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Comment by cosmin800 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why anyone bothers to buy anything else than WD, seagate is making bad products for at least 10 years if not 15. Barracuda 7200.11 anyone? That was 12 years ago,I got a pair of Ironwolf 10TB, they failed in 6 months. How many seagates I saw failing? All - 30 - 50 God knows how many exactly. I have 10 years old WDs still running, actual powered on 6 years or so. I don't know why people are buying the same bad engineered products over and over again. Seagate should not exist anymore since long time ago.

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We buy a lot of seagate drives .... over the past few years in the 8, 10, 12 and now 16 tb capacities.

I have never put any stock in this Ford vs. Chevy argument with hard drive manufacturers. Any of them are One model away from having a deathstar.

We proof the drives fairly extensively and burn them in for long periods before deploying them. That has Worked out well.

WD is temporarily dead to me after their shenanigans of selling Red drives that are SMR, which in my opinion is flat-out fraudulent. When WD pledges to stop selling SMR drives to NAS customers, I'll reconsider using them again.

A Seagate may (or may not! see Backblaze stats) die sooner than a WD drive, but at least it's fit for purpose until then.

After the WD / Hitachi merger, there was an anti-trust case and WD was forced to sell some assets to Toshiba.

Toshiba took on a huge portion of Hitachi's former business, and seems to have a solid business. Backblaze doesn't buy Toshiba because the sticker is in the wrong location (and Toshiba doesn't want to move the sticker), but otherwise... their Toshiba tests look pretty good.

Why does the location of the sticker matter?

When you have 60 hard drives in a server, and server says "Hard Drive SerialNumber #51233142 has failed", you need a quick-and-easy way to find that hard drive.

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html

A sticker with the Serial Number on the correct location will help you find which of those 60-hard drives are broken. Toshiba didn't have their stickers in a location that worked for Backblaze.

Sounds like something you can solve with a labelmaker unless it's over the "do not cover" portions.

On the one hand, you can make 600-labels per rack.

On the other hand, you could just buy WD hard drives at virtually the same price and not have to worry about those labels at all since the sticker is in the correct spot.

Its not that its an unsolvable problem. Its that the solution is not worth the price difference between the drives.

You could put diodes next to each drive so the tech doesnt even have to read serial numbers.

I use Seagate all the time, and while there are failures, I find the doom-saying about them to be greatly exaggerated. Moreover, because they are so much less expensive than the competition, and because I am using them in applications where redundancy is already a requirement, and because they have a warranty, everything has worked out.

Every seagate drive I’ve ever bought failed. After the 3rd failure on an external drive used for a multi-media PC I switched to WD. Still have 10+ year old WD drives that still work.

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