I'm super excited for the new Seagate 8tb drives @$260/each.
Please order a carton of them and let us know ASAP how they work for you!
What is the best hard drive?
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Re: What is the best hard drive?
#102The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 3 TB drives are another story. We’ll cover how we handled their failure rates in a future blog post. I'm really looking forward to this... could it be a similar problem to the one that caused the huge amount of 7200.11 failures a few years ago?
Are you referring to the botched firmware ones (I think the firmware revision was SD15)? If so, at the time (~2008) I had an HTPC with 10 1TB-1.5TB drives with 6 of 10 affected by the firmware issues. I was able to successfully flash all my drives at the time with no data loss.
i built a pc for a family friend around that time... i'd spec'd it with a different drive, but they showed it to the IT guy at their work who recommended seagate. 6 months later the drive stopped working, and it had to be shipped to the other side of the world to be reflashed
Re: What is the best hard drive?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evergreen, now there's a euphemism. :-) I appreciate, in the end you have to do what gets you the most views, however, from my perspective missing out the date means you prefer to waste my time as I have to scan the article until I get a feel for how old it is. I would read anything written within 6 months and would consider up to 12 months if the information was high quality. It's not like we're overburdened with qu…
Note to the point, it shows that Backblaze cares more about content marketing SEO than HDD reliability.
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Re: What is the best hard drive?
#104This same URL was submitted an hour earlier and got 4 upvotes. This one has 222 as I write this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923016 Timing is everything, I guess.
Much like comedy!
Re: What is the best hard drive?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We’ve been asked to use the HGST name and we have honored that request. // Intriguing - that suggests some sort of advertising deal? Which calls in to question the impartiality of the report. Who asked them? In what context? Why accede to a third parties interference in the report? Are Backblaze getting reduced price HGST drives now?
The manufacturer of the hard drives was listed incorrectly by Backblaze. It's as simple as that. Hitachi (owned by Toshiba) and HGST (owned by WD) are two different companies. You can't say a drive was manufactured by Hitachi/Toshiba when it was actually a HGST drive.
If the drive has|had the Hitachi brand on it you absolutely can say that's what brand of drive it is|was.
As I understand: WD bought HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), then sold on the manufacturing of 3.5" drives to Toshiba to comply with EU and FTC requirements (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-h...). WD retained the 2.5" side of the HGST manufacture.
I doubt anyone wants to buy a WD HGST branded drive on the strength of the past manufacture in what are now Toshiba owned factories. WD would want the past drives, sold as Hitachi, to be called HGST as it boosts that brand - but to some extent that would be misinformation.
So back to this:
>Some of the HGST drives listed were manufactured under their previous brand, Hitachi. //
Those Hitachi brand drives were it seems made in facilities that Toshiba own now. HGST is now a WD brand (though they were not quite one company as of Dec 2014) - unless the "Hitachi" drives were made in WD facilities the calling them HGST gives quite the wrong impression.
It's quite convoluted and I don't really follow HDD manufacture news that much; please correct me if I'm wrong.
Re: What is the best hard drive?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've posted a broken URL: "Post not available".
I guess I have Backblaze to thank for that. It was a valid URL when I posted it. sigh
Yev from Backblaze here -> we saw that and couldn't track it down or figure out where it came from, the post itself didn't change since we published it this morning. Sorry Notacoward :(
Re: What is the best hard drive?
#107I'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…
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Re: What is the best hard drive?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. Oh god, how did I forget about that? Yeah, the guys on hddguru had things to say about that a few years back. A few folks made some really good side money making a tool specifically for realigning the heads on those WD drives. I used to do the very occasional DIY data recovery…
The hddguru article was most memorable for this picture:
http://hddguru.com/articles/2006.02.17-Changing-headstack-Q-...
Edit: article itself is here if you're curious about the context of that picture: http://hddguru.com/articles/2006.02.17-Changing-headstack-Q-...
Re: What is the best hard drive?
#109The Western Digital Velociraptor is pretty tough to beat. Near SSD performance (depending on what you are doing) and reliable. For compiling code it's definitely the best choice.
Unless you could use an SSD? (most people who compile code are valuable enough that their time warrants the fastest thing available, no?)
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Re: What is the best hard drive?
#110Always 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…
"... Yev from Backblaze here -> it's an internal debate as to whether we should put dates on everything. ..."
@Yev, writing about specific technology is time-bound and doesn't exactly have the half life of DNA.
Having said that, I appreciate all that Backblaze writes about hardware. It's interesting and easy to read. This takes time and thought, you (at Backblaze) must be doing something right.