- Mar 13, 2006
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Don't buy Seagate - some models have failure rates over 25%.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate.
That means, between seagate & hitachi, hitachi is the clear winner.Seagate 12,765 39,576 1.4
Hitachi 12,956 36,078 2.0
Western Digital 2,838 2,581 2.5
Toshiba 58 174 0.7
Samsung 18 18 3.7
Isn't very good.Western Digital Red (WD30EFRX) 3.0TB 346 0.5 3.2%
Look at the sample size...
That means, between seagate & hitachi, hitachi is the clear winner.
WD's small sample size isn't showing that good either...
The 'popular' reds:
Isn't very good.
Too bad we don't see any data for blacks, or the RE edition.
2/3 of my recent drive purchases have been Hitachi, but they are just so darn slow.
On the other hand they are dead silent.
You can find the model numbers used in the study here: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
The drive with the highest fail rate, ST31500341AS (25.4%), is a Seagate 7200.11 drive from 2008. A six years old model using three 500GB platters.
...
I would also love to see results for Toshiba hard drives.
Also, importantly, the study did not include many of the popular general purpose home PC drives, sorted here in order of number of reviews on newegg:
1. WD Black WD1002FAEX
2. WD Blue WD10EZEX
3-6. Smaller WD Blue drives
7. (was included) ST3000DM001
8. ST1000DM003
9. ST2000DM001
10. WD Black WD2002FAEX
Instead, mostly lower RPM drives or older 7200RPM drives were in, and results for either of those may not apply to new 7200 RPM drives. I would also love to see results for Toshiba hard drives.
Blacks are hardly popular general home use drives.
The drive with the highest fail rate, ST31500341AS (25.4%), is a Seagate 7200.11 drive from 2008. A six years old model using three 500GB platters. This makes me doubt there are any useful conclusions to be drawn from this drive's survivability when compared to newer 1TB per platter drives. It is clearly an outlier which you can't use to judge Seagate's reliability in general, especially that of their current drives. The second highest failure rate was on ST31500541AS (9.8%), much improved over the -341AS. But even this one is a five year old model, not exactly relevant any more. For example, ST4000DM000 is a new drive with 3.8% failure rate, similar to WD's numbers.
I don't think these results should be taken as "Seagate sucks, Hitachi rocks", one has to look at each model separately instead of blindly trusting one brand over another, and also weigh the cost of the drive and the length of its warranty against the likelihood of it failing.
We are focusing on 4TB drives for new pods. For these, our current favorite is the Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000).
Why would you say that? I would say Blacks are very often bought for home use by people who think they are more reliable than Blues or just like to have longer warranty. Plenty of gamers with Black drives too.
General home use means Dell / HP etc. They aren't using blacks.
Yeah, blacks are popular due to the longer warranty. This study explains why Seagate drive have such short drive warranties.
No, it doesn't. Seagate drives typically have the same 2 year warranty as WD Blue. Toshiba has 1-2 year warranty depending on the drive. And WD Black's 5 year warranty doesn't mean it's more reliable, it just makes it more expensive.
WD Black's 5 year warranty doesn't mean it's more reliable, it just makes it more expensive
No, it doesn't. Seagate drives typically have the same 2 year warranty as WD Blue. Toshiba has 1-2 year warranty depending on the drive. And WD Black's 5 year warranty doesn't mean it's more reliable, it just makes it more expensive.
The warranty means the manufacturer trusts the device to not fail within that period, otherwise they would be losing a huge pile of money. It's a reasonable indicator of a manufacturer's trust in their product offerings.