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What is the best hard drive?

backblaze.com

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Re: What is the best hard drive?

#51

Post by thaumaturgy »

kw71 wrote: post #12

I've been listening to the discussions of data recovery technicians for many years. As such, I took a guess at the results before the page loaded. And I was right. Seagate bad. Hitachi best. WD almost as reliable as Hitachi. I can recall one or two bad WD models over recent years, the one at the top of my memory is the 500GByte WD5000AAKS. There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that made it park too frequently, but at leas…

I'm going to be mad forever at WD for pioneering the approach to distributing drive firmware & tuning parameters over both stripe 0 and the drive's on-board ROM, making board swaps impossible for small shops.

But I'm really disappointed at what's happened to Seagate. I've gone from total confidence in recommending their products to actively recommending against the brand in just a couple of years, and our experiences roughly match Backblaze's. (Though on a much much smaller scale.)

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#52

Post by atYevP »

atYevP wrote: post #4
mmastrac wrote: post #2

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a refe…

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

BREAKING NEWS -> There are now dates on all of the individual blog posts. The landing page is "date-free" but is in chronological order, if you open a post, the date will be below the title...AS NATURE INTENDED!

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#53

Post by atYevP »

joshstrange wrote: post #35

Let me start off by saying I am a Backblaze customer and I LOVE these posts and use them as my bible for buying drives for my NAS/Media Server. With that said this is going to sound a little nitpicky but why isn't the publication date anywhere on this article? I've noticed a growing number of blogs not putting the publish date anywhere on the blog page which makes it really hard to know if what they say is still vali…

Important New Bulletin -> There are now dates on the individual blog posts.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#54

Post by [deleted] »

joshstrange wrote: post #35

Let me start off by saying I am a Backblaze customer and I LOVE these posts and use them as my bible for buying drives for my NAS/Media Server. With that said this is going to sound a little nitpicky but why isn't the publication date anywhere on this article? I've noticed a growing number of blogs not putting the publish date anywhere on the blog page which makes it really hard to know if what they say is still vali…

[deleted]

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#55

Post by atYevP »

mmastrac wrote: post #2

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a refe…

Important News Bulletin -> Dates are now back on the individual blog posts!

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#56

Post by ghshephard »

atYevP wrote: post #52
atYevP wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. It used to be that they were part of the URL (because of the way our blog was designed) but that is no longer the case. We decided to leave them off for a while to see if that made posts more "evergreen", but we definitely see where it can lead to some confusion. We'll keep chatting about it internally, there's likely…

BREAKING NEWS -> There are now dates on all of the individual blog posts. The landing page is "date-free" but is in chronological order, if you open a post, the date will be below the title...AS NATURE INTENDED!

That's amazing - I'm reading the post right now (as in, 11:28 AM pacific)- and I switched back to the tab, and it doesn't show the date. But I opened it less than 10 minutes ago. They couldn't have changed it that real time could they.

Hit Refresh. Lo and behold - there is the date.

Now that's an agile organization. Thanks very much - I really appreciate the date on these posts as well.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#57

Post by wanderingstan »

mmastrac wrote: post #2

Always love reading HDD reliability stats from Backblaze -- but this demonstrates one of the reasons why post dating is so important, especially when the information in the post is time-sensitive. Nowhere on the page does it say that the post date is today, unless you click the "latest posts" tab by the author below. I had originally though it was a repost of the many older articles from Backblaze until seeing a refe…

It would be cool to have a browser plugin that could overlay the posting date onto a page. The approximate post date should be inferable from archive.org or Google cache.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#59

Post by kw71 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #51
kw71 wrote: post #12

I've been listening to the discussions of data recovery technicians for many years. As such, I took a guess at the results before the page loaded. And I was right. Seagate bad. Hitachi best. WD almost as reliable as Hitachi. I can recall one or two bad WD models over recent years, the one at the top of my memory is the 500GByte WD5000AAKS. There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that made it park too frequently, but at leas…

I'm going to be mad forever at WD for pioneering the approach to distributing drive firmware & tuning parameters over both stripe 0 and the drive's on-board ROM, making board swaps impossible for small shops. But I'm really disappointed at what's happened to Seagate. I've gone from total confidence in recommending their products to actively recommending against the brand in just a couple of years, and our experiences…

In the older days some of these disks had a discrete rom for this, but recently they have been integrated into a larger chip. It seems that if you have the rework skills, you can transfer the chip with integrated memory to the new board. It's certainly gross when the spindle motor driver on one of these boards explodes.

However if you take the lid off a WD drive, the head arm pivot goes out of alignment, since it is secured in place by one of the lid screws. So, if you have to swap internal parts for data recovery, you should own or make a jig to hold the top of the pivot and make fine adjustments, or you will never be successful. Depending on your skills, this may present more difficulty than reworking a board for a swap.

Luckily I have never had to try a DIY data recovery.

Re: What is the best hard drive?

#60

Post by gtaylor »

xienze wrote: post #18
kw71 wrote: post #12

I've been listening to the discussions of data recovery technicians for many years. As such, I took a guess at the results before the page loaded. And I was right. Seagate bad. Hitachi best. WD almost as reliable as Hitachi. I can recall one or two bad WD models over recent years, the one at the top of my memory is the 500GByte WD5000AAKS. There was a flaw in the WD10EACS that made it park too frequently, but at leas…

It's funny how things can turn around so completely. Around the time of the Deathstar fiasco, you couldn't pay me to use a Hitachi. Seagate was the brand to buy. Now it's the complete opposite.

I still cringe a little bit when I see "Deskstar", but apparently they've turned it around in a big way. I'm still irrationally scared, though.
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