# Hard Drive Failure Rates



## RCoon (Jan 21, 2014)

Something for people to refer to when moaning about HDD failure rates.

http://techreport.com/news/25940/hard-drive-reliability-study-names-names


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## Ahhzz (Jan 21, 2014)

I knew to stay away from Seagate, and prefer the WD Blacks, but I'll have to look a little more at the Hitachis. Thanks


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## rtwjunkie (Jan 21, 2014)

I've still got a couple WD 74Gb Raptors (one in my son's PC, and one in HTPC) that are still in use since Sept 2006.  Both still have no SMART warnings, and still have no bad sectors.  Simply amazing the longevity of those things!


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## FordGT90Concept (Jan 21, 2014)

I have two of the 3 TB Seagates and neither has failed yet.  I've kind of written Hitachi off lately but that was clearly a mistake.  Bare in mind that Hitachi is the smallest HDD manufacturer out of the three so that may be skewing results.


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## Arjai (Jan 21, 2014)

I have two Hitachi's, a 250GB in, This Old Comp, and a 750GB in my ASUS Laptop.

I the 250 has been stellar! The 750, in my laptop, so far, so good, It is the newer of the two and has been used for a shorter time.

When I, eventually, get my life back to squared away, I plan to get a Kingston SSD kit and use this 750 for a backup and data drive. Blah, Blah. 

Thanks @RCoon for the post.


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## Ahhzz (Jan 21, 2014)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I have two of the 3 TB Seagates and neither has failed yet.  I've kind of written Hitachi off lately but that was clearly a mistake.  Bare in mind that Hitachi is the smallest HDD manufacturer out of the three so that may be skewing results.


Actually, click thru to the orig report, you'll see that they had 13000 Seagate and hitachis in the mix, and around 3500 wd drives.


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## AsRock (Jan 21, 2014)

Info not worthy, lack of details.

How ever i am a WD fan regardless what these kind of reports say.


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## FordGT90Concept (Jan 21, 2014)

Ahhzz said:


> Actually, click thru to the orig report, you'll see that they had 13000 Seagate and hitachis in the mix, and around 3500 wd drives.


That's not representative of the market at all.


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## micropage7 (Jan 21, 2014)

just saw it from facebook. 
so size matter?
and i dunno, bigger space can save many data but when suddenly it die, you lose it all


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## freaksavior (Jan 21, 2014)

The 1.5Tb had bad firmware causing them to fail, after about a dozen RMA's I finally got some that worked.



micropage7 said:


> just saw it from facebook.
> so size matter?
> and i dunno, bigger space can save many data but when suddenly it die, you lose it all



That's why when you use large file systems you need something to check the data often enough to prevent loss like ZFS. Standard raid levels were not designed for this type of capacity. Now if you're just running one then you can use a backup service or buy a second for backups.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Jan 21, 2014)

I've never had a HDD outright fail. Had them spit out errors but they all seemed to shape up after a reformat. I switched to Seagate because I got tired of the racket WDs make when seeking. Now I would never go back. Same speed, less noise, lower price.


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## extrasalty (Jan 21, 2014)

I was big Seagate fanboi until I had to replace 7(seven) in 1 year- all different ages and sizes. One of the replacements came dead. 1 died a year later. Long turn around and poor refurbishing from Seagate's Tennessee plant. Costly returns- whether 1 or 4 HDDs. Not even factoring their poor manufacturing and quality issues. 
Western Digital is the exact opposite- fast turnaround from California, very cheap shipping - $5 for something UPS charges $11, replacement drives come with nearly full warranty as opposed to refurbs from Seagate, which sometimes have no remaining warranty but 90 days. I made the decision 2 years ago to never buy Seagate ( Samsung too since they are owned by Seagate and warranty is handled exactly the same). 
Another lesson learned - don't use WHS drive duplication. Ever.
Since all hard drives will fail sooner or later, it gets really hard to make sure your data is not corrupted before that. SMART is not doing much at all for data integrity, let alone warning. After that abomination Windows Home Server drive duplicaton slowly corrupted over 2TB of data, ZFS made me see the light. For me ZFS and WD Black is the winning solution. I laugh at Seagte's peeling magnetic layer now.


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## newtekie1 (Jan 21, 2014)

If you adjust the numbers by only including the numbers you choose to include and purposely leaving others off, you can make it look as bad as you want for any manufacturer you want.



> WD's Green 3TB "start accumulating errors as soon as they are put into production... they were left out of the totals completely...



Every company has a bad run from time to time.  I don't prefer any company when it comes to hard drives, I buy what provides the best GB/$, and never rely on a single drive to house any important data.  Make backups!


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## Sasqui (Jan 21, 2014)

More interesting reading...
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

Notice the drop off at year 3 (read more about it in the article):


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## Ahhzz (Jan 21, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> If you adjust the numbers by only including the numbers you choose to include and purposely leaving others off, you can make it look as bad as you want for any manufacturer you want.
> 
> 
> 
> Every company has a bad run from time to time.  I don't prefer any company when it comes to hard drives, I buy what provides the best GB/$, and never rely on a single drive to house any important data.  Make backups!



Not to disagree with your conclusion by any stretch, but it appears that the only ones they left off, they COMPLETELY left off, due to being completely skewed. they also commented directly to that, saying that the greens were just not dealing well in that environment. Didn't say they were crappy drives or anything. As for a "bad run", if you go back thru their blog, they've obtained these drives from multiple sources, not one set. It's a pretty good read. The data I liked best was the quantity of drives overall. this was not a limited run of even a few hundred drives
Quote:
Brand               Number of Drives Terabytes             Average Age in Years
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
end quote

sorry, my table-fu is not strong 

Looks to me like that's a really wide spread of drives, large collection, and the best Actual Use report I've ever seen on drives. Who else has put that many _different brand _drives thru that long of a run, and published the details? I have long preferred WD Blacks, have several 2Tb in  the house right now, with 2 3Tb reds in my NAS. But this will make me consider the hitachi brand next time out...


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## newtekie1 (Jan 21, 2014)

Ahhzz said:


> Not to disagree with your conclusion by any stretch, but it appears that the only ones they left off, they COMPLETELY left off, due to being completely skewed. they also commented directly to that, saying that the greens were just not dealing well in that environment. Didn't say they were crappy drives or anything. As for a "bad run", if you go back thru their blog, they've obtained these drives from multiple sources, not one set. It's a pretty good read. The data I liked best was the quantity of drives overall. this was not a limited run of even a few hundred drives



Yes, but if you are releasing studies on hard drive reliability, if you want to seem reputable don't leave off an entire group of drives just because they all failed and you don't want to show that information.

Also, I'm not talking about a bad production run, I'm talking about a bad run in terms of a bad stretch of time where they are having issues.  Every year we see reports like this, and every year the company with the problems seems to change.  A month from now WD could run into issues and their reliability could start to go down.

Also, one of the 1.5TB Seagate models had an annual failure rate of *120%*...yeah their numbers are reliable...


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## Ahhzz (Jan 21, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> Also, one of the 1.5TB Seagate models had an annual failure rate of *120%*...yeah their numbers are reliable...



You really should read the whole article. The 120% failure means they replaced them more than once in a year, due to what they assume is a bad batch from refurbs. Again, it doesn't look like they're sugar coating anything except dropping off what appear to be some obvious anomalies, which is what any statistician worth .500000000001 a grain of salt is going to do 


Quote:
_We got them from Seagate as warranty replacements for the older drives, and these new drives are dropping like flies. Their average age shows 0.8 years, but since these are warranty replacements, we believe that they are refurbished drives that were returned by other customers and erased, so they already had some usage when we got them._
End Quote

And after nagging you to read the article, I missed this gem at the bottom
"_A year and a half ago, Western Digital acquired the Hitachi disk drive business. Will Hitachi drives continue their excellent performance? Will Western Digital bring some of the Hitachi reliability into their consumer-grade drives?" _


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## newtekie1 (Jan 21, 2014)

Ahhzz said:


> You really should read the whole article. The 120% failure means they replaced them more than once in a year, due to what they assume is a bad batch from refurbs. Again, it doesn't look like they're sugar coating anything except dropping off what appear to be some obvious anomalies, which is what any statistician worth .500000000001 a grain of salt is going to do



I read the whole article, I just don't agree with their methods.  I believe it makes their numbers in-accurate.  Something can't fail more than once, if the replacement fails then that is still only a 100% failure rate.  The replacement drive counts as a new drive in the study.

Furthermore, they talk more than once about the fact that they believe a lot of the drives they use are failing because they are using them in environments the drives weren't meant to be used in. These are high-vibration, high temperature, RAID environments.  And not surprisingly, the desktop drives that aren't supposed to be used in these environments fail a lot.  They are using Seagate desktop drives, which aren't supposed to be used in a RAID environment of more than 2 drives and they are failing.  But the WD RED drives that are meant for this type of environment are showing to be more reliable.  This isn't a surprise.  However, they are presenting this data in a way to get people to believe these are how the drives perform in a desktop environment, or at least they knew that is how people would view the results.

In fact, if you look at similar studies, such as the one from Google, you see they specifically don't name brand names because they admit that they are using the drives outside of their intended purpose and it would be unfair to use the numbers to influence brand buying decisions of the standard consumer.  This is because a drive might behave very poorly in a data center, but will run flawlessly in a desktop.


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## FX-GMC (Jan 21, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> I read the whole article, I just don't agree with their methods.  I believe it makes their numbers in-accurate.  Something can't fail more than once, if the replacement fails then that is still only a 100% failure rate.  The replacement drive counts as a new drive in the study.



I agree.

Now if they wanted to go into Failures per purchased drive.....


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## Ahhzz (Jan 22, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> I read the whole article, I just don't agree with their methods.  I believe it makes their numbers in-accurate.  Something can't fail more than once, if the replacement fails then that is still only a 100% failure rate.  The replacement drive counts as a new drive in the study.
> ............ but will run flawlessly in a desktop.



It seems that you just want to insist that they (Backblaze) produced the results of this study to influence people into buying or not buying a series of drives. This is a long running blog of a company dedicated to "our cloud storage", as referred in the opening paragraph. They had a drive shortage, as many did, they had to source many drives from many different companies to keep up with their demand, and they decided to keep track of the drives replaced, and, in their experience, the drives' real-world MTBF, in a Cloud Environment:
"In the Backblaze environment..."
"Some drives just don’t work in the Backblaze environment"

This is an Online Cloud Storage/Backup company. They have no apparent desire to influence people to purchase one series of drives over another, and in fact, several times stated the have a preference for the WD reds, which they don't portray as having many of at all:
"Our other favorite is the Western Digital 3TB Red (WD30EFRX)."
"We wish we had more of the Western Digital Red 3TB drives (WD30EFRX)"
They _do_ speak highly of the Hitachi drives they have ("If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives"), but again, people reading this blog are made aware UP FRONT (if for some reason they assumed instead of reading) that this is in a Cloud Storage environment, not a bank of desktop computers.

Simply put, this blog shows a wide variety of drives in a large databank cloud storage environment, larger than most of us could dream of at this point, but just on a larger scale than what many of us have in our house or place of business. As such, it is highly interesting to me that the WD Red, designed for the RAID environ, scored worse than the equivalent Hitachi Desktar.

Western Digital Red
(WD30EFRX)3.0TB      __________346_______________0.5_______________3.2%
Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000
(HDS723030ALA640)3.0TB   ___1027_____________2.1________________0.9%


As for " the replacement fails then that is still only a 100% failure rate.", that's just playing with numbers. As a computer tech in this forum, I had absolutely no problem understanding that that meant they had drives fail and be replaced in less than a year's time. If someone didn't understand that, they were reading the wrong blog, and meant to be reading about Paddington Bear, not Backblaze.  (Plainly, how would you explain that they bought **for instance** 100 drives, and had 120 fail in one year, on average? I understood it...)

What's the issue here? It almost sounds like a fanboi rant from you, which I'm sure you aren't. The company provided some serious real-world data, description of the environment used, reasoning behind the layout and build structure, and their experience with several different drive types. They appear to have no hidden agenda, no company affiliation beyond their own, I don't see any harm done that anyone who cares to read these type articles could possibly experience. If Joe Public decides to read it, and then decides to buy a Hitachi over a Western Digital or Seagate, who is harmed? If it's a question of "Seagate's not that bad!!!", Tom's Hardware readers appear to disagree, and if any of us are going to take someone's word over another, what does it matter that there's another dissenting opinion?

To the educated reader, all the information explaining the parameters of the "test" are in plain text. To the uneducated, they're still wondering if their microwave is spying on them for the NSA.....


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## newtekie1 (Jan 22, 2014)

I think I've made myself very clear.  This isn't a fanboy rant, I'm just stating my opinion. 

Measuring drive failures at more than 100% makes the numbers inaccurate in my opinion(and it seems I'm not the only one).  And in fact in statistical studies as well.  In medial studies, if the patient is cured, then relapses and is cured again they don't call that a 200% success rate.  If a patient dies, and is revived, and then dies again it isn't a 200% failure rate.  To be really accurate, the new drives, even if they were replacements for failed drives, should be counted as a separate drive.

Also, releasing the brands of the drives only leads to people taking the study's information incorrectly, and why most companies that release numbers like this don't release the specific brands of the drives.  The information is interesting for sure.  However, to release the brand names only serves to try to influence people's buy decisions.  And just as expected you have sites like TechReport and others picking these numbers up and presenting them as if they were desktop failure rates, and people here believing that.  You can't use these numbers to predict desktop failure rates.  These were drives put into conditions they weren't meant for, they would likely have very different failure rates in a desktop system.

And the Hitachi Deskstar drives are very well built drives with rock solid firmware.  Hitachi actually approves them for RAID use.  So it isn't surprising they are doing well and even outperforming the RED drives(which are just Green drives with TLER enabled).  But that is the point too.  Hitachi doesn't really have an enterprise class drive, their standard desktop drive fills that niche too.  So they write their firmware to be RAID compatible.  Seagate and WD on the other hand don't write the firmware for their desktop drives to be RAID compatible.  But remember, there was a time when the Deskstars weren't that great, which is why they earned the nickname Hitachi Deathstars.


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## Ahhzz (Jan 22, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> I think I've made myself very clear.  This isn't a fanboy rant, I'm just stating my opinion.
> ....snip..... But remember, there was a time when the Deskstars weren't that great, which is why they earned the nickname Hitachi Deathstars.



Homer: "I agree with you in theory...."

So, patient recovery rates aside, how would you indicate that you purchased 100 drives, and over the course of a year, had 120 drive failures? I think they explained their numbers sufficiently for anyone to understand. 

I don't think either one of us can speak to "only leads to people taking the study's information correctly....". I understood it. You understood it. Several people here understood it. We can't correct everyone 





I *absolutely *remember the Deathstars, well old enough for that, and remembering the IBM tags on hard drives, and several other defunct names, *shudder* maxtor included. I also didn't know that about the greens and reds. I had read some about them back when I got my baby NAS over here, I think, but didn't see that info. Checking Freenas right now for more info, thanks


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## newtekie1 (Jan 22, 2014)

Ahhzz said:


> Homer: "I agree with you in theory...." So, patient recovery rates aside, how would you indicate that you purchased 100 drives, and over the course of a year, had 120 drive failures? I think they explained their numbers sufficiently for anyone to understand.



It is simple, if the 100 drives they purchased died, then it is a 100% failure rate.  If the drives are replaced, then that is a new drive in the study.  So if they had 120 drives fail, then the had 120 drives.   You can't have 120 drive fail if you didn't have 120 drives.



Ahhzz said:


> I don't think either one of us can speak to "only leads to people taking the study's information correctly....". I understood it. You understood it. Several people here understood it. We can't correct everyone



The fact that we've already seen techreport mis-reporting the information, and people here talking about the information like it applies to desktop applications.  Yes, if you read the whole study you get all the information, but most people won't, most people won't even read the entire TechReport article.   Most people will look at the pretty graph and that is it.


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## larrymoencurly (Jan 22, 2014)

Are there any explanations for the different failure rates?  

Russia's StoreLab agreed about Hitachis being best but thought post 7200.11 model Seagates were fine.


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## RCoon (Jan 22, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> Yes, if you read the whole study you get all the information, but most people won't, most people won't even read the entire TechReport article. Most people will look at the pretty graph and that is it.



Then in that case they deserve to be horribly misinformed and advance absolutely nowhere in their technical adventures.
I find all the information useful, regardless of how confusing the case study was carried out. Somebody has finally given us a useful report to base our HDD failure complaints on, and specifically outlines certain drives that cannot hack it when it comes to heavy duty data storage use.
All in all, GG Hitachi.


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## ne6togadno (Jan 22, 2014)

RCoon said:


> and specifically outlines certain drives that cannot hack it when it comes to heavy duty data storage use.
> All in all, GG Hitachi.


you can find that info by simply reading system specs of the drives. no need to dig into reports from incorrect case studies. the only useful thing in this report is that it shows that if you want good reliability you should use tech that can meet requrements of your working conditions.


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## Frick (Jan 22, 2014)

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-6/disques-durs.html


So how do they do the total number? Because that ST31500341AS at 25% is going to make a dent.


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## newtekie1 (Jan 22, 2014)

RCoon said:


> Then in that case they deserve to be horribly misinformed and advance absolutely nowhere in their technical adventures. I find all the information useful, regardless of how confusing the case study was carried out. Somebody has finally given us a useful report to base our HDD failure complaints on.



You just showed my point exactly.  This gives us, normal consumers of desktop drives, nothing.  Yet you still seem to think it does.  These failure rates mean nothing to "us".


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## Ahhzz (Jan 22, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> You just showed my point exactly.  This gives us, normal consumers of desktop drives, nothing.  Yet you still seem to think it does.  These failure rates mean nothing to "us".



As a Folder, a Cruncher, a regular on this forum, with 4 "rigs" in your sig, you cannot convince me that you are a "regular consumer", or that you didn't understand exactly what the article told you when you read the whole thing. Just won't happen. Not really sure why you're drawing this line in the sand over something that you obviously understood from the get-go.

Tek, we can't force everyone to use their brains. We can't force them to fully read an article in order to make in informed decision. We can't babysit them all.  The Internet *will* be wrong, a lot, and so will those using it, myself included in that sample. We could look at half the articles on here, read half the article, and insist that it was misleading. Which would then get us smacked in the heads by several other regulars for being too stupid to use an etch-a-sketch, much less a PC. 

If you consider yourself a "normal consumer" (which I still, no offense intended, disagree with), you understood it, so therefore those failure rates did mean something to a "normal consumer". Whether you are or aren't, we still can't control people who don't bother to read an entire article and draw incorrect conclusions. It's that simple. Reading the whole article tells exactly what they intended. Not reading it could lead one to conclude that lighter colored-logo drives fail more than darker colored ones. Ridiculous, but no worse simply because I drew that conclusion from the diagram instead of reading the article. 

We *can't* force them to think!! If you got something useful from the article, great!! If you didn't, ask someone to explain! If that's too much effort, pick something new to read! I don't get the problem....


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## newtekie1 (Jan 22, 2014)

Sigh, the issue is that people are already mis-interpreting the results.  I understand the original study, that isn't the issue.  The issue is that people won't bother even reading the original study.  TechReport mis-interpreted the results and is trying to imply they apply to desktop environments.  RCoon is trying to apply the results to desktop environments.  People will look at the graph, read nothing, and assume these failure rates are for desktop environments.  It is for this specific reason that all the other companies that have done studies like this don't name names. The only people this information helps are people running large RAID setups, not the people that read TechReport, and probably not most of the people reading this thread.

When I'm looking for a drive for one of my computers, I am a regular consumer.  I'm going to buy a desktop drive, and put it in a desktop environment.  That is the definition of a regular consumer buying a desktop hard drive.  And these results mean nothing to me when I'm considering buying a desktop hard drive.


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## natr0n (Jan 22, 2014)

I have a few older seagates for years; I never trust leaving important data on them.

Mostly use them for testing OS and dumping ISO on.


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## TRWOV (Jan 22, 2014)

I've always preferred Seagate drives for their GB/$ ratio. A 10% chance of failure is a good compromise IMO plus I won't ever put them through the same stress as the HDDs in the study.

I'd say that for 99% of home users this study is inconsequential. Not to mention that none of my drives have failed yet, not even the Barracuda that has been recording D1 footage from 9 cameras for 5 years now.


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## Ahhzz (Jan 23, 2014)

newtekie1 said:


> When I'm looking for a drive for one of my computers, I am a regular consumer.  I'm going to buy a desktop drive, and put it in a desktop environment.  That is the definition of a regular consumer buying a desktop hard drive.  And these results mean nothing to me when I'm considering buying a desktop hard drive.



As it may be. For myself, I don't consider myself a "regular consumer" for much of anything. When I'm buying a Battery pack for my devices, I check to see how much amperage they put out per channel, how many devices at once, how long they take to charge. When I'm buying a vid card, I look at reviews, here and elsewhere, I look at specs, I ask for opinions, I look for warranty length, customer support history, "overclockability". I think it would be fair to say that many of us, if not most, here, do as well. But most of all, I don't read part of one review and draw my conclusions from that part. If I did, it's my own damn fault for being too fucking stupid to own an etch-a-sketch. For those that _are_ that stupid, I have pity, and a small portion of disdain. Not for not knowing enough, but for being stupid enough to think "I read it on the Internets!! It must be true!!!!one1!1".

Thanks for the article, Rcoon, I had read their previous, back in Nov and meant to keep an eye out. Appreciate the read


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## Melvis (Jan 23, 2014)

No surprise. Learnt my lesson yrs ago to move away from Seagate. They were really good, just not so much anymore and that warranty? ewww.  My mate only runs Seagate drives, he has LOTS of them and has nothing but issues. I run 90% WD and some still old seagates and have no issues at all. That been said the WD Blue Drives fail the most out of all the WD drives Ive seen but there mostly from Laptops. Toshiba still takes the cake with more dead drives then any other that come in, there terrible!!.


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## Rowsol (Jan 23, 2014)

rtwjunkie said:


> I've still got a couple WD 74Gb Raptors (one in my son's PC, and one in HTPC) that are still in use since Sept 2006.  Both still have no SMART warnings, and still have no bad sectors.  Simply amazing the longevity of those things!



funny enough I put my old 74gb raptor into my mom's computer as a 2nd drive and it's still going.  Had it about... 10 years?


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## TRWOV (Jan 23, 2014)

Adding to the fire: still working to this day in a Pentium 2 based embroidery controller PC


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## MxPhenom 216 (Jan 23, 2014)

running a 2TB Seagate Barracuda with no issues with 2 1tb partitions. I did in the past have 2 seagates fail on me that were in RAID0.


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## Jetster (Jan 23, 2014)

Read
http://www.maximumpc.com/estimating_life_expectancy_hard_drives_tricky_business2013

And This

http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/


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## Zakin (Jan 23, 2014)

This reflects my experiences pretty well, although most of my mechanical drives are Samsung, my one and only Seagate in the past four years or so, literally lit on fire one day and I'm not exaggerating. I wish I had a copy of the email I sent to Seagate, thankfully they totally replaced that thing and said it wasn't my fault by any means. I was incredibly annoyed cause that happened right in the case.


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## micropage7 (Jan 23, 2014)

many aspect could affect hdd life, not only the drive itself
they just point failure drive


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## Frick (Jan 23, 2014)

100% of my Samsung drives have malfunctioned within four years.


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## micropage7 (Jan 23, 2014)

Frick said:


> 100% of my Samsung drives have malfunctioned within four years.


if the drive is more than 3 years you shouldnt rely on it anymore


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## Jetster (Jan 23, 2014)

I loved the Samsung drives. I was sad to see them go. Never had one issue with them

I really think its as complicated issue. There are so many variables. Read the articals I posted above.


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## ne6togadno (Jan 23, 2014)

do you guys realize that you continue to discuse incorrect "case studies" and missleading article based on "tech report" that is usless even for simple statistics not to mension conclusions for general quality/realiability of the HDD drives.
to pick up desktop drives and put them in cloud based storage environment and then to make realiability comparison between them is just retarded. it is like to pick harley, kawasaki ninja and bmw f850gs, go race to dakar rally with them and then make fail rate comparison between 3.
i wont be surprised if seagate take leagal actions agains backblaze for undermining of brand with inccorect "case studies and tech reports" (not sure if i have translated legal terminology correct).
the thing that this report show is that lower cost of seagate drives comes at the prize of interoperability between desktop and busines class drives while hitachi drives are good for any working conditions and wd somewhere in the mid.
as for personal experience after my first 5.25" quantium fireball i always had seagate drives (4 or 5 cant remeber already) and for all i have em filled before failed except one 500gb momentus that died just after win install so i consider it as DOA. got it replaced in one week from reseller and replacment is now working flawless for 2-3 years.


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## rtwjunkie (Jan 23, 2014)

Rowsol said:


> funny enough I put my old 74gb raptor into my mom's computer as a 2nd drive and it's still going.  Had it about... 10 years?


 
Both of mine are now being used for paging files and download location and IE cachein those two computers, so they get a good workout.  In terms of actual "ON" hours, I think they are both over 2 years of real uptime, which is pretty hefty.  Then again, they were originally enterprise class drives, so I'm not surprised.


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## Jack1n (Jan 23, 2014)

I just had my Hitachi 2TB fail on me.. it was less than a year old as well and i lost a lot of my data,replaced it with a Seagate 2TB,will have to see how it performs...
As far as WD i had an old caviar SE16 320gb fail on me,my 640gb Caviar black has a bad sector on it(works fine apart from that)and my 150gb Raptor hangs from time to time(not too often)but then again my raptor is 5 years old(LOTS of up time,cant say exactly how long because i updated its firmware).


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## Frick (Jan 23, 2014)

micropage7 said:


> if the drive is more than 3 years you shouldnt rely on it anymore



Irrelevant. Samsung has a 100% failure rate.


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## de.das.dude (Jan 23, 2014)

Ahhzz said:


> I knew to stay away from Seagate, and prefer the WD Blacks, but I'll have to look a little more at the Hitachis. Thanks


hitachi was bought by wd 


i do have an old hitachi 80gb sata2 that i used as my os drive for 7 years(80gb is becomin small for os drive now)
it still gives peak performance(80MBps write) and has no bad sectors. 


i had a seagate 160gb that literally started smoking for no reason! after that everytime i connect the power, some chip would start boiling!


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## Steevo (Jan 24, 2014)

Frick said:


> Irrelevant. Samsung has a 100% failure rate.


What if I had a drive die too, could we claim 130% failure, and then go into the "protection" business? Hire some muscle, maybe get a few broads to hang around, timmy from down the street to play the piano, real classy like.


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## Solaris17 (Jan 24, 2014)

I run hitachis samsungs and seagates. Iv had a samsung fail, Iv had a WD fail i go shopping for the size I want. if its cheap and THAT MODEL has good reviews then I buy it if its in my price range. if its part of the manus I like all the better. who gives a f#$%? if the mail man drops the shit your boned regardless.

just run it through smart and give it a week with data on it before you retire the donar drive. you've got warranties.


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## larrymoencurly (Jan 26, 2014)

freaksavior said:


> The 1.5Tb had bad firmware causing them to fail, after about a dozen RMA's I finally got some that worked.


Back Blaze said that firmware caused a lot of those Seagates to fail, but they also said they didn't count drives that failed during their ~3 weeks of initial testing.  So does that mean those Seagates had an even higher failure rate, or does it mean Back Blaze's initial testing isn't very good?


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## erocker (Jan 26, 2014)

Across the 10 computers I own, with 14 Seagate drives in total, I haven't had one fail in the 12 years my business has be open. I must be lucky. Granted I have replaced slower 5400 rpm drives with 7200 rpm drives throughout the years. Heck, they're even in a grungy industrial environment and are probably maintained less than they should be.

*Also, the "annual failure rate" is for one company... or blog site or whatever, Blackblaze. Can't say I know or trust the source.


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## newtekie1 (Jan 26, 2014)

larrymoencurly said:


> Back Blaze said that firmware caused a lot of those Seagates to fail, but they also said they didn't count drives that failed during their ~3 weeks of initial testing.  So does that mean those Seagates had an even higher failure rate, or does it mean Back Blaze's initial testing isn't very good?


Another issues with BackBlaze's study is the testing method, or rather what they consider a "failed drive".  To them, a drive has failed when it starts generating RAID errors.  But a RAID error can be caused just by the drive taking too long to respond to a command, which wouldn't matter in a desktop environment.  That doesn't mean a has actually failed, but to them and their study it does.


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