Seems that Seagate are the worst, even if it's a 2% failure rate.
And reality sucks: right yesterday I lost one hdd from Seagate and the second one is making noises. Ohh boy
And reality sucks: right yesterday I lost one hdd from Seagate and the second one is making noises. Ohh boy
Honestly, all hard drives are pretty solid these days, and I honestly don't think one manufacturer really stands out enough that individuals can really expect a given drive to last longer than another. Statistics just don't work on a sample size that small. You may get lucky, or you may get unlucky, it really just depends on which drive you happen to get.
I make my personal HD buying decisions based on:
- warranty and customer service - price - noise - performance
Both Seagate and WD have about the same warranty, and they both seem to be pretty good with customer service (check recent reviews though, this can change). If you consider them equal in that department, pick based on the other three metrics.
I was about to buy some Seagate drives for a NAS, but ended up with WD because they were on sale. I was a little worried about the noise from Seagate, but the price and performance won me over, but I switched at the last minute because the price changed.
Now, if you're going to build a data center with a large number of consumer drives, absolutely use Backblaze's results. If your just going to but a few, recognise that all drives the test are reasonably reliable, so whether your drive dies early is mostly luck (assuming you treat them nicely).
They have the data spread out across enough drives with enough redundancy to live with it.
That being said, I had a pair of 1 TB Seagates in RAID 1 that had over 7 years of runtime, which I retired for a capacity upgrade.
I think I saw double-digit failure rates from certain Seagate models a few years ago, though :(
> No wonder Backblaze has replaced most of their inventory with these two brands.
We Reed-Solomon encode each file across multiple drives in multiple machines, and we always use "enough parity" that the failure rate won't result in data loss.
So for us, we have a (pretty simple) little spreadsheet that takes into account drive failure rate as a cost, along with drive density (more dense drives means renting less data center space) and we let the spreadsheet kick out which drives to buy based on the cheapest total cost of ownership. Honestly, we're not brand loyal AT ALL, and we're not afraid of a higher failure rate (other than that raises the cost because we have to buy replacements for failed drives).
With that said, if an individual purchases ONE DRIVE they might value a lower drive failure rate differently than Backblaze does. But honestly, if there is a 1% drive failure rate per year or a 10% drive failure rate in a year, you should still backup the data so you can sleep at night.
We recently replaced all the 15K Seagate drives in our dev/stg 6 year old server with Samsung 860 EVOs, because I was replacing 1-2 a month (out of ~20 disks).
I've also had good luck with Toshiba disks, though I have a much smaller sample size.
I could deal with their quality issues if their RMA process was at least reasonable. With WDC it's a credit card number (if you want an advance RMA) and a web form to request an RMA. With Seagate it's a game to try and buy "official" packaging, a tooth-and-nail fight for an RMA number and a long wait.
They actually refused to RMA the spindle-locked drive because the PCB was damaged (well, no duh). Thankfully the supplier was more lenient.
My home system using WD Reds has been great. It is larger than a normal home storage box (24 drives), and it gets substantially more use than normal (backing store for a bunch of VMs, mostly). I've replaced one drive in five and a half years.
Contrast with storage servers built for work with WD Golds. Those are 45 drives each and used for database backup workloads. We replace about a drive a quarter (of the 90 total), and this has been pretty consistent for a bit over two years.
Not sure if I got great Reds or if Golds are just terrible, but that's what I've seen.