Posted on 02/17/2016 9:12:01 PM PST by Utilizer
By the end of 2015, the Backblaze datacenter had 56,224 spinning hard drives containing customer data. These hard drives reside in 1,249 Backblaze Storage Pods. By comparison 2015 began with 39,690 drives running in 882 Storage Pods. We added 65 Petabytes of storage in 2015 give or take a Petabyte or two. Not only was 2015 a year of growth, it was also a year of drive upgrades and replacements. Let's start with the current state of the hard drives in our datacenter as of the end of 2015 and then dig into the rest later on.
Hard Drive Statistics for 2015
The table below contains the statistics for the 18 different models of hard drives in our datacenter as of 31 December 2015. These are the hard drives used in our Storage Pods to store customer data. The Failure Rates and Confidence Intervals are cumulative from Q2 2013 through Q4 2015. The Drive Count is the number of drives reporting as operational on 31 December 2015.
(Excerpt) Read more at backblaze.com ...
HGST sell the best drives. I used to buy lots of wd and seagate but the failure rates were too high
pssst....Hillary, you taking notes?
I’ve long used nothing but HGST drives for my customers. Confirms my own personal experience that Seagates are THE worst drives. WDs hit or miss, with enough misses I gave up on them too. Not happy WD bought HGST, either.
Also, I NEVER buy so-called bare-bones OEM drives, only drives in retail packaging, even though they’re more expensive and harder to find. I had so many failures no matter who I bought them from that I figured warehouse pickers everywhere just dumped them in bins like kindling chips and if a few dropped on the floor here and there during order fulfillment, oh well.
Now, though, I’m just bailing on HDs all together and going for Samsung 850 EVO SSDs.
Kool. Where is similar SSD info?
I bought HGST after losing two Crapgate ones. And the WDs that store config info on the drive itself rather than in nonvolatile memory are the worst of all.
HGST > Toshiba
Avoid WD and Seagate totally
I know WD has bought HGST. If you could determine which model hdd come out of HGST factories, maybe buy those, but I would wait til we get more information
The whole Brand v Engineering v design v marketing v Fabrication site differentiation vs. time is quite problematic.
I just got unbelievably lucky with an HGST laptop drive that failed. The computer crashed and would not restart. It gave me an unreadable drive error, but I was able to put it in an external enclosure and use recovery software to save an image. I then wrote the image to a new identical drive that I purchased through Amazon Prime. I had to use a Windows 7 system repair disc to get Windows 7 to start. After that I ran standard and a few other 3rd party diagnostics for error checking and repairs. I have been able to start all of the programs that I normally use without any difficulty and have not been able to find any bad data files.
I ran diagnostics on the failing drive, but it could not pass the SMART tests. I actually tried to reinstall an operating system from factory install DVDs just to see if it would do it, but it failed after a few minutes. Then I realized that the drive still had about a month left on its warranty. I have now received a replacement hard drive. it is the first hard drive that I have ever had which failed before the warranty had expired. In the past it has always been slightly after the warranty ran out.
Yes, only you said it with so many less words. I am quite happy to have received a replacement drive for once.
I don’t see their definition of a drive failure.
HGST Used to be IBM before they sold that division
They made the deskstar brand which was known as the deathstar since the drives were awful (at the time)
HGST is Hitachi
Maxtor and Quantum were bought by Seagate
These days I just buy and use SSD drives, a lot faster and more reliable, so far
I buy nothing but Seagate only had one drive failure in 15 years.. Bought 10 to 15 drives!!!
The only time I ever lost a Seagate it was because of me doing something stupid that resulted in it being shorted out.
I purchase a great many Seagate and WD drives, but considering their useage I am not overly concerned with them failing as I have several that are over ten years old and are still spinning reliably.
Then again, I do not put thme to the useage that these particular drives have been subjected to. so I am inclined to think that I should move things over to a more reliable brand especially when the data info on these drives is reputedly more in danger than I originally thought...
Some Drives Are More Equal Than Others...
*grin* :b
Perhaps in a future article...
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