Backblaze Releases Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2020 - Seagate Worst Performer

[Sicofante]

I don't buy your argument. They get low prices from all vendors because the buy bulk.

There's no empirical evidence that Seagate drives are worse than others for home users and NAS builders.

 

[Kapone33]

There is nothing wrong with Seagate drives though they currently have higher failure rates, according to this data, there is no reason for a consumer not to get a Seagate drive. The reason I don't buy Seagate drives is because they are more expensive than they need to be for their SSDs and NVME drives and HDDs are no longer a part of my PC lexicon.

 

[zlobby]

I don't buy your argument. They get low prices from all vendors because the buy bulk.

There's no empirical evidence that Seagate drives are worse than others for home users and NAS builders.

One can extrapolate from statistcs, which wouldn't quarantee correctness.

Orone could just see th sheer amount of horror stories on the internet and see that Seagate are nkt generally knkwn for reliability, hence the recommendation of many people to stay away from them.

My experience personally is quite horrible when talking Seagate in SOHO segment.

 

[Sicofante]

One can extrapolate from statistcs, which wouldn't quarantee correctness.

Orone could just see th sheer amount of horror stories on the internet and see that Seagate are nkt generally knkwn for reliability, hence the recommendation of many people to stay away from them.

My experience personally is quite horrible when talking Seagate in SOHO segment.

My experience with Seagate drives is excellent and there are horror stories for every brand. What do you think you're proving with anecdotal evidence? There was a particular issue with Seagate drives around the time of the Thai floods (even then I had no issues with their drives, which I buy for me and my customers), but that was it and it was a long time ago. Nothing particularly special since that episode.

 

[newtekie1]

Seagate performed bad in pretty much every Backblaze test.

I have replaced SO MANY Seagate drives in my career. I would never buy or recommend Seagate drives. From DOAs, to weird noises, headparking issues and drives that just stop working. Seen it all and Seagate RMA is absolute hell.

WD / HGST for me. I have used WAY MORE of these drives and done LESS replacements.

And in my long carreer I've done the exact opposite. I've probably filled a dumpster with WD Blue/Green drives over the years.

It's all about the model, not the brand. My current home storage systems have WD, HGST, and Seagate.

 

[las]

And in my long carreer I've done the exact opposite. I've probably filled a dumpster with WD Blue/Green drives over the years.

It's all about the model, not the brand. My current home storage systems have WD, HGST, and Seagate.

Most people I speak with tend to think Seagate is poor quality (with a few of them working in big datacenters - i only work in a small to mid sized one).

It always comes down to personal experience I guess ...


WD Green are probably not the best WD ever made, yet I still have 4x WD Green 3TB running in RAID10 in my old NAS, with headparking disabled. Closing in on 10 years with 24/7 usage, not a single issue. Got them for 50% off back then, because a friend read they sucked for NAS usage, because of headparking issues Solution...Disable it.

When I think Seagate, I think Maxtor (which they bought - Made terrible terrible drives too). Reminds me of IBM Deathstar days.

 

[Chrispy_]

I've stopped caring about Backblaze reports because they no longer use a very wide range of drives and the only drives with enough datapoints to give a reasonable idea of reliability are enterprise drives. I miss the days after the Thailand floods when Backblaze would drive around the US grabbing every consumer hard drive they could find on store shelves and shucking them. We used to see a huge cross section of the consumer hard drive market - reliability stats that simply didn't exist anywhere else.

Now, the backblaze reports aren't really drives that we as consumers care about. They're using mostly noisy, hot, expensive enterprise capacity drives. Meanwhile, consumers tend to be buying NAS drives like WD Reds and Ironwolf models.

As an enterprise datacenter user, reliability is kind of a moot point. You buy your storage, you throw a whole bunch together into failure-tolerant arrays with hot-spares and then you have backups of those arrays.

DISKS WILL DIE. ANY MODEL, ANY BRAND. You expect to replace a few disks a year and for those that I replace myself I see a pretty even spread of HGST, Seagate, Toshiba. I don't see any WD simply because the storage vendors I use (HP, Nimble, Imation, Dell) don't tend to sell WD.

A 1.5% AFR is nothing out of the oridinary and for the market that any of those enterprise disks target, AFR is not even in the top 3 things buyers are looking for in a mechanical drive.

 

[zlobby]

I've stopped caring about Backblaze reports because they no longer use a very wide range of drives and the only drives with enough datapoints to give a reasonable idea of reliability are enterprise drives. I miss the days after the Thailand floods when Backblaze would drive around the US grabbing every consumer hard drive they could find on store shelves and shucking them. We used to see a huge cross section of the consumer hard drive market - reliability stats that simply didn't exist anywhere else.

Now, the backblaze reports aren't really drives that we as consumers care about. They're using mostly noisy, hot, expensive enterprise capacity drives. Meanwhile, consumers tend to be buying NAS drives like WD Reds and Ironwolf models.

As an enterprise datacenter user, reliability is kind of a moot point. You buy your storage, you throw a whole bunch together into failure-tolerant arrays with hot-spares and then you have backups of those arrays.

DISKS WILL DIE. ANY MODEL, ANY BRAND. You expect to replace a few disks a year and for those that I replace myself I see a pretty even spread of HGST, Seagate, Toshiba. I don't see any WD simply because the storage vendors I use (HP, Nimble, Imation, Dell) don't tend to sell WD.

A 1.5% AFR is nothing out of the oridinary and for the market that any of those enterprise disks target, AFR is not even in the top 3 things buyers are looking for in a mechanical drive.

To be fair, BB are not shoving their reports in our throats. It's the media outlets and the forum dwellers who make all the noise.