otherwise cause long-term damage. On the other hand, you could say Seagate cheats by reporting about a non-issue "problem" and scare people into buying another drive.
Personally, I prefer the Seagate route and choose to ignore some of these "errors" or use the "faulty" drive for data that isn't crucial to me.
SHS
PrMinisterGR
This is a personal rambling, and I'm not a statistical report, but I'm never ever installing anything that has remotely to do with Seagate in my system. I had two disks, well ventilated, on rubber cushions, lightly used, using the latest available firmware, on an excellent PSU. They both crapped out in under three years. The first one made a weird spinup noise, and the other was just creating tens of thousands of bad sectors.
I now have a 3TB Toshiba which is a rebranded HGST, and a refurbished Hitachi Ultrastar with a proper SMART report. I somehow forsee them to behave better than the Seagate drives, although the Ultrastar is a really noisy drive.
FeDaYin
1 of my ST2000DM001 died 1 month ago and today I unplugged it to throw it and now I don't have it anymore. It had 800 days of working time.
Still visible in Windows, but over 55000 reallocated sectors and over 10500 pending, usable only on first 14GB, after that it's full of bad sectors from every 4gb.
I had so much faith in Seagate, everything I have it's from Seagate.
sykozis
3, 7 year old drives failed.... That's really not bad at all.
I think it's quite laughable how people try to use results from Backblaze to justify a HDD manufacturer preference. Over the last 20 years, I've had harddrives from nearly every manufacturer fail. The failure rates I've seen personally, put HGST in the same category as Maxtor. Regardless of the reliability Backblaze claims for each drive they use, there is no guarantee what so ever that an end-user will have the same experience. Operating temperature makes a big difference folks....and that's a very important detail that Backblaze is not providing....