151–160 of 168 posts
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But Hitachi is owned by Western Digital, and Western Digital hard disks are not doing quite as well.
It's now called "HGST (a Western Digital company)" and the two product lines (WD and HGST HDDs) are totally separate in both parts and manufacturing. /HGST employee
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Yup, we have top-men that are in charge of keeping an eye on firmware, if we see a need in an update, we'll do it.
Have you been able to reach out to anyone at Seagate in their drive FA group to see if they'd be interested in you sending back samples of the failed drives?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you been able to reach out to anyone at Seagate in their drive FA group to see if they'd be interested in you sending back samples of the failed drives?
I assume (mentioned in the article) they get sent back for warranty RMA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Hitachi is owned by Western Digital, and Western Digital hard disks are not doing quite as well.
It's now called "HGST (a Western Digital company)" and the two product lines (WD and HGST HDDs) are totally separate in both parts and manufacturing. /HGST employee
It is so bad even running HD video off of some 2014 HGST laptop hard drives causes distortion. There's also no way to increase the ADM value indefinitely that I am aware of (it reverts after every sleep).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But Hitachi is owned by Western Digital, and Western Digital hard disks are not doing quite as well.
Yev from Backblaze here -> HGST is run by a completely different division w/ a different manufacturing line. So there are some difference!
I keep seeing this stuff over the years, so I go buy something other than Seagate like WD... and they fail within a year. So I replace it with a Seagate and no problems for years. See another report that says Seagate is terrible- repeat process. I'm just going to keep using Seagate until my anecdata refutes the reality I live in.
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> I purchased 1450 Hitachi drives. Isn't using very similar drives a problem because their failure rates are not statistically independent, so there is an high probability that they will all fail at the same time?
I've seen it. RAID5 with 5 similar disks failed during weekend. All but one drive were dead. Of course disk failure also prevented daily backup run and all hell broke loose on Monday morning. The exact reason of death is unknown. Important fact is that the raid was configured on Thursday. So I guess the same time death is most probable when drives are really new and from same batch.
I would guess in your scenario something like that happened. Or perhaps trying to migrate tons of data to a new disk caused an issue. Just seems unlikely otherwise.
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Doesn't that negate a lot of the usefulness of the data? If most Hitachis fail in the burn-in but all Seagates pass it then the expected failure of a drive would be wildly different to that suggested by the charts. Do you have the figures for raw losses including at burn-in? I mean, sure, you burn-in and do warranty returns so buying Hitachi would still seem better - but if one needs a drive to just work then it's ke…
Brian from Backblaze here. Let's call that "DOA Failure rate", where the drive is either dead on arrival, or does not survive the 2 day initial burn in test. I'll ask the boots on the ground for more data, but my impression is the 2 day burn in doesn't catch many drive failures, let's say less than 1/2 of 1 percent. We have even proposed skipping it, but we gain confidence the REST of the system is wired up correctly…
Why not take apart some failed drives and see what you can find out as to why they failed vs. ones that did not. Perhaps info that might be of interest to the manufacturer but in any case would make an good blog post. Or maybe you can cannibalize and use again.
[1] I did an "air crash investigation" on a RC Chopper that had crashed. I found out that a servo failed because a part in it was plastic (a gear) (as opposed to, I think, brass). Consequently the jerky move that I made was enough to cause the plastic gear to loose a tooth and then I lost control.
No Toshiba hard disks apparently. HGST and Wester Digital are the same company, but it seems they have separate product lines? It's confusing.
The 3.5" desktop and server Hitachi drives are all manufactured by Toshiba. WD wanted to buy Hitachi's drive division so there would be a WD/Seagate drive duopoly, European regulators said they had to sell Hitachi's 3.5" to someone else before they would approve the merger. Toshiba stepped up and got it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-h...
So yes it is somewhat confusing. You buy one of these drives and it will say "HGST a Western Digital company" on the box, when in reality it's all made by Toshiba, probably in an old Hitachi factory.