Seagate Drives have worlds worst failure rate - BackBlaze

[Lias]

http://www.zdnet.com/who-makes-the-b...es-7000025375/

TL;DR version:

"In general, Backblaze sees more problems with Seagate drives than the other two vendors. .... And in general the Seagate drives have proven to be less reliable overall."
"Hitachi drives have proven to be the most reliable. Their annual failure rates have ranged from .9% all the way up to 1.5%."

[Codex]

Interesting!

I've had massive issues with seagates and refuse to ever get them again, I have 2 x 1tb's fail in a week, then within 4 days of receiving a new one to replace one of them it also failed lol. CL replaced them all with WD's at no extra cost x)

At my old work we had most seagates fail, followed closely by hitachi, only had 1 WD fail (around 150 failed drives, around 60% seagates and 40% hitachis)

[Pyromanik]

http://www.zdnet.com/who-makes-the-b...es-7000025375/

TL;DR version:

"In general, Backblaze sees more problems with Seagate drives than the other two vendors. .... And in general the Seagate drives have proven to be less reliable overall."
"Hitachi drives have proven to be the most reliable. Their annual failure rates have ranged from .9% all the way up to 1.5%."

I've never had a single issue with a seagate drive.

WD on the other hand...



That said, all my seagate drives predate their decline into shit. The only one that doesn't hasn't given up yet, thank fuck.

[Arseynimz]

I bought a 5 x 4TB's when they came out, but haven't really ventured too much in the Seagate zone - I'm pretty content with WD, The again, I think I've been a little lucky cos I have only had one OCZ drive failure... *touches wood*

[Lias]

In my personal experience Seagate have been terrible for some time now.

[han16]

I have a stack of dead seagates at home, however I feel as tho the failing has only been an issue of recent years. I have a few older 320gig/400gig drives still trucking on.

Never had a WD fail, my system lost its last last Seagate drive only recently, which was quickly replaced with a 4tb WD.

[BeNZene]

I bought a 5 x 4TB's when they came out

Raid 6 setup to protect dwarf porn collection?

[Arseynimz]

I bought a 5 x 4TB's when they came out

Raid 6 setup to protect dwarf porn collection?

Single drive Redundancy on a FreeNAS dedicated box for all of the internet backing up that one must do on behalf of the world.

[han16]

I bought a 5 x 4TB's when they came out

Raid 6 setup to protect dwarf porn collection?

Single drive Redundancy on a FreeNAS dedicated box for all of the internet backing up that one must do on behalf of the world.

Thinly veiled attempt at hiding dwarf porn fetish from Get Some wise cracks.

[nevjmac]

I used to have seagate HDD's till 2 of them crapped out at the same time. I havn't gone back from using WD since

[Kopfjaeger]

haven't purchased a Seagate in a very long time, all WD's here that i try and rotate out every 3 years or so

[RightHandOnly]

seagate also sell more drives so...so naturally their failure rate for peeps would seem high.

Hitachi,,,make the best drives......if you are really concerned about quality drives.....dont buy sata...and buy only sas at 10K or 15K rpm if not buying ssd.

The  process and working components are better as they have to be for the speeds they must support so better  quality and drive will last longer.......but will use more power and generate more heat....

anything in the 7k speed space is rubbish...

[mattnz]

seagate also sell more drives so...so naturally their failure rate for peeps would seem high.

Hitachi,,,make the best drives......if you are really concerned about quality drives.....dont buy sata...and buy only sas at 10K or 15K rpm if not buying ssd.

The  process and working components are better as they have to be for the speeds they must support so better  quality and drive will last longer.......but will use more power and generate more heat....

anything in the 7k speed space is rubbish...

What are you on dude?

Firstly, failure rate is not a function of drives sold. If anything, drives sold would allow a more reliable estimate of failure rate. Not that that has any relevance to the data in the OP.

Secondly, the drives in the study were in an always online storage server. This is far from how most consumers will use them. In that setting some power saving functions become a liability, increasing failure rate.

And what?! Don't buy SATA?! Only buy SSDs or 10k??? Do you work for a hard drive manufacturer? The simple fact is that a cheap and cheerful 3/4TB will serve the storage needs of 98% of people, the other 2% can get another couple and set up a RAID array.

[han16]

anything in the 7k speed space is rubbish...

Nay. They are plenty fine for storage.

Sure as system drive you would be far better off with an SSD, but for storage the trusty old 7krpm drive is good as gold.

[AvatarFACE]

I've probably had about 7 or 8 HDDs before my current SSD drive and my WD other drive and most of them have been seagate, and I'm still using a couple of 500Gb ones in other PC's that are basically home office machines, so far the only HDD I've had a problem with was my WD Velociraptor 320Gb. Just my 2 cents.
Maybe certain seagate models are worse than others and I've just managed to get the better ones?
I remember a friend of mine in school (2001ish)who would never by WD because he had a run of them failing.

[RightHandOnly]

seagate also sell more drives so...so naturally their failure rate for peeps would seem high.

Hitachi,,,make the best drives......if you are really concerned about quality drives.....dont buy sata...and buy only sas at 10K or 15K rpm if not buying ssd.

The  process and working components are better as they have to be for the speeds they must support so better  quality and drive will last longer.......but will use more power and generate more heat....

anything in the 7k speed space is rubbish...

What are you on dude?

Firstly, failure rate is not a function of drives sold. If anything, drives sold would allow a more reliable estimate of failure rate. Not that that has any relevance to the data in the OP.

Secondly, the drives in the study were in an always online storage server. This is far from how most consumers will use them. In that setting some power saving functions become a liability, increasing failure rate.

And what?! Don't buy SATA?! Only buy SSDs or 10k??? Do you work for a hard drive manufacturer? The simple fact is that a cheap and cheerful 3/4TB will serve the storage needs of 98% of people, the other 2% can get another couple and set up a RAID array.

Sorry MATT Probaly should have put more info.

Seagate are the largest selling hard drive manufacturer on the Planet....so if they sell shitloads more drives but still say for example have a 5% failure rate ...lets assume a random number of 1 million drives sold in a period of time and the next closest manufacturer sells 500K  the 5% failure rate means twice as many people would complain.

I am not saying drives fail because  more people buy them I am saying because a higher number of folks have seagate drives there could be more people moaning on the web that their drive is shit.

Again I should have qualified more of my response....sata drives are not designed be be access on mass all the time its called work cycles.

I have a sata drive but also have 2 ssd drives...one for OS and one for Games.

My sata is used for backups of my SSDS and data I access but  not all the time.

as a result my drive should last a long time.

If I was too use a sata as primary boot and data and games etc I would be backing it up everyday just because they are not designed for this work rate.

No I dont work for a hard drive vendor...but my main role in IT is Highend SAN storage Disk arrays and Design and implementation and stuff like that ....I work for a cloud provider....and I have worked for large companies and designed and managed many of their storage arrays....so DISK and stuff is a big part of my work life.

You are right SATA is perfect for most home users...but if reliablility and speed and and long work rates and stuff are important...I stand by the dont buy sata.

[Lias]

Seagate are the largest selling hard drive manufacturer on the Planet....so if they sell shitloads more drives but still say for example have a 5% failure rate ...lets assume a random number of 1 million drives sold in a period of time and the next closest manufacturer sells 500K  the 5% failure rate means twice as many people would complain.

I am not saying drives fail because  more people buy them I am saying because a higher number of folks have seagate drives there could be more people moaning on the web that their drive is shit.

This isn't anecdotal evidence of people whinging on the internet.  This is the publicly released data by a major cloud storage vendor. It pretty categorically proves that seagate is _way_ worse than Hitachi or WD.

There is more details at the original BackBlaze blog here: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/

no I dont work for a hard drive vendor...but my main role in IT is Highend SAN storage Disk arrays and Design and implementation and stuff like that ....I work for a cloud provider....and I have worked for large companies and designed and managed many of their storage arrays....so DISK and stuff is a big part of my work life.

You are right SATA is perfect for most home users...but if reliablility and speed and and long work rates and stuff are important...I stand by the dont buy sata.

You have more experience than me in that area, but I think were talking apples and oranges here. Your talking high work rate (massive amounts of IOPS), which is a fairly unique enterprise requirement. Pretty much everyone else we want drives that may stay on high hours, but have very relatively low work IOPS for *cough* linux iso storage *cough*. We want cheap, high capacity and longterm reliability with high power on but low workload.

For anything needing high IOPS, yes avoid consumer grade SATA drives like the plague.

[RightHandOnly]

Hi LIAS,

The evidence is skewed if from one cloud vendor.

This is because this cloud vendor might have 2000 drives in total and 75% are seagate.....I am not defending them but using one cloud vendor as a gauge is not good practise.

We dont know how they are using said drives either and they wont release that info as its sensitive.

I would take more more global stats which are based on warranty returns to the manufacturer or returns in general.

As I said Earlier...even as home users...and even if you have no idea should ask friends as we all do what HDD should I buy based on doing this.....I think most people look at the size and price rather than what they are actually going to do.

I hope this helps some folks think a bit more about HDD same as we do when we buy GPU or CPU's.

HDD are just as important.

you are right is some sense my views are skewed as I work in this space......and sata will be fine for a lot of people just dont forget about the other stuff and what you are going to be doing with the tech....this is most important.

[Lythieus]

I've lost so many Seagate drives it's unreal. never had issues with wd hdd's, I've run WD exclusively for a few years now