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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

I have stopped caring about hard drive brands.

What Backblaze and experience show is how drives of a certain brand performed a couple of years ago, not how the drive you just bought will perform.

IBM used to be very good until Deathstars, and now HGST, who took over is among the most reliable. I used to be very satisfied with Seagate, then ST3000DM001 happened, and now, it looks like they are slowly getting back on track. Maybe it is WD turn right now. I don't think there is a way to know until it is too late.

Personally, I like to make RAID mirrors with drives of different brands, or at least different models. Even it it is not ideal for performance, it helps making sure that not all drives fail at the same time.

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IBM had one batch of bad drives and a second batch of somewhat iffy drives after many years with an excellent record and suddenly nobody ever trusts them again. Meanwhile Maxtor put out crap drives year after year and nobody seemed to mind. It was a very weird situation.

FWIW however I bought some HGSTs a couple of years ago that are by far the loudest drives I've ever used. They've been reliable thus far, but the noise level is so bad that I had to move them away from where the people are working.

Thinking of Maxtor gives me warm fuzzy feelings. That 20gb disk felt like it could store the world.

I had one of the first double-height 70 MB drives when it came out.

It literally could hold all of the popular software of the time, around 50 applications.

I also had one of the first CD-ROM drives at work (the Japanese director had connections at Sony.)

We were like, "How can anybody possibly ever fill 650 MB of data storage?"

We ended up mastering our own satellite data CD-ROMs to demonstrate to people what was possible.

Meanwhile NTSC is sitting over there needing around a megabyte per second to store.

Pictures and movies have always been the easy answer for how it's possible to fill up huge amounts of storage.

But user behavior data is a much bigger fraction of total storage use than video.

Source?

And nowadays it'll barely store the operating system (unless you make a conscious effort to strip things down).

I loved and owned quite a few 2.5" HGST travelstars. There were capably of takig insane abuse and worked just fine. Interestingly enough I never got to buy the 1.5TB ones; by the time I needed one it disappeared off the market, the website, everywhere. I never knew why.

    192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       2502492302
    193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   086   086   000    Old_age   Always       -       142654

^^^ those are a working, happy disk; all due to a "feature" that was on in Ubuntu by default that wanted to idle/spin down the disk every other second and it took me a while to notice.

On contrary I'd worn a 2TB 2.5" Seagate out in 2 years. Bought it new, put it in the same machine the 1TB HGST had been running for 3 years already, the Seagate died earlier - or at least that's what ZFS told me. It's spinning, but it throws weird errors from time to time.

I never had experience with 3.5" Hitachis.

Eons ago there were some interesting disks in the market though; if I remember correctly my father had some Fujitsu SCSI160 or 320 drives which had their normal working temperature around 50-60C.

Yeah, it would have been nice to know how loud the HGST would try to be before I bought one. But stuffing it in an isolating bracket like this basically fixed that: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07LCD2RJY/

I guess they are same design as Toshiba DT01ACA series. My 10-years old Barracuda was barely audible drowning in fan noises, but this new Toshiba seeking is obnoxiously loud.

Not so sure that helps in this situation. FreeNAS users are reporting these drives failing to resilver, which _could mean_ that you end up with a failed array and data loss instead of a failed drive. I'll personally be staying away from WD for a while. I'd rather drives fail prematurely than be a ticking time bomb.

The news isn't that WD is doing this, it's that WD is also doing this. At this point both the top 2 are doing this.

I'm so sick of HDDs, I can't wait for SSD NAS to close the gap. An NVMe M2-blade NAS would be incredible!

I don't trust ssds for long term storage, and I'm mortified on the experience when they die from one second to the other.

At work, we had literal hundreds of machines failing the same week because of sudden ssd death.

Ssds are fine for speed, but for storage... maybe one day.

Probably not. The permanent need for power to avoid data slowly disappearing from the device pretty much makes SSDs a non starter for long term storage.

Surely routine ZFS scrubs would mitigate this?

SSDs literally zero themselves out if they’re left unplugged for too long. No file system trickery will save you from that.

Are you sure? This article says that was a misunderstanding.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2925173/debunked-your-ssd-wo...

That’s not what the article says. The article says that consumers are overreacting, but that SSDs can and do lose their data with loss of power and/or heat.

I feel like we are a long way off from that just based on price. Generously I think we can say a 1TB SSD (sata even to go cheaper) is about $100. That compared to a bare WD Red 8TB which comes in at ~$27/TB. ~4x the cost and smaller drives is a hard sell (even with the speed). I have a pool of SSD's that I keep some stuff on but the rest goes to spinning rust.

>and now, it looks like they are slowly getting back on track.

The smartmontools ticket linked in the article says that Seagate is doing the same thing. Best to avoid.

Indeed. According to a newer article [0] on the same web site:

> Some Seagate Barracuda Compute and Desktop disk drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology which can exhibit slow data write speeds. But Seagate documentation does not spell this out.

---

[0]: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-ba...

> Personally, I like to make RAID mirrors with drives of different brands, or at least different models. Even it it is not ideal for performance, it helps making sure that not all drives fail at the same time.

This is exactly my approach lately, and it works great for RAID10 arrays (where you only need 2 or 3 different vendors - one per side of the mirror - to mitigate shared bathtub curves). I usually go with SSDs nowadays, though (half Crucial, half Kingston), both for performance reasons and because they rebuild faster (and also because the limited lifetime of flash memory makes some sort of RAID essential for longevity, though this has been less of a problem with modern flash tech); if I really needed the capacity of magnetic media I'd probably opt for a WD / Toshiba split.

What do you recommend for Crucial and Kingston SSDs?

I’m familiar with Crucial BX500 and Kingston UV500. They are both SATA and are decent performance considering the limitations of SATA 3. If price isn’t a factor or performance is important I’d go with a Samsung 860 EVO or Pro on SATA. I’ve also used a smaller number of SanDisk by WD SATA SSDs and they work fine as well. Had a bad Samsung 840 series but I think failure to implement proper overprovisioning was to blame. Also had a bad Intel SATA SSD but it was an older generation product and had a small sample size of only a few Intel SSDs, so not writing Intel off; yet it’s suffice to say their products don’t seem price competitive with Samsung’s offerings.

As for NVME SSDs I have used and installed probably ten so far but I think every single one so far has been a Samsung 9xx m.2 and I’ve been extremely satisfied with all of them, especially the 960 series EVO and Pro and moreso the current gen 970 EVO Plus and Pro.

Honestly I just go with whatever's cheapest for a given target capacity (which, judging by my Amazon and Newegg purchase history, would be the Crucial MX500 and Kingston V300). Any SSD's almost always "fast enough" for my purposes (even with SATA instead of NVMe), and Kingston and Crucial have both been consistently reliable enough that I haven't felt the need to splurge much (and if they do fail... well, that's what RAID's for, right?).

Both the desktop on which I'm typing this comment (my personal "gaming" rig) and my work laptop (a Thinkpad T470) are using Crucial MX500s (1TB, M.2); the former has a couple extra M.2 slots, so I'm considering migrating to a Crucial P1 + Kingston A2000 combo (thus biting the bullet and switching to NVMe, and getting RAID going on this machine). Most of my 2.5" purchases tend to be Kingston V300s unless the MX500 happens to be cheaper (e.g. most recently for an old XP computer I'm rebuilding for a family friend) or I'm specifically buying both for the aforementioned purpose of RAID diversification (which is a bit tricky, since Crucial and Kingston use different increments for capacity, but I'm also perfectly willing to pull a bit of a SSD "no-no" and use the leftover space on whichever drive for a swap partition, or else just let the space sit unused, or perhaps use it for temporary files where I don't care about any sort of data preservation).

In any case, no complaints with any of 'em. I haven't tried the P1 or A2000 yet (let alone Kingston's pricier KC2000), so I can't attest to those, but the MX500 and V300 have both proven to be reliable workhorses.

I'll definitely be sure to try Samsung again at some point; the first SSD I ever bought was a Samsung (at Fry's), and I had pretty awful experiences with it, but that was back when SSDs were a pretty new concept so I'm guessing things have generally improved.

i do that too, and effectivele that means i had to get one of each brand available. the choices are really limited here.

There are really only two or three HDD makers out there, so you really can't take brand too seriously.

I think Seagate has always been low on reliability; the ST3000DM001 is an outlier but I've heard far more reports of data loss from them than any other brand. The number of threads in HDD recovery forums that refer to a particular brand makes for an interesting analysis... and even before that outlier they were below WD. From what I've seen, WD is somewhere in the middle.

My beard must be grayer than yours. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Seagate was the gold-standard for reliability, and they were priced accordingly. We literally bought nothing besides Cheetahs for our data center for more than a decade. So did everyone else.

Past performance does not indicate future return, but so far I'm seeing no reason not to distrust Toshiba hard drives at the very least given the Backblaze stats. I've bought 8 Toshiba drives with zero problems over several years on aggressively used drives but I've had several failures across drive families over the past 10 years with Western Digital drives of different batches and lines.

One of the dangers of blending drives is that there are sometimes drive geometry incompatibilities that can screw up RAID. Saw someone show they had drives that are a few cylinders off and can't replace drives now with certain replacements.

> Past performance does not indicate future return, but so far I'm seeing no reason not to distrust Toshiba hard drives at the very least given the Backblaze stats. I've bought 8 Toshiba drives with zero problems over several years on aggressively used drives but I've had several failures across drive families over the past 10 years with Western Digital drives of different batches and lines.

Are there too many negatives there? It seems that you first say that you distrust ("no reason not to distrust") Toshiba drives, but then you say that your experience with them has involved no problems.

Should probably drop the dis- , thanks. Too many conditions in a row too fast is how I get bugs in my code just like in my written sentences :P

does WD still make new HGST products? How can you tell which drives are from which team, or have they been blended together?

Some HGST tech is Toshiba now, some of it is WD. Hard to know whether WD drive is made up to HGST snuff. If you want the best, buy helium WD drive labeled HGST. If you can't get it, then WD or Toshiba helium datacenter drives should be close.

That's what I'm wondering though. Nearly all the WD data center drives are marketed as Ultrastar. Is this marketing, or did the HGST entity supplant WD enterprise during "integration" in the last two years? https://www.westerndigital.com/products/data-center-drives#h...

It looks like the only surviving product names are Ultrastar and CinemaStar. Nothing is labeled HGST anymore. Most of the HGST Helium disks were SMR, if I'm not mistaken. As of now, given the two HelioSeal series, one of the two is SMR.

Side Note: Hitachi had such a great thing going with their Schoolhouse Rock meets Dino DNA commercial. I wish this would have continued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II

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