# Test of 60.000 spinning HDD



## VulkanBros (Nov 4, 2016)

Could be nice to have those stats over SSD disks

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/


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## Toothless (Nov 4, 2016)

Interesting.


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## Vayra86 (Nov 4, 2016)

HGST is going to be my go-to HDD guy now.

It was good in previous years, its still good, and its consistent across all models.

WD Toshiba (DT) and Seagate - you shall be avoided.


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## lZKoce (Nov 4, 2016)

Vayra86 said:


> HGST is going to be my go-to HDD guy now.
> 
> It was good in previous years, its still good, and its consistent across all models.
> 
> WD Toshiba (DT) and Seagate - you shall be avoided.



"On October 19, 2015, Western Digital Corporation announced a decision from China's Ministry of Commerce ("MOFCOM") which enabled the company to integrate substantial portions of its HGST and WD subsidiaries under Western Digital Corporation ("Western Digital"), but they must offer both HGST and WD product brands in the market and maintain separate sales teams for two years from the date of the decision"

It's kinda of the same thing. WD owns much of HGST. My last 1TB drive is from HGST and I am very happy with it.


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## Disparia (Nov 4, 2016)

Really like my HGST Deskstar NAS in the home server. Going to get another one soon to replace a Seagate that has started to report bad bits. Might even be the last HDD I ever buy (for personal use). By the time I fill up another 4-6TB I'll be looking at 2-4TB SSDs at half their cost today.


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

This data has been out a while and doesn't look like much changed for the first quarter of 16.


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## GreiverBlade (Nov 4, 2016)

Vayra86 said:


> HGST is going to be my go-to HDD guy now.
> 
> It was good in previous years, its still good, and its consistent across all models.
> 
> WD Toshiba (DT) and Seagate - you shall be avoided.


tell that to my only HDD that failed recently ... it was a Hitachi (HGST) and also it was one of the noisiest 2.5 7200rpm HDD out of the box ... 

on the other hand ... all my IDE Maxtor Seagate, SCSI Seagate and SATA Toshiba, WD (SSHD that one ...) are still in good condition 
(semi off topic, well ... i use a OCZ SSD for quite long now and ... unlike seemingly a lot of user, that one either have any issues ... )


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

Vayra86 said:


> HGST is going to be my go-to HDD guy now.
> 
> It was good in previous years, its still good, and its consistent across all models.
> 
> WD Toshiba (DT) and Seagate - you shall be avoided.



You know only 1 Toshiba drive and 18 WD drives have failed right?

And of over 35000 Seagate drives with over 2 million drive days right around 210 have failed. That's well over MTBF ratings for lifespan.


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## GreiverBlade (Nov 4, 2016)

cdawall said:


> You know only 1 Toshiba drive and 18 WD drives have failed right?
> 
> And of over 35000 Seagate drives with over 2 million drive days right around 210 have failed. That's well over MTBF ratings for lifespan.


oh  and it's a DT01ACA300 ... mine are DT01ACA100, argh and i planned to replace one of them by a 200 or 300 .... oh well 200 it will be ... i don't want to have the 2nd failing 300


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## natr0n (Nov 4, 2016)

Proof seagate is shit.

Been eyeing Toshiba's based on user reviews and they seem like a safe bet now.


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

natr0n said:


> Proof seagate is shit.
> 
> Been eyeing Toshiba's based on user reviews and they seem like a safe bet now.



How so? They have more hours than every other drive in the test combined. Look at the data again.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 4, 2016)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again every time BackBlaze data is brought up.  Their drive failure statistics mean nothing to consumers.


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## Jetster (Nov 4, 2016)

haha WD fan boys take note. Highest failure rate.  Things are always changing. Really I've always said any of the brands are fine. These kind of reports really mean nothing

Also note they had 35,000 Seagate drives. Over half the drives tested


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> I've said it before, and I'll say it again every time BackBlaze data is brought up.  Their drive failure statistics mean nothing to consumers.



It is interesting to see got all of those consumer level drives are actually lasting reasonably well in an environment that their manufacturer specifically says they shouldn't be in.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 4, 2016)

Jetster said:


> Really I've always said any of the brands are fine.



In my experience, the drive model matters more than the brand.  They all put out cheap models that seem to be less reliable, and better drives that are more reliable.


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## natr0n (Nov 4, 2016)

cdawall said:


> How so? They have more hours than every other drive in the test combined. Look at the data again.




Indeed.
Every seagate drive I have owned has died/failed, so I am biased against the brand.


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

natr0n said:


> Indeed.
> Every seagate drive I have owned has died/failed, so I am biased against the brand.



After how long? In what conditions? 2.8 *million* drive days on the 4TB models in that survey.


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## natr0n (Nov 4, 2016)

cdawall said:


> After how long? In what conditions? 2.8 *million* drive days on the 4TB models in that survey.



Time varies really. I only have 1 seagate left 500gb for storage already signs of reallocated sectors and clicking.  Conditions barely used mostly for storage drives cool temps. Example set to sleep after 3 mins being idle.
Random reallocated sectors, random clicking always the same issues with seagates for me.

Also every pc I have repaired always has a bad/dead seagate.


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

natr0n said:


> Time varies really. I only have 1 seagate left 500gb for storage already signs of reallocated sectors and clicking.  Conditions barely used mostly for storage drives cool temps. Example set to sleep after 3 mins being idle.
> Random reallocated sectors, random clicking always the same issues with seagates for me.



I have a pair of 7200.9's (maybe 10's?) 1.5TB's still floating around in random PC's 6 or 7 years later, my server is 2TB Constellation ES drives. I find if people have issues with any brand it is usually user related or just that old. I have yet to see any brand personally that lasted longer or shorter than any other.

Also remember a constant spin up/spin down will be harder on any and all drives that just running at RPM...


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## P4-630 (Nov 4, 2016)

I'm only using one HDD at the moment, a Hitachi 750GB 7200rpm 2.5" HDD in my desktop.
+ I have one 640GB external Seagate drive which I don't use much.


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## Folterknecht (Nov 4, 2016)

You want to do something good to your HDDs? Position them directly behind the front intake fan(s) in the airflow with at least one slot space between them (if possible) keeping them well under 40°C.


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

Folterknecht said:


> You want to do something good to your HDDs? Position them directly behind the front intake fan(s) in the airflow with at least one slot space between them (if possible) keeping them well under 40°C.



Anything under 40c if anything led to faster failure.  40-60c is fine.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 4, 2016)

cdawall said:


> Anything under 40c if anything led to faster failure.  40-60c is fine.



Correct, colder temps actually lead to faster HDD failures.


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## Jetster (Nov 4, 2016)

That was also a Blackblaze  study so its not conclusive. There are other study's that report same or different findings

I will point out this years failure rates are the lowest they have ever been accost the board all brands


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## VulkanBros (Nov 4, 2016)

Dont know if you guys are right about the tempretures.
I have  48, 900 GB SAS drives in my VSA (SAN box) HGST UltraStar 10.000 rpm....
They all run at 18 degrees celsius (They have these these recommandations: environmental (operating) ambient temperature 5° to 55° C)
All 48 drives have been running for 4 years and eleven month (24/7) in 18 degrees celcius without any failures...


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## Steevo (Nov 4, 2016)

I have two of the Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630 3TB drives in a RAID 0 array that runs 24/7 and has been since 2011 with 0 issues.


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## GreiverBlade (Nov 4, 2016)

natr0n said:


> Proof seagate is shit.
> 
> Been eyeing Toshiba's based on user reviews and they seem like a safe bet now.


agree on second ... not first tho ... all my Seagate drives had a heavy work life and still got out unscathed.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 4, 2016)

Jetster said:


> That was also a Blackblaze  study so its not conclusive.



No it wasn't.  At least that isn't where I got my data from.


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## Vayra86 (Nov 4, 2016)

cdawall said:


> You know only 1 Toshiba drive and 18 WD drives have failed right?
> 
> And of over 35000 Seagate drives with over 2 million drive days right around 210 have failed. That's well over MTBF ratings for lifespan.



Well, as for the Toshiba's I've also had a similar drive that also failed on me. I know, luck of the draw, but still. In this *context* I feel these kinds of things matter. As you say, these drives are taken far beyond their intended use and specs in most cases. We both know this is true, HOWEVER, in that situation we are actually talking about that last few percent margin here. For the majority of uses the actual choice of drive will not have any meaningful impact. Regardless, these results do allow you to have at least some influence on those last few percent of possible 'added risk' in having a bad drive - or one that barely meets up to spec / fails WAY too early instead of a little. And in that respect, the Seagates have been bad like this for a few years now. Very early failures compared to other brands.

And in that context these numbers are especially in the case of a large number of drives, very meaningful.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 4, 2016)

Vayra86 said:


> Regardless, these results do allow you to have at least some influence on those last few percent of possible 'added risk' in having a bad drive - or one that barely meets up to spec / fails WAY too early instead of a little. And in that respect, the Seagates have been bad like this for a few years now. Very early failures compared to other brands.



Interesting you talk about context.  You know, the context of this article is that Backblaze has admitted that they left out some WD models that had 100% failure rates, right?  You're talking about this data being a good indication of what drives to avoid because they fail early, and BackBlaze openly admits that the drives that really do consistently fail early, they just completely leave out of the data.  So this data is completely useless in any way for trying to find a drive that fails early.

Also, the Backblaze numbers are completely irrelevant for consumers.  What they consider a drive failure is not actually a consumer drive failure.  They consider the drive failed when the RAID array marks it as bad and won't sync with it anymore.  That often happens on 100% working drives.  Using desktop drives in a RAID array will cause this problem.  Putting them in a high vibration environment like a RAID enclosure makes the problem worse.  So while the drive might work perfectly fine in a single drive environment, like it was meant to be, it is going to be marked as failed by Backblaze.  This is why their failure numbers are completely useless for normal consumers.


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> Interesting you talk about context.  You know, the context of this article is that Backblaze has admitted that they left out some WD models that had 100% failure rates, right?  You're talking about this data being a good indication of what drives to avoid because they fail early, and BackBlaze openly admits that the drives that really do consistently fail early, they just completely leave out of the data.  So this data is completely useless in any way for trying to find a drive that fails early.



2.85 million drive days. . . And says Seagates fail early


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## newtekie1 (Nov 4, 2016)

cdawall said:


> 2.85 million drive days. . . And says Seagates fail early




That's just in a 3 month span too.


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## cdawall (Nov 4, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> That's just in a 3 month span too.



Yep. Other thing they don't realize is WD and Seagate have some of the lowest % of revenue paid to warranty services of any company.


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## EarthDog (Nov 5, 2016)

cdawall said:


> You know only 1 Toshiba drive and 18 WD drives have failed right?
> 
> And of over 35000 Seagate drives with over 2 million drive days right around 210 have failed. That's well over MTBF ratings for lifespan.


Certainly glad someone has their reading glasses on...

...this place... lol


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## rtwjunkie (Nov 5, 2016)

Jetster said:


> That was also a Blackblaze  study so its not conclusive. There are other study's that report same or different findings
> 
> I will point out this years failure rates are the lowest they have ever been accost the board all brands



Actually the cooler temperature failure correlation was from Google, and their years of data.


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## Jetster (Nov 5, 2016)

rtwjunkie said:


> Actually the cooler temperature failure correlation was from Google, and their years of data.



Yea I may be wrong about that one


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## Steevo (Nov 5, 2016)

rtwjunkie said:


> Actually the cooler temperature failure correlation was from Google, and their years of data.




It was, it took over 45C temps before high temperature had any effect on drive lifespan, but below 32C death increased as fast as above 50C I believe. 

The study found that if a drive lives past 1 year it chance of living to 3 was good, and if after 3 years no sectors were found bad, it chance of living to 5+ years was good until bad sectors were found, and then the lifespan average was like 6 months.


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## chaosmassive (Nov 5, 2016)

this is why I hunting HGST hard drive this past few months
unfortunately normal desktop-grade 7.2k 1 or 2 TB quite rare
but NAS drive litteraly everywhere


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## cdawall (Nov 5, 2016)

chaosmassive said:


> this is why I hunting HGST hard drive this past few months
> unfortunately normal desktop-grade 7.2k 1 or 2 TB quite rare
> but NAS drive litteraly everywhere



They sell them by the crate at microcenter. They are cake to come by here


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## chaosmassive (Nov 5, 2016)

cdawall said:


> They sell them by the crate at microcenter. They are cake to come by here



dang it, lucky you to have micro centre

Interestingly, HGST 1TB slightly more expensive than WD 2TB blue in my local store


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## cdawall (Nov 5, 2016)

That's simple WD blue drives are junk and you are probably looking at a 5400RPM model.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 5, 2016)

cdawall said:


> That's simple WD blue drives are junk and you are probably looking at a 5400RPM model.



Yep, blue and green drives are garbage.  Purple, red, black, and gold are good.


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## RejZoR (Nov 5, 2016)

WD Blue aren't that bad. Had several of them in laptops and they seem the most reliable and sufficiently fast for what they are. Have always prefered 7200 RPM models like WD Black or Seagate Momentus though. Or these days, SSD's hands down. Just so many benefits it's stupid not to use them in notebooks. Unless you really need raw capacity...


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## AsRock (Nov 5, 2016)

natr0n said:


> Indeed.
> Every seagate drive I have owned has died/failed, so I am biased against the brand.



Same here, i still have 3 of 6 of the WD's i used to use in raid.

For all we know the WD's could of been used 4 times more than the others.

When it comes to hard drives i like to go by users experience than these things.


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## FordGT90Concept (Nov 5, 2016)

newtekie1 said:


> Correct, colder temps actually lead to faster HDD failures.


According to Seagate, 0-60C operating, -40-70C non-operating.  Western Digital narrows it a bit to 5-55C operating, -40-70C non-operating. Stay inside those numbers and there's no correlation between temperature and failure (they only encountered one low power drive that was thermally sensitive).  Mind you, only 1.84% out of 61,523 drives died in a three month period.  There's a few bad eggs in their test (4TB Seagate and 2TB Western Digital stand out) but overall, the drives performed very well.


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## newtekie1 (Nov 5, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> WD Blue aren't that bad. Had several of them in laptops and they seem the most reliable and sufficiently fast for what they are. Have always prefered 7200 RPM models like WD Black or Seagate Momentus though. Or these days, SSD's hands down. Just so many benefits it's stupid not to use them in notebooks. Unless you really need raw capacity...



I think the laptop Blues are a little better than the desktop ones, but I still don't trust them.



FordGT90Concept said:


> According to Seagate, 0-60C operating, -40-70C non-operating.  Western Digital narrows it a bit to 5-55C operating, -40-70C non-operating. Stay inside those numbers and there's no correlation between temperature and failure (they only encountered one low power drive that was thermally sensitive).  Mind you, only 1.84% out of 61,523 drives died in a three month period.  There's a few bad eggs in their test (4TB Seagate and 2TB Western Digital stand out) but overall, the drives performed very well.



All of their drives stay in about a 10-12° range, and they are all running very cold(obviously because they are in a cold data center).  That isn't in any way a good test of how temperatures affect drives.  Google's numbers the average temperature was ~30°C, that is the upper limit with Backblaze.  And Google's data also showed that failure rates rose almost exponentially as temperature dipped below 25°C.  And, IMO, that makes sense for consumer drives.  Because in most cases they are probably going to be running close to the 30°C area in a standard computer case in a normal persons home.

And even though the manufacturers set operating temperatures, that doesn't mean the failure rate will be the same throughout that temperature range.


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## RejZoR (Nov 5, 2016)

I don't trust Green/Eco drives, but I have fairly good experience with WD drives in general. Especially Black ones.


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## cdawall (Nov 5, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> I don't trust Green/Eco drives, but I have fairly good experience with WD drives in general. Especially Black ones.



Good news the WD blues you think aren't bad happen to be the new ECO drives. Welcome yet again to the year 2016.


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## RejZoR (Nov 5, 2016)

So, that's good then.


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## cdawall (Nov 5, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> So, that's good then.



No.


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## Komshija (Nov 7, 2016)

GreiverBlade said:


> oh  and it's a DT01ACA300 ... mine are DT01ACA100, argh and i planned to replace one of them by a 200 or 300 .... oh well 200 it will be ... i don't want to have the 2nd failing 300


Replace it with X300/HDWE1X0 or P300/HDWD1X0 series. I would recommend 4 TB from X300 series or 2 TB from P300 series.



Folterknecht said:


> You want to do something good to your HDDs? Position them directly behind the front intake fan(s) in the airflow with at least one slot space between them (if possible) keeping them well under 40°C.


Temperature shouldn't matter much, but it's advisable to keep them above 30°C and under 45°C. HDD's are more likely to fail during abrupt shutdown, but dust, moisture, g-forces can contribute as well.


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